A.L. Kennedy on how to write a novel in 4 steps

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Features

How to write a novel in four steps

A BBC Radio 4 drama

Subterranean Homesick Blues: The Complete Series 4 and 5

The final two series of A L Kennedy's wry comic drama about love in later life 
 
In their youth, John and Maggie had a tempestuous on/off affair that ended badly. Now in their sixties, they've decided to give their romance another chance - and discovered that love doesn't get any easier when you're older but no wiser. 
 
Having survived dating and moving in together, the duo face the next big test for their relationship: tying the knot. They soon find that married life is no picnic either - even their honeymoon turns out to be more endurance test than relaxing spa break. 
 
As John worries that Maggie's getting bored with wedded bliss, he's got some work to do to save their marriage. And there are further challenges to come, in the form of lockdown and a mystery 'lurker' who seems to have set his sights on Maggie... Will the couple come through it all unscathed, and finally find their happy-ever-after? 
 
Created by award-winning writer A. L. Kennedy, this witty, engaging series stars Bill Nighy as John and Anna Calder-Marshall as Maggie. 
 
 
Production credits 
Written by A L Kennedy 
Directed by Sally Avens 
 
© 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd 
(P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

Charles Dickens: A BBC Biography

A BBC radio collection celebrating Charles Dickens' life, work and influence 
 
Charles Dickens was a literary giant, second only to Shakespeare in the ranks of England's greatest writers. This extensive biographical collection looks at the man, his novels and his legacy to provide an all-round portrait of the much-loved author. 
 
Michael Eaton's five-play cycle Dickens in London, starring Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings and Antony Sher, explores Dickens' changing relationship with the city that fired his imagination. His numerous achievements are discussed in Great Lives: Charles Dickens (featuring Armando Iannucci and Humphrey Carpenter) and In Our Time: Dickens (featuring Melvyn Bragg and guests). Sam West reads from Dickens' letters in Words and Music: Dickens's World; Simon Watts tells how the author's 1842 visit to the US became a turning point in his career in Witness History: Dickens in America; Ian Gillan takes a tour of Dickens' old home in Pride of Place: 48 Doughty Street; and in Night Waves, Philip Dodd talks to Claire Tomalin about her definitive biography, Charles Dickens: A Life. 
 
Literary Pursuits finds Sarah Dillon hunting for the story behind the story of Dickens' classic masterpiece, Great Expectations; and in The Mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Frances Fyfield ponders what happened to the hero of Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel? In Free Thinking: Dickens, Matthew Sweet and guests examine his oeuvre and the way his work connects with the present day, while Landmarks: Charles Dickens is devoted to the great author's final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. 
 
Finally, Indian writer Ayeesha Menon finds out about her country's love affair with Charles Dickens in The Documentary: Dickens and India - Mutual Friends; and his enduring significance is explored in the five-part Radio 3 series The Writer's Dickens, in which contemporary novelists Tessa Hadley, Romesh Gunesekera, AL Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith and Justin Cartwright consider the craft of Dickens' prose and reveal how he is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. 
 
Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time

A collection of raw, brilliant, unforgettable stories, from one of our great writers

Quite astonishing... A masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form.

AL Kennedy’s latest collection of wise, funny, human short stories came at just the right time. I...emerged feeling better about the world than I had in a while... Kennedy is brilliant at subtly shifting the ground of her stories, gently rotating your perspective so that by the end you’re facing in quite the other direction, not sure of how you got there… [There is] waspish intelligence at work here.

Striking, expertly constructed… Kennedy’s exquisite blending of the limits of pain and courage recall Primo Levi.

AL Kennedy’s seventh collection of stories is a quite astonishing…clear-eyed…masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form; comical, plangent… Words indeed for our times.

Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading.

Connoisseurs of short stories that pack an emotional punch will find plenty to admire in this fine new collection.

Each story invites the reader to enter a very particular struggle with characters who not only feel real, but whose aching vulnerability will resonate long after the moment has ended… Formidably insightful, A.L. Kennedy’s latest collection…is a shrewd examination of life’s defining moments.

[The] title and tone of [We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time] fit our current situation like a bespoke suit… Perfectly judged and moving.

From the brilliant AL Kennedy...a collection of unforgettable short stories about ordinary people wrestling with the lives they have been given as the world spins around them.

Every story is a smasher…thrums with contemporary resonance… If you’re looking to survive your time, you could do a lot worse than cling to these stories.

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

'Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading' Sunday Times 
 
Humour, fantasy, rage and despair both help and hinder the protagonists of these stories as they navigate changing circumstances, accumulating losses, moments of comprehension and tenderness. Here is the woman, hoping for a quiet day at the zoo, who finally snaps at a white man's racist tirade and vents years of fury; the micro-celebrity who practises lines for a chat show on which he'll never appear; and the woman who walks out of her honeymoon suite at midnight, perhaps for good. Unsparing in her close examination of human relationships, A. L. Kennedy proves once again why she is regarded as one of our great storytellers. 
 
'Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thoughts... Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear-cut and yet capable of great tenderness' Observer 
 
'An author with a proven ability to see - truly see - and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page' New Statesman

Subterranean Homesick Blues: The Complete Series 1-3

A comic drama about love in later life, when you're older but no wiser

A.L. Kennedy is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction, an academic and a stand-up comedian.

Love doesn't get easier when you're older but no wiser. 
 
Maggie and John had a passionate but disastrous affair in their younger days, but it didn't last. Now in their late sixties, a surprise encounter gives them another chance to take up where they left off. 
 
Will they manage to find the best in each other and finally get together? Or will old wounds and an awareness of their ageing bodies deter them? Will the treadmill created by the high-cost, high-pressure 21st century, and their endless other commitments and interruptions large and small, overwhelm them? Or will they take the final risk? 
 
This delightful comic drama stars Bill Nighy as John and Anna Calder-Marshall as Maggie. 
 
A.L. Kennedy is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction, an academic and a stand-up comedian. 
 
Directed by Sally Avens.

Serious Sweet

Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize: a topical London love story from the brilliant, prize-winning A. L. Kennedy

Kennedy tenderly anatomised London and loneliness in Serious Sweet.

So beautiful that it makes your head hurt.

Serious Sweet is a magnificent novel, showing Kennedy at the very top of her game. Ambitious in scope, daring in execution, full of dazzling apercus and dark comedy… It is a tale of redemption, as serious and as sweet as you could wish for.

In equal measures, funny, sad and addictive… The opening pages had me holding my breath in fear and anticipation… Capturing the relentless hustle of London life to perfection.

A. L. Kennedy shakes her city until the right atoms collide. She stands back to give a picture of the whole of London on one day, and then suddenly swoops down to pick up a tiny detail.

Deeply affecting... Kennedy strips her characters emotionally bare… Serious Sweet portrays intense lives of quiet desperation: it is a novel about hope and muted courage and, at the end of the day, a very tentatively experienced optimism.

A. L. Kennedy's eighth novel is a profoundly moving, often funny, and at points rending depiction of two good people. Serious Sweet is about the heroism of decency; albeit damaged decency... Kennedy is not one of our finest writers simply because of the quality of her prose: she is because of the moral profundity of her work.

This is a bold, cinematic novel... Parts of it are terrifically funny.

Her flair for describing feelings and relationships makes this an engaging window into the messy minds of Londoners and her commentary on the city rings true.

Determinedly and impressively intellectual… A novel of ideas that is deft enough never to be didactic because it asks more question than it answers.

This is an author with a proven ability to see – truly see – and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page.

[Like] Sleepless in Seattle, respun by James Joyce, and set within a London on the precipice of Brexit.

Kennedy is never less than illuminating.

[Kennedy is] witty, sharp, almost too intelligent and a bit provocative.

An uplifting tale of the triumph of niceness over nastiness.

A writer of exquisite precision… A public novel, angrily political… Expressing her idea of a writer’s social responsibility so eloquently… Well-suited to Kennedy’s talent and her characteristically oblique and original way of seeing the world.

What sets this novel apart is Kennedy’s physical and emotional sensitivity to both solitude and tenderness.

Absorbing… Serious without being solemn, sweet without being sickly, it’s an elegant tale about the unexpected places where kindness and sympathy can flourish and deepen.

Kennedy’s comedy is ruthlessly observed – an anti-romance that warms into something moving and profound. It’s also a brilliant portrait of city living.

Two lonely people go about their day in London in this typically Kennedian and utterly wonderful novel… but they find their way towards each other in an agonising love story that’s all about morality and decency in a careless world… Kennedy is a stand-up comedian, and observational comedy runs through this novel in interior monologues that are heartbreakingly familiar and laugh-out-loud sad. Her sentences are some of the best in modern fiction (there’s a springer spaniel called Hector with “black, bewildered ears… [that] made him look as if he’d recently heard dreadful news and still hadn’t adjusted.”) and reading her prose is like eating those fizzy sweets that are both sweet and sour make you wince at the back of your mouth – then go back for more… It’s gorgeous.

Consistently raw and powerful… emotionally exhausting… But there’s a lot to be said for a novel which sets so much store by “affection and tenderness”, and in which the emotional peaks and the possibilities of redemption and renewal are marked by the simple holding of hands.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 
 
Jon is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work, he is a good man in a bad world. 
 
Meg is a bankrupt accountant – two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV. Living on Telegraph Hill, she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety. 
 
As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London – passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever – they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story.

Doctor Who: The Drosten’s Curse

The brilliant Doctor Who novel by award-winning novelist A.L.Kennedy - now in paperback.

Isn’t life terrible? Isn’t it all going to end in tears? Won’t it be good to just give up and let something else run my mind, my life? 
 
 Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word. 
 
 
Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers' Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. 
 
 
Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up…

Paradise

The breakout novel by one of Scotland's best novelists – brave, inventive and brilliant. A.L. Kennedy on top form

A brave and uncompromising book that lingers in the mind, Paradise is A.L. Kennedy on top form

This is a narrative that will not let the reader go - One of the most linguistically inventive and captivating British writers of the age

The book sings its encapsulated pain with the effervescent energy of laughter

Beautifully written...Her sharpest vision yet

One of Britain's most iconoclastic and fiercely independent talents, a writer who repeatedly tests our expectations... Compelling, even consuming

A writer of great power and subtlety, a specialist chronicler of depression... alcohol addiction, yearning and loss

Every sentence of Kennedy's fluid prose is to be savoured... An unflinching book, elevated by the sublime quality of Kennedy's writing. Lacerating comedy is pitted against passages of sheer beauty

Kennedy's lyrical evocation of the mind of an alcoholic draws on, and slyly subverts, a long distinguished tradition of hard-drinking narratives in Scottish literature, from Alasdair Gray to Irvine Welsh

In Paradise, A.L Kennedy weaves her word magic around one woman's determined embrace of alcohol

Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to realise that her lifestyle is not sustainable. Her soul is unwell, her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is unreliable and her drinking is out of control. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of her problem. From Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state – her paradise.

A 4th Doctor novel

Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse

An unabridged reading of a brand new 4th Doctor novel by A.L. Kennedy.

A.L. Kennedy (Author) A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

An original novel by A.L. Kennedy featuring the Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker in the BBC TV series. 
 
Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. 
 
It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are 
thinking, without anyone saying a word. Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers’ Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. 
 
Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up...

All the Rage

A dozen stories: a dozen ways of looking at love, or the lack of love. Over five previous collections, A. L. Kennedy has shown herself to be a master of the short form, with a perfect way with sentences and a voice so distinct as to be instantly recognisable.

One of the most consistently dazzling writers of her generation... Kennedy's stories are a little like love: no matter how many times they break your heart, you still come back for more. This collection proves, once again, that it is always worth it.

Kennedy is brilliantly, painfully funny about the fault-lines and disaster zones of the typical relationship

This book celebrates love like a hungry dog celebrates the corpse of a rabbit... Kennedy is, if you like, the Anti-Cartland... Magnificently bleak.

It is Kennedy’s portrayal of the difficulty, if not seeming impossibility, of connecting with other people that makes these stories so moving… Kennedy’s disjointed, angular style and weird, displaced atmospherics really work

A.L. Kennedy's masterful new collection... Stories appear to roam chaotically, like the mind, but of course they are neat, perfect messes.

The book is filled with lyrical beauty, wry humour and acute observation, imbued by a willingness to dig deep and give voice to the reader’s rawest emotions. All the Rage is an outstanding collection, full of stories to be savoured.

[Kennedy] is the god of her own godless world. Her prose moves in more mysterious ways than mere comprehension will allow.

A satisfying diversity of experience and insight.

Full of moments of risk, which Kennedy's characters handle self-consciously and with care... She strings lyrical sentences together effortlessly.

Beautifully crafted... It would be impossible not to admire these stories.

Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thought and holds them palm-up, naked, there for our observation and evaluation. Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear cut and yet capable of great tenderness.

Full of heartache and the ways in which we hurt each other, and ourselves... Fans of Kennedy's quirky expressionism won't be disappointed.

Evidence that, at her best, there’s no-one to touch Kennedy.

This is a sure-footed and intelligently organized collection. These small pieces encompass an extensive emotional territory

An arresting collection that blends poetic imagery, raw emotion and cerebral insight

The dazzling new collection from the Costa Prize-winning author of Day and The Blue Book. 
 
She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best. 
 
A husband and wife wait for a train as their relationship unspools silently around them. A woman contemplates the idea of her lover dying as she queues in a bank. An almost impossibly uncomfortably lunch culminates in a passionate kiss. In this dazzling collection of stories lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered somehow emerge – haltingly, awkwardly – into the astonishment of intimacy.

Doctor Who: Time Trips (The Collection)

Groundbreaking Doctor Who adventures by some of the most respected writers in the Universe - now available in one volume

Cecelia Ahern (Author) Before embarking on her writing career, Cecelia Ahern completed a degree in journalism and media studies. Her first novel, PS, I Love You was one of the biggest-selling debut novels of 2004 and a number one bestseller. Her successive bestselling novels are Where Rainbows End, If You Could See Me Now, A Place Called Here, Thanks for the Memories, The Gift, The Book of Tomorrow, The Time of My Life, One Hundred Names, How to Fall in Love and The Year I Met You and have collectively sold 23 million copies. PS, I Love You became an International box office success, starring Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, and Where Rainbows End was adapted to Love, Rosie starring Lily Collins and Sam Claflin. Cecelia has also co-created the hit American television comedy series Samantha Who? Jake Arnott (Author) Jake Arnott was born in 1961, and lives in London. His debut novel, The Long Firm, was published in 1999 to huge public and critical acclaim. He Kills Coppers, Truecrime, Johnny Come Home, The Devil’s Paintbrush and The House of Rumour have followed to equal acclaim. Both The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers have been made into widely praised TV dramas. Trudi Canavan (Author) Trudi Canavan lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has been making up stories about people and places that don’t exist for as long as she can remember. While working as a freelance illustrator and designer she wrote the bestselling Black Magician Trilogy, which was published in 2001-3 and was named an ‘Evergreen’ by The Bookseller in 2010. The Magician’s Apprentice, a prequel to the trilogy, won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2009 and the final of the sequel trilogy, The Traitor Queen, reached #1 on the UK Times Hardback bestseller list in 2011. Jenny T Colgan (Author) Jenny T. Colgan has written numerous bestselling novels as Jenny Colgan, which have sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide, been translated into 25 languages, and won both the Melissa Nathan Award and Romantic Novel of the Year 2013. Aged 11, she won a national fan competition to meet the Doctor and was mistaken for a boy by Peter Davison. Stella Duffy (Author) Stella Duffy has written thirteen novels, over fifty short stories, and ten plays. She has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year and twice won the CWA Short Story Dagger. She adapted her novel State of Happiness for film with Zentropa/Fiesta, HBO have optioned her Theodora novels for a TV mini-series. She is also a theatre-maker; Associate Artist with Improbable, Artistic Director of Shaky Isles Theatre. Stella is the Co-Director of Fun Palaces, the campaign for wider cultural engagement for all. Nick Harkaway (Author) Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall in 1972. Author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker and Tigerman, he lives in London with his wife and two children. Joanne Harris (Author) Joanne Harris is the internationally renowned and award-winning author of over twenty novels. Her Whitbread-shortlisted novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is the author of several other bestsellers, including The Lollipop Shoes, Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé and The Strawberry Thief. She has also written acclaimed novels in such diverse genres as fantasy based on Norse myth (Runemarks, Runelight, The Gospel of Loki), and the Malbry cycle of dark psychological thrillers (Gentlemen &amp; Players, Blueeyedboy, and Different Class). 
 
Born in Barnsley, of an English father and a French mother, she spent fifteen years as a teacher before (somewhat reluctantly) becoming a full-time writer. In 2013, she was awarded an MBE, and in 2022 an OBE. She lives in Yorkshire, plays bass and flute in a band first formed when she was sixteen, and works in a shed in her garden. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and served for four years as Chair of the Society of Authors. She also has a form of synaesthesia which enables her to smell colours. Red, she says, smells of chocolate. A.L. Kennedy (Author) A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

Time Trips is a unique and beautifully illustrated collection of Doctor Who adventures from bestselling and award-winning writers including Joanne Harris, Trudi Canavan, Nick Harkaway, A.L. Kennedy and more. Taking you from ancient Alexandria to nameless planets in the far future, these tales are at turns funny, frightening, moving and thought-provoking – short stories that are bigger on the inside. 
 
Time Trips includes: 
 
The Anti-Hero (featuring the Second Doctor) by Stella Duffy 
 
Salt of the Earth (featuring the Third Doctor) by Trudi Canavan 
 
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller (featuring the Third Doctor) by Joanne Harris 
 
The Death Pit (featuring the Fourth Doctor) by A.L. Kennedy 
 
A Handful of Stardust (featuring the Sixth Doctor) by Jake Arnott 
 
The Bog Warrior (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Cecelia Ahern 
 
Keeping Up with the Joneses (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Nick Harkaway 
 
Into the Nowhere (featuring the Eleventh Doctor) by Jenny T. Colgan

On Writing

The Guardian-based blogs that form a master-class in writing from the Costa Prize-winning A.L. Kennedy.

It’s a pleasure to gain access to the thoughts of someone so unashamedly committed to the importance of stories. Written largely as blogs, these memorable, often very funny snapshots of Kennedy’s life also contain much better advice for would-be writers than more overtly practical guides.

Observations, both lucid and passionate, on the general state of the book trade and literary culture... Yet it’s the manoeuvres she uses and the structures she creates in order to let art happen in her own life that form the kernel of the book.

Invaluable advice to authors...her humour – often sardonic, never malicious – is deployed to great effect.

On Writing is wit, sadness and aphorism for the writer, reader, and human alike.

The life-saving blog is the jam in the sandwich of her book, the sweetener before her revealing stand-up comic routine/memoir and more considered essays that give it professional literary substance.

A writer’s journal...offers encouragement, advice and words of caution.

Engrossing book... It is sharp and funny, full of her trade-mark dark humour.

It’s astute, electrifying, and nicely self-deprecating. She’s a master of the absurd, the wry juxtaposition, the startling image. In being the antithesis of the didactic “How to Write” manual, On Writing proves to be one of the most useful books imaginable for writers, in training and beyond.

It reflects the life of a successful literary fiction writer in today’s market.

After six novels, five story collections and two books of non-fiction, and countless international prizes, A.L. Kennedy certainly has the authority to talk about the craft of writing books – it’s just a wonder she’s found the time. These are missives from the authorial front line – urgent and vivid, full of the excitement, fury and frustration of trying to make thousands of words into a publishable book. At the core of On Writing is the hugely popular blog that Kennedy writes for the Guardian – and we follow her during a three-year period when she finished one collection of stories and started another, and wrote a novel in between. Readers and aspiring writers will have almost everything they need to know about the complexities of researching, writing and publishing fiction, but they will be receiving this wisdom conversationally, from one of the funniest and most alert of our contemporary authors. 
 
Alongside the blogs are brilliant essays on character, voice, writers’ workshops and writers’ health and the book ends with the transcript of Kennedy’s celebrated one-person show about writing and language that she has performed round the world to huge acclaim. Read together, all these pieces add up to the most intimate master-class imaginable from one of the finest – and most humane – writers in our language.

Doctor Who: The Death Pit (Time Trips)

Time Trips &ndash; groundbreaking Doctor Who adventures by some of the most respected writers in the Universe. Short stories that are bigger on the inside&hellip;

Something odd is going on at the Fetch Brothers Golf Spa Hotel. Receptionist Bryony Mailer has noticed a definite tendency towards disappearance amongst the guests. She&rsquo;s tried talking to the manager, she&rsquo;s even tried talking to the owner who lives in one of the best cottages in the grounds, but to no avail. And then a tall, loping remarkably energetic guest (wearing a fetching scarf and floppy hat) appears. The Fourth Doctor thinks he&rsquo;s in Chicago. He knows he&rsquo;s in 1978. And he also knows that if he doesn&rsquo;t do something very clever very soon, matters will get very, very out of hand.

The Blue Book

An extraordinary story of love, loss and the act of deception from one of the finest novelists in contemporary British fiction.

AL Kennedy is almost unique among British novelists for her ability to write fiction that is at once challengingly experimental, luminously beautiful and utterly readable. It helps that she is fiercely observant and very funny... If you want a guide to the rough contradictions of the heart, AL Kennedy is your woman

An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished... the writing is as taught and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all

This is a masterful novel, imaginatively crafted, shaped by big, precisely articulated emotion

Kennedy is a fine stylist and single passages are exquisite

Offers the pleasures of a work in which form and content dovetail with extraordinary skill, and in which narrative tricks are utilised to enlarge on the theme of deception rather than for the sake of tricksiness itself

It displays all the verbal artistry and emotional force of its predecessor, burrowing deep into the minds of its intense central characters

The more mysterious elements of the novel's structure...make the book a giddy pleasure

If you like Kennedy's work, with its cool wit, spare stylishness, sharp sense of place and world-worn tenderness, then you'll find all those attributes here

Always a bold writer, she observes the world with a refreshingly skewed intelligence, and her well-known darkness, sometimes verging on morbidity, is always leavened with wit and humour. She also writes beautifully

An amazing conception, one that will make you want to turn back and start again the moment you have finished...the writing is as taut and thrilling as Kennedy's prose always is and there is her usual wry laughter chuckling within it all

Complex and complicated in the very best way

Kennedy is as disconcertingly accurate at tenderness as at wildness... A passionate writer, on the edge and at risk

Kennedy writes with flaying precision about the things we won't often admit to ourselves, let alone speak aloud

A virtuoso of prose. Her phrasing is fine-tuned and supple to the highest degree: intuitive and subtle about the multifarious sensations of being alive

One of the most brilliant writers of her generation.

Kennedy's sixth novel might move by turns through mystery, love story and comedy of shipboard manners, but its central subject is the transgressive, near-sexual pleasure of passing off fiction as fact

A tricksy, dazzlingly playful novel from this exhilarating Scottish author

The story takes on a dual purpose, questioning the reader’s appreciation of what is truth and what is deception

Beth’s compulsive self-examination makes this novel as hard to turn away from as it is unsettling to read

She observes the world with a refreshingly skewed intelligence, and her well-known darkness is always leavened with wit and humour

It may take a while to find your land-legs after reading Kennedy, but the trip will have been well worth the effort

A stylistically experimental writer, Kennedy reveals the inner workings of those who peddle stories for a living

You are crossing the Atlantic on a liner with your boyfriend who may or may not be planning to propose. 
 
You are fleeing the past - your ex-lover Arthur, the man who helped you dupe the vulnerable into believing loved ones were trying to make contact from beyond the grave. 
 
But there's a secret you've kept from Arthur, a deception about the two of you that threatens to emerge when you discover Arthur's presence on the boat.

What Becomes

'What Becomes marshals all the qualities of her justly praised writing: unflinching insight, clear and spacious prose, a narrative voice that bounces between grave compassion and bantering wickedness and plenty of black comedy' - Daily Telegraph

The hardest thing about the advent of a new collection of stories by A L Kennedy... is the search for synonyms for 'brilliant'. Her uncanny dialogue is as note-perfect as J D Salinger's her vision as astutely bleak as Alice Munro's, and her ability to summon up a society in a few strokes rivals William Trevor's

A.L.Kennedy really dazzles, yet again, in her exceptional new collection

Kennedy's new stories continue the courageous anatomy of emotional pain that has always been at the centre of her writing. Sometimes stomach churning, bleak and humorous in turn, she is rightly viewed as one of the most brilliant and eccentric writers of her generation

If you are at all interested in contemporary fiction, this is work you must not miss

AL Kennedy manages to convey an edgy modernity within relatively standard narrative forms...written with the tonal meticulousness of genuine literature

Be warned, Kennedy is a good storyteller, and an even better observer, possessing immaculate timing... She also writes very well: there is an almost jaunty ease about her prose

Kennedy has a way of pinning words down and forcing the truth out of them that makes her fiction alarming. There is pleasure in reading these extraordinary stories, but there is also pain

There is poetic life in so many of Kennedy's images... She can be very funny too... very original, very startling

These tightly compressed short stories are deft portraits of people under extreme pressure, delivered with a surreal perspective that oddly serves to compound their power...her writing is superb: almost every word in this flinty, almost unbearably sad collection matters

It's a testament to her talent and her humanity that these broken lives are life-affirming in the way that only good art can be

Kennedy is attuned to the shock of separation, as well as the pain ... Kennedy is adept at different types of stories

A L Kennedy's short stories are rare pearls, all seductive surface and dark depths

Kennedy has such control over her material that it never overwhelms the reader or becomes showily gothic

There's no denying that these utterly controlled stories have a power, humanity, and even beauty of their own

While What Becomes is not always an easy book to read, Kennedy's linguistic inventiveness, wild humour and compassion make it an unexpectedly joyful one

Twelve stories from the manic mistress of comically vitriolic observation

Kennedy specialises in acute observations of thought... In this collection of short stories, she inhabits unhappy couples, lonely shopkeepers and strangers in hotel rooms to searing, painful and comic effect

A virtuoso performance...This is a collection of stories that will be re-reading exceptionally well, like an album of brilliant songs you keep wanting to hear again

Funny and furious, Kennedy's tales of floundering marriages and domestic disappointment follow an anarchic path of their own

Kennedy's superlative work always attracts admiration

A.L. Kennedy's fifth collection of short stories show us exactly what becomes of the broken-hearted. Her characters are perfectly ordinary people - whose marriages founder; who sit on their own in a cinema watching a film with no soundtrack; who risk sex in a hotel with an anonymous stranger or who order a luxurious meal as their lives fall apart - but the stories she weaves around them are truly remarkable. 
 
She reveals the sadness, violence, hurt and terror, but also the redemption and the love - and she does so with enormous human compassion and leaps of black humour. 
 
From the winner of the Costa Book Award for Day.

Kennedy is described in the literary press as not only one of our finest, but also one of our most humane, writers

Day confirms, if confirmation were needed, that Kennedy is a singular, superlative author. I hope that the judges of this year's Man Booker prize pay particular attention to it

Kennedy does bleak the way the Russians do epic; unremittingly, awesomely and undershot with redeeming humour

Once again, Kennedy brilliantly interweaves over-wrought internal dialogue with external outrageous acts. The unfolding tenderness of nature and of amity blend superbly with the casualness of daily horror

Day is more than a novel, it is an investigations into the difficulties of being alive

Day is a very good novel. It is largely about love, as most novels are, but the author's skill with language... makes the average cliché unique... Historical details become flesh and funny in her hand

AL Kennedy has built a reputation as one of the fiercest, most bloody minded and thrilling British writers and her new novel more than backs that up... Day is an utterly engrossing read

This is a remarkably clean lined book, of highly literary construction, that still feels huge and wide ranging. Day is a forceful, wholly achieved piece of work by a writer of enormous power. It ought to win all the prizes going

Well deserved to win the 2007 Costa book of the year award...sophisticated texture...Ms Kennedy manages to make every battle truism fresh

Alfred Day wanted his war. In its turmoil he found his proper purpose as the tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber; he found the wild, dark fellowship of his crew, and - most extraordinary of all - he found Joyce, a woman to love. But that's all gone now - the war took it away. Maybe it took him, too. 
Now in 1949, employed as an extra in a war film that echoes his real experience, Day begins to recall what he would rather forget...

Original Bliss

'A writer of linguistic brilliance, balm-bearing humanity and blissful originality' Scotsman

Kennedy explores the dark byways and cul-de-sacs of love. She turns her clear, clever prose unflinchingly on jealousy, perversion and tangled desire. But she is as sympathetic as she is sharp in her observations and profound in her thinking

Kennedy's great gift throughout for amused honesty, the clear-eyed dissection of sexual and emotional hang-ups...gives the book its rare cargo of resonance... It sparkles with beautiful observation

A revelation. It's the best piece of writing A. L. Kennedy has yet done

The supremely original writer among a gifted generation of young British fiction talents

A delight... Subtle, erotic, ambitious and accomplished

The stories collected in Original Bliss are concerned, appropriately, with the complexities of sex and the lack of it. In the long novella that gives the book its title, Helen Brindle thinks she has lost God - but it is simply love that she's missing. She can't find it at home, with the violent, deadly Mr Brindle, but will she find it in Stuttgart when she meets the enigmatic Edward E. Gluck, with his Process and his paraphernalia? And what happens when her father confessor starts to confess? A beautiful and terrifying examination of passion and pornography, of the aching need for completion and healing.

Looking for the Possible Dance

'Praise the Lord and pass the orchids - a real writer is among us, with a beautiful first novel' Julie Burchill

Mary Margaret Hamilton was educated in Scotland. She was born there too. These may not have been the best possible options, but they were the only ones on offer at the time. Although her father did his best, her knowledge of life is perhaps a little incomplete. Margaret knows the best way to look at the moon, how to wake on time and how to breathe fire. Now she must learn how to live. A. L. Kennedy's absorbing, moving and gently political first novel dissects the intricate difficulties of human relationships, from Margaret's passionate attachment to her father and her more problematic involvement with Colin, her lover, to the wider social relations between pupil and teacher, employer and employee, individual and state.

Now That You're Back

'One of the most brilliant writers of her generation' - Sunday Telegraph

Kennedy has now proved that she is one of the few young writers to have found a distinctive voice, one that we could recognise even from a couple of sentences; and that in itself is already a considerable achievement

Great short stories are rare if not rarer than great poems and the fact that a handful here possess great magical quality is remarkable... A. L. Kennedy is a writer of original and beguiling diction

Funny, deadpan, angry, tender and despairing

Exposing and exploring the sinuous undercurrents of violence, anguish and love, A.L. Kennedy examines the nature of the individual, both in isolation and society, as characters define and deny their chosen identities. While showing us the unlikeliness of intimacy and the impossibility of communication, Kennedy also reveals the subversive liberation of impotence, the humour of discomfort as human beings chafe together, the crazed claustrophobia of the family adn the wildly funny results of an eccentricity unleashed.

Night Geometry And The Garscadden Trains

'The supremely original writer among a gifted generation of young British fiction talents' - Scotland on Sunday

A. L. Kennedy is one of the most brilliant writers of her generation

A collection of fifteen exquisite and troubling tales... It is a particular delight to discover a writer as original as A. L. Kennedy

The clarity, wit and description of her style are uplifting... A writer in her thirties, who is becoming one of Britain's best

A writer of linguistic brilliance, balm-bearing humanity and blissful originality

Kennedy writes with flaying precision about things we won't often admit to ourselves, let alone speak aloud

The heroes and heroines of Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, A. L. Kennedy's first collection of stories, are small people - the kind who inhabit the silence in libraries, who never appear on screen and who never make the headlines. Often alone and sometimes lonely, her characters ponder the mysteries of sex and death... and the ability of public transport to affect our lives.

Indelible Acts

'A. L. Kennedy is one of the most brilliant writers of her generation' Sunday Telegraph

Brilliant... These 12 stories are among the most devastating you will read this year

An astonishing writer, with an imaginative empathy that seems to know no bounds

These are powerful, intimate and angry stories. Kennedy writes with flaying precision about the things we won't often admit to ourselves, let alone speak aloud

The clarity, wit and descriptive intensity of (Kennedy's) style are uplifting and the collection ends on a note of fragile hope... A writer in her thirties, who is becoming one of Britain's best

The twelve stories in Indelible Acts are variations on a theme of longing - the unassuagable human need for contact, for completion, for that most fugitive gift of all: reciprocal love. Its characters' lives are thwarted, dashed, impassioned, each in their own way immolated by hope. A queue outside a cheese shop leads to a thrilling infidelity; a crematorium funeral exposes a love gone sour; a foreign hotel room becomes a diorama of despair as physical sickness becomes a metaphor for incurable grief. In the title story, two lovers confront their lusts amid the ruins of Rome; in 'A Bad Son' a young boy from a damaged home searches for some kind of peace in the newly fallen snow.

A.L. Kennedy

Amelia Bullmore

Robert Glenister

Three Full-Cast BBC Radio Dramas Starring Bill Nighy

Bill Nighy stars in these three plays by multi-award-winning author A. L. Kennedy 
 
A.L. Kennedy is a celebrated novelist, playwright, short story writer and columnist. She has won numerous UK and international book awards, including the Costa Prize, and has twice been featured on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. A prolific writer for stage, screen and TV, she has also created several works for radio, among them this trio of dramas specially written for Bill Nighy. 
 
A Single Act &ndash; Lonely Simon (Bill Nighy) longs to bond with his vulnerable grandson Ben (Sebastian Croft), and rekindle his truncated relationship with his neighbour, Joyce (Amelia Bullmore). But although he cares for them both, he can&rsquo;t seem to connect with either. Could the magic of laughter and the &lsquo;Wilhelm scream&rsquo; bring them together? Celebrating 100 years of audio drama, this witty, poignant play pays homage to the inventiveness of radio and the world of sounds. It opens with a short introduction from Bill Nighy, talking about why this special art form is unique and what it means to him personally. 
 
Confessions of a Medium &ndash; Searching for a higher meaning to life, kindly, naive Mr Parker (Robert Glenister) moves to London, shuns conventional religion and explores the dark arts of séances and spiritualism. He believes he&rsquo;s met a spiritual guru in the guise of Mr Thomson (Bill Nighy) &ndash; but despite being a charming, erudite and mesmerising medium, Thomson is a total fraud... Based on a true story from the 1870s, this gothic, darkly comic drama explores themes of illusion, delusion and desire. 
 
Love Love Love Like the Beatles &ndash; Oliver has never been able to say those three little words &lsquo;I love you&rsquo;. Now, at his wits&rsquo; end after losing his job and wandering the streets all night, he finds a private residents&rsquo; garden and waits for the love of his life to pass by. Knowing he has a tendency to bolt when he&rsquo;s nervous, he climbs a tree &ndash; and refuses to come down until he sees Jo&hellip; This romantic comedy about a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown stars Bill Nighy as Oliver and Amelia Bullmore as Jo. 
 
A Single Act 
Simon Pratt &ndash; Bill Nighy 
Joyce Zani &ndash; Amelia Bullmore 
Ben Vane &ndash; Sebastian Croft 
Directed by Sally Avens 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 26 December 2023 
 
Confessions of a Medium 
Thomson &ndash; Bill Nighy 
Parker &ndash; Robert Glenister 
Morton/Mr Gordon/Gentleman/Wilson/Waiter &ndash; Jonathan Keeble 
Mills/Butler &ndash; Andrew Westfield 
Miss Foster/Mrs Gordon/Lady No.1 &ndash; Fiona Clarke 
Miss Blackstone/Woman &ndash; Daryl Fishwick 
Produced and directed by Pauline Harris 
Pianist: Daniel Browell 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 13 March 2010 
 
Love Love Love Like the Beatles 
Oliver &ndash; Bill Nighy 
Jo &ndash; Amelia Bulmore 
Mrs Henderson &ndash; Brigit Forsyth 
Mrs McDonald &ndash; Maggie Fox 
Leonard &ndash; David Fleeshman 
Directed by Pauline Harris 
First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 26 June 2012 
 
&copy; 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2024 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

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