The Crimson Petal was, and is, an 835-page tale set in 1870s London. It follows the progress of a young woman called Sugar, a prostitute who longs to escape the influence of her abusive mother. By the end of the book, she is working as a nanny and has formed a close bond with a little girl called Sophie. There is every reason to hope that Sugar, damaged though she undoubtedly is by her past, will not perpetuate the cycle of abuse. But hope is not the same thing as knowing for sure. At the very end, Sugar and Sophie are forced onto the streets. What happens next is undisclosed.

A few days ago, I lugged out the cardboard box where I keep letters from my readers. I re-read the ones about The Crimson Petal. Most of them were wonderfully generous and enthusiastic; several of them were from people who’d been readers for decades and had never written to an author before.

Here are some of the things I found:

Ever since I was a child in Cape Bruton, Nova Scotia, I have loved to read. There are some books which illuminate why that is, and remind a person how thankful we should be for those who write. The Crimson Petal and the White moved me so deeply, and taught me so much, in the process of a wonderful escape into another time . . . I wish I could articulate more lucidly all that your work made me think about and feel. Thank you for your gift.

This lady was unusual in not demanding to be told what happened after the ending of the novel. Most people who wrote to me were not so serene. Quite a few described themselves as ‘in shock’ or ‘desperate’. A lady in New York began her letter:

How dare you, sir? What an ending!

A man in Arnhem, The Netherlands, anticipated my position as he made his pitch:

It is very clear why the story ends where it ends. You have made your point . . . Still I would like to request a sequel, for the following reasons:

I have grown attached to Sugar, your and my heroine. In my own real life there have been a number of sudden and irrevocable goodbyes, which have left lasting feelings of pain and guilt. Why do you make me suffer more?

Another man assured me that:

I could have easily read another 800 pages. So I implore you to please, please, please, PLEASE continue the story in a sequel.

Another man — the author of a tough, gritty contemporary Scottish novel — showed a touching concern for little Sophie:

About the ending; you are writing a sequel, aren’t you? Sophie grows up to be a woman-before-her-time, maybe an author herself?

Another young man, from Texas – also, by remarkable coincidence, a published novelist – showed considerable ambivalence towards my book:

The Crimson Petal and the White is singularly the most frustrating, maddening masterwork that I have ever trudged through in my entire life . . . How dare your book end with us not knowing what happened to Agnes! And where did Sugar take Sophie off to anyhow? Novels aren’t supposed to just stop! Novels aren’t like real life. Novels are supposed to have satisfying tight endings.

More conciliatory was the lady from Bournemouth, Dorset, speaking on behalf of a group of ‘avid readers of mature years’. Her postcard, decorated with pussycats, read:

Thank you so much. However, where did Sugar and Sophie go? Australia? New Zealand? Back north? Please – if you know — give us an idea. We worry about Sophie!

A 65-year-old woman from Quebec was given the book as a Christmas present and initially had her doubts:

I had never heard of you and, at 835 pages, I wondered if I would ever have the courage, and the physical strength to hold the book on my lap. I took it home and read the first line. That’s all it took . . . Just before I end this letter, please tell me: where did Sugar go????? Did she indeed bring the child back to her mother???? What happens to them? You must write a sequel.

A woman from Aurora, Colorado confessed that she had not slept for two days and called in sick for work in order the read the novel in one marathon session:

I simply won’t be able to sleep until I’ve sent this off. About five minutes ago I finished your work The Crimson Petal and the White. I would have been writing five minutes earlier but I was too stunned by your ending…

A lady in Michigan tackled the book in a slightly more leisurely mode:

I’ve spent two weeks entranced by The Crimson Petal and the White with only a few breaks for meals and an occasional tennis or bridge game. And I didn’t think I liked historical novels. After finishing at 1 a.m., I spent the rest of the night wondering what happened to Sugar, Agnes and William, the cad. You can’t leave me hanging; please issue a news bulletin regarding their fates.

A corporate lawyer wrote:

I wonder if you can resolve a dispute as to the interpretation of the ending of your book, I am a member of an all-male book group . . . Everybody but me thought the ending meant that Sugar took Sophie away to meet Agnes and they all lived happily ever after.

I was touched by the goodwill of a man from New York City:

I just now — this second — said goodbye, knowing that it must be so. All week I had to pinch myself as a reminder that my new friends were not forever — but until the end of the week or maybe a little longer. Now they are gone – I hope to greater heights.

Particularly haunting was this hand-written note from a gentleman in Lancashire:

A few days before Christmas I was half awake and the first thought that came to me was what I could obtain as Christmas presents for Miss Sophie, Sugar and Mrs Fox. Then suddenly I realised who they really were.

There were many other people people who communicated with me. Academics, women on welfare, historians, campaigners for social justice. I even corresponded with several prostitutes who announced that they were Sugar and had been spooked by my ability to spy on their thoughts as they were dealing with customers. All in all, my novel had made a powerful impression on an extraordinary range of people. I didn’t send replies to as many as I would have liked, because I grew tired of explaining that there was not going to be a sequel. Sugar had been denied privacy all her life, I would say, and by the end of the novel she has earned the right to make her own way in the world, unscrutinised by us. And isn’t it fun, at the end of the book, to be challenged to do what the Victorians were obliged to do between instalments of serialised novels: construct what happens next in our imaginations? In any case, the ending of The Crimson Petal is not as sudden as it might first appear. Re-read the final chapters, and you will find that there is a gradual process of leave-taking, a drawing of curtains, a succession of narrative farewells to each of the key characters. Yes, their future is uncertain. But so are all our futures. Only death concludes the story, and Sugar and Sophie are still alive. A sequel would crush that life out of them.

So, here I am in 2006, presenting a collection of Crimson Petal stories. Have I changed my mind about the sequels?

No. This is a book of stories about characters who also appeared in The Crimson Petal and the White. You needn’t have read that book in order to appreciate this one. The stories are, as stories should be, little worlds of their own.

They are also a much more wide-ranging time-travel experience than The Crimson Petal was. Some of the characters in these new stories are very much younger than when they were in the novel, some are very much older. One tale is a memoir of the Edwardian era, narrated in the 1990s by the son of on of Petal’s characters — a reminder of how few human lifespans it takes to link us to distant centuries. Yet the essential mysteries at the end of The Crimson Petal (What happened to Sugar? Where did she and Sophie go?) are left intact.

Inevitably, though, the three stories that are set after the end of Petal — ‘Clara and the Rat Man’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘A Mighty Horde Of Women In Very Big Hats, Advancing’ — offer glimpses of futures that may be different from the scenarios some readers imagined. Fro example, those folk who were convinced that Sugar must have been captured immediately after the end of the novel will have to concede that, as far as can be judged from these new tales, no such capture occurred. But we are still a very long way from knowing “what happened”. These stories offer openings, not closure. Or, if they offer closure, it is of an instinctive, emotional kind.

None of which need concern readers who are unfamiliar with these characters’ history. The tales collected here are complete narratives, and if The Crimson Petal had never existed, I would wish to have written them regardless. ‘A Mighty Horde . . .’ gives me as much satisfaction as my best novels. In fact, to my mind, it is a novel, with a novel’s scope and richness of theme. It’s done with fewer words, that’s all.

But why these characters, and not others? Why this slim volume, and not more? Because these were the tales that demanded to exist. There were other characters I was curious about, characters I wished I could spend more time with. They had moved away, disappeared into history. I had to let them go. My one serious regret is that I didn’t manage to write a story about Henry Racham, a decent man who deserved so much more than he got in The Crimson Petal. I offered him an opportunity to live again, as a younger person, even as a child; I urged him to seize the chance to say the things he’d been too shy to say the first time round. He remained too shy.

Such things must be respected.

This, then, is all there is. I can understand why some readers might still wish to know more about what became of Sugar. Revisiting my accumulated correspondence, I wish I knew what became of some of the readers who took the trouble to write to me. The man who had cancer and read The Crimson Petal in hospital: is he still alive? The prostitute who said she was leaving the game and returning to education: did she? And so on. But I will probably never know. But then, I’d thought I would never know the things in these stories. And now I know.

Michel Faber.

From the foreword in the hardback edition of The Apple, published in 2006.

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Both a sparkling and accessible history of Western thought, and a courageous dissection of how religion and philosophy have converged and clashed through the ages, Luc Ferry’s blueprint for a new humanism challenges every one of us to learn to think for ourselves, and asks us the most important question of all: how can we live better?

• Read the prologue and first chapter of Learning to Live
  

Luc Ferry is a philosopher, teacher and politician. His writing has been published in twenty-five countries and he has won the Prix Medicis for his essays, as well as the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was formerly the Minister for Youth and Education in France.

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• Read a review of The Lost City of Z on our sister site Bookgeeks

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Introduce yourselves.

Felicity Potter has been a bookseller since 1982. The other staff who work part-time are Kate Claughan who has a young son and looks after the children’s section; Simon Manfield and Carol Jackson are local artists. Ness Parfitt is a literacy and functional skills examiner. Anna Siemaszko and Robert McLaughlan have worked as librarians.

Are there any specialisations, enthusiasms or interests you and your staff have that are reflected in the shop’s stock?

Felicity, Kate and Carol are interested in local history: Felicity and Kate set up Royd Press between them to fill gaps in the market. Kate and Felicity also specialise in walking books and nature. Felicity is a life-long literature explorer and also prone to sudden enthusiasms for random subjects (which does help the diversity of the stock).

Kate enjoys sharing books with her son, and tries to keep a wide ranging selection of interesting, high quality, and sometimes unexpected titles for children, from best sellers to classics for all ages.

Do you work with local authors, hold regular events and readings, etc.?

We know a lot of local authors and promote their work with displays and publicity, and sometimes with book signings. We also support local literary events.

We were overwhelmed at our Harry Potter Midnight Party and had a fantastic event for Michael Morpurgo’s “Born to Run”, where we raised money and donations for the local Greyhound Rescue Centre. And played host to a doggy party!

What are you reading at the moment?

Peter: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Anne: Dark Fire, by C.J.Sansom
Kate: Annapurna – South Face, by Chris Bonington
Anna: Madeline Bunting’s The Plot
Felicity: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Ness: Pattern in the Carpet, by Margaret Drabble

What are your criteria for any book promotions (e.g. 3 for 2, window placements, etc.) you may run?

We think what our customers would probably like and choose recommendations each month for a work of fiction, one of non-fiction, a children’s book and a CD, and display them prominently throughout the month.

What makes your shop THE shop to visit when in town on a book-buying mission?

Hebden Bridge has a character all its own, and we have grown with it over the years. We have an exceptionally good range of fiction and non-fiction – new and old – plus local maps, guides and history, books by local authors and what we are often told are “the best cards in town”.

We try and offer good personal service in a friendly atmosphere and do our best to find hard-to-get books for customers as well as the easy ones we can supply overnight. You may meet your friends in the shop!

A memorable visitor was Rabbit the Kiwi Rabbit. A forlorn toy rabbit found in our premises graced our shelves for much of 2007, but thanks to a customer his young owner was located in New Zealand! A couple from a local furniture store who were holidaying in NZ escorted him home and the pair were reunited. Celebratory carrot cake was consumed.

The whole story in pictures can be seen at www.btinternet.com/~bookcase/rabbit.htm

You can call the shop on 01422 845 353, or find them at:

29 Market Street
Hebden Bridge
West Yorkshire
HX7 6EU

and visit their website at www.bookcase.co.uk

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As it turns out, I was wrong. The layering of questions and images and half-phrases that eventually coalesces into the seed of a novel is subtle and complicated and begins before you commit to a single word. And, as I probably should have known, the work doesn’t end the day you turn the manuscript over to your editor. The day of publication, at least, serves as a convenient endpoint. Finally, the author can say, “Okay. I’ve done all I can. Time to move on.” At least, that’s what I always thought.

Then I heard a story about an author who had made the decision to revise a short story she’d written more than thirty years earlier. The story had been published, anthologized, taught in university classes… and she’d decided it wasn’t finished, after all. Honestly, I found the idea unsettling. I was a little annoyed with the writer in question for opening a door that I had assumed to be closed.

But like it or not, the idea stayed with me. Soon I had a premise – what would happen if a writer decided to change the endings to every one of her books? – and in that premise, there was a character whose desires and motivations were opaque enough that I wanted to figure them out. I was already thinking about the novels this author might have written, and how I would construct their last chapters: an epidemic which wipes out people’s memories, but only the bad ones; a survivor of the Titanic finds himself haunted by strange images appearing in the cartoons he draws; a ghost-mother wages a custody battle between the living and the dead. I was already wondering: Why is she doing this? Does she think she can rewrite her past? Or is she hoping to create a new ending for her own future?

I began writing The Nobodies Album the day I heard that news story. Or else it was the day I saw the first sentence in my head and typed the words onto a page: There are some stories no one wants to hear. Or maybe the day when I realized that there was going to be a murder to solve.  I can’t really say.

As for when I’ll be finished with the story? It remains to be seen.

Carolyn Parkhurst

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Born and schooled in the north of England, she went to university in Cambridge, and then lived for many years in London. She now divides her time between London and Somerset, and finds herself increasingly drawn to the West Country, and to the landscapes of the early poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

I first loved…

The Radiant Way, a reading primer. I loved learning to read, and I enjoyed this book, even though it is quite dull. My father taught me when he came home from the RAF and this is how he got to know me again at the end of the war.

I keep by my bedside…

Dante’s Divine Comedy and a Biblical Concordance. I don’t read them very often, but they are always there, just in case.

I want to read next…

Whatever David Lodge publishes next, and I hope it’s soon, as I so enjoy his novels

I loved as a child…

I loved the Orlando books by Kathleen Hale, and most of Alison Uttley.

Kept me awake at night…

The last book that literally kept me awake until I’d finished it was J.G.Ballard’s The Empire of the Sun. It is an extraordinarily powerful narrative, unlike any other memoir.

Made me laugh…

Dan Rhodes’s Gold. He is one of our funniest contemporary writers, and the Pub Quiz in this novel is excellent. I am delighted that he won the 2010 E.M.Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Made me cry…

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot. I sympathised deeply with poor Maggie Tulliver and was very distressed when she drowned.

Changed my life…

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Powerful, unflinching, transforming.

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The Showstoppers – Ain’t Nothin’ But a Houseparty

Dr.Feelgood – She Does It Right. This is a burst of manic r’n'b energy from the band that had a massive impact on me as detailed in the opening chapter.

David Bowie is the closest thing I’ll ever have to a musical hero as explained in the book – and I could have chosen any one of dozens of his tracks but I’ve chosen one of his songs done by someone else. This is because this record just brings back being a
teenager and first tasting freedom. It is All The Young Dudes, by Mott the Hoople.

Kate Bush featuresd prominently in the book and I continually go back to her haunting This Woman’s Work.

The title of my previous book (a novel) was Northern Sky – inspired by the Nick Drake song. I’d have this played at my funeral.

I was massively energised by punk rock as detailed in my first book Showbusiness – my life changed forever in this period and so to bring it back I’d choose Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones.

The first record I ever bought was Virginia Plain by Roxy Music.

I’ve spent most of my adult life in Manchester and have witnessed the music scene change and re-generate many times. The era that I felt most in tune with though was the post-punk days of factory Records and Joy Division’s Transmission would pretty
much sum it up. Transmission was also the name of my first radio show which was on Piccadilly Radio and is covered in the book.

I shared a love of the band Stereolab with John Peel and so by them I would choose French Disko.

Finally I talk in the book about winning Stars in their eyes as Shane MacGowan and his songs have been a great influence on my own songwriting and band, so, I’ll have The Pogues and A pair of Brown Eyes.

Over and out. M

Watch a playlist with all of these tracks on YouTube.

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Six Weeks in Russia and The Crisis in Russia belong to an earlier and entirely different episode in Ransome’s career: an episode which he was glad to forget until his children’s books had established him as a household name. Long before the Walkers first set sail for Wild Cat Island, he was one of the most influential and controversial journalists of his generation. Escaping from a disastrous first marriage, he had fled to Russia to study fairy tales, and was still in Russia when the First World War exploded in 1914. Over the next ten years, before returning to England with Trotsky’s former private secretary, he worked as Russian correspondent for the radical Daily News, then for the Manchester Guardian. Following the Bolshevik coup d’état in November 1917, he became one of a tiny number of Western journalists permitted regular access to the Bolshevik leaders and achieved a notoriety that at one point brought him within a hair’s breadth of prosecution for treason.

In addition to newspaper journalism, Ransome wrote three political pamphlets in defence of the Bolshevik government, the first and most aggressive completed in May 1918, as Allied troops prepared a military intervention. Six Weeks in Russia is his second pamphlet, written in early 1919 to describe conditions in St Petersburg and Moscow in the aftermath the World War. It includes several meetings with Lenin, a conversation with the deputy head of the Bolshevik secret police, Jacob Peters, and a description of the inauguration of the Third International, Lenin’s vehicle for spreading revolution abroad. Ransome maintained an essentially sympathetic view of the Communist experiment in Russia, but Six Weeks (the title suggests a visit) is also a self-conscious effort at distancing its author from the politics of the Revolution. Since his first pamphlet the Bolsheviks had unleashed the Red Terror, the Allies were supporting the Whites in the Civil War, and Ransome had been recruited to MI6 as a British spy. Six Weeks is therefore both a rare eye witness account and a careful high wire act: an effort at pleasing both the Bolshevik administration, British intelligence, and the Allied peace conference then sitting in Paris. The book was translated into Russian, and in England was read by Sir Basil Thomson, head of Special Branch, who congratulated Ransome and invited him to tea.

When Ransome wrote Six Weeks in Russia, he was the only British journalist living in Moscow with access to the Kremlin. By contrast, The Crisis in Russia was published in 1921, when the Bolsheviks and the British were negotiating a trade agreement and the Kremlin had opened its arms to all sorts of visitors. Owing to competing books by Bertrand Russell and H G Wells, Ransome’s third and final pamphlet received little attention. But it is essential to anybody interested in how the West came to terms with the Soviet as a sovereign government, and also for those who want to understand Arthur Ransome, whose friends at the time ranged from Karl Radek, the Bolshevik propaganda chief, to Enver Pasha, former Ottoman Minister for War and one of the chief architects of the Armenian genocide. Ransome, who in his first pamphlet had praised Soviet Russia as the freest country in the world, now openly acknowledged Bolshevik tyranny, insisting that it was the essential vehicle of economic recovery. Privately he had long since lost faith in the Revolution and was longing to go home.

Comfortably installed in the Lake District, it is, perhaps, unsurprising that Ransome discouraged searching questions about his time in Russia, while his second wife, Evgenia, admitted only that her father had been ‘a very senior gardener to the Tsar.’ But in Swallows and Amazons, Ransome could not resist at least some reference to a colourful past, casting himself as Captain Flint, a retired pirate struggling to complete his memoirs.

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“Two brothers and two sisters, but one of them doesn’t count.”

That’s what I used to say as a child about my older sister, the spazzo. Defective, deficient, physically handicapped, mentally  subnormal. The words swirled in my ears, but so did the grim semi-silence that met my questions about the sister who lived in a
mental hospital, which we visited. Which terrified me. However, while I remember the terror and the unspoken bleakness of it all, I also remember a woman whose shocking disabilities couldn’t mask an undeniable, if indescribable intelligence: her sense of humour, her romantic tastes and adventures, her ability to relish the beauty and absurdity of the world, and, above everything, an astonishing determination to communicate with that world, at all costs.

To create Grace in Grace Williams Says It Loud, I used and confused my own and my family’s memories of my sister. I did the same with the few remaining records of her life: an incomplete and random, but jaw-dropping jumble of photographs, medical
records and private correspondence. My intention was to invent a life-story for someone who scarcely had one, and to make it a conventional – yet exceptional – love-story.

Enter Daniel. No models for him. He appeared, characteristically, as if by magic, fully formed, mending shoes and stitching scraps of paper into their soles. I was living and working in the French Alps at the time, which probably accounts for his background, some of his taller stories, and for the fact that I almost fell in love with him myself. I was certainly sad to see him go. But he had to, since the reader knows from the opening sentence that Daniel will die.

Most of the novel is set in the Briar Mental Hospital. While, again, memory served for certain details, I needed to research the history of disability and what went on in the enormous nineteenth-century institutions, built in a circle around London, to house it. The hospital Grace is sent to, in 1957, is one, none and all of these. I’ve mixed and matched – unreliable facts, my unreliable memory and a large dollop of merry old make-believe – to make you laugh, cry, think. There was an awful truth in my childhood lie, which the fiction of Grace Williams challenges – as loud as possible.

Win a copy of Grace Williams Says It Loud

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