Spotlight on...The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

What's this all about? Well, I thought I'd start a little series of posts about each of my published books. I am often asked questions like "If I were going to read one of your books, which one should I start with?" or "Do I have to read them in order?" or indeed, "Who are they for?" So I thought I'd answer some of those questions here. If anyone wants to ask me another question about an individual book, feel free! (Only don't ask me to do your homework for you, please...)

Anyway, I thought I'd kick off with my first published book, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, which was published in the UK by Penguin in 2009. It was subsequently published in the US, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania and Brazil.

So, what's it about?

The book is set in a little German town called Bad Münstereifel. The heroine of the story is a 10-year-old girl called Pia Kolvenbach, who has a German father and an English mother. At the beginning of the book, Pia's grandmother dies in a freak accident, and as a result Pia is ostracised at school. She is thrown back on the company of fellow outsider "StinkStefan" and her grandmother's old friend Herr Schiller, who fills the pair's heads with gruesome folk legends. Then a girl from Pia's school - Katharina Linden - vanishes during the town's annual Karneval parade. Whilst the town is still in uproar, another child disappears...and later, another. Pia and Stefan, inspired by the stories Herr Schiller tells them, conclude that there is a supernatural explanation for the disappearances, and decide to investigate. They do not realise that every step they take brings them closer to a very real danger...

NB If you'd like to see the book trailer, it's here: The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

Ten-year-old? So it's a kids' book, then?

Erm, not really. It's actually told from the viewpoint of an older Pia, years later. The reason for having a young heroine was nothing to do with the target audience - in fact I didn't consciously have a target audience at all. I wrote the book because we lived in the real town of Bad Münstereifel for 7 years and I fell in love with it so utterly that I wanted to immortalise it in a novel. I found the legends of Bad Münstereifel absolutely fascinating (the ones related in the book are all genuine) and I wanted my heroine to be young enough to believe in them. The book is read by teens and adults alike (see previous post about YA literature).

If this is your first book, should I read this one first?

You don't have to. My second novel, The Glass Demon, is set in a small town close to Bad Münstereifel, and one or two minor characters from The Vanishing of Katharina Linden make an appearance - basically it is set in the same "universe" (bookiverse?) as The Vanishing, although it is set a few years later. However, the stories are separate and self contained; you can read The Glass Demon quite happily without reading The Vanishing first.

My third book, Wish Me Dead, is set right in Bad Münstereifel itself again, 10 years after the events of The Vanishing. Wish Me Dead does refer back to those events, so in some ways it would be logical to read The Vanishing before Wish Me Dead, but again, you don't absolutely have to. Wish Me Dead has its own self contained plot and the background bits are explained as you go along.

After Wish Me Dead I stopped writing books set in Germany (though someone did ask me recently whether I would ever do a sequel to The Glass Demon and I truthfully replied that I would never say never; I loved writing that book and still love the characters).

Is it scary?

Well, a relative of mine said a scene towards the end reminded him of The Silence of the Lambs! But actually, the book is not so gruesome that you can't give it to younger teens. The grisly bits are mostly horrible discoveries - the heroine is ten years old, after all, so she is not going to be engaging in hand to hand combat with a killer. Having said that, there are some pretty nasty revelations...

Did it win anything?

Yes, it won an ALA Alex Award in the USA. In the UK it was shortlisted for both the CILP Carnegie Medal and the Booktrust Teenage Award.

What did the critics think?

"Grant's splendid debut, set in a claustrophobic German town, combines the grisly folk-tales of the Brothers Grimm with the insidious rumour-mill of a small community where ancient wounds fester and scores remain unsettled, seen through the eyes of an intelligent, imaginative 10-year-old. Young Pia is the last person to see eponymous class-mate Katharina alive, and she is determined to find out what became of her. From a festive family dinner that goes bizarrely and horribly wrong via the spiteful minutiae of changing playground alliances, to the full-on bravura of the fist-in-mouth climax, this is a feast of treats and creeps. The excellent writing, and the eschewing of anything remotely winsome or mawkish, make this an eerily subtle literary page-turner. Wonderful." - The Guardian.

"This fascinating debut novel veers off in an unexpected direction and Grant steers it with impressive skill...a richly textured, effortlessly written novel with an impeccable sense of place and characterisation." - The Sunday Telegraph.

"Lightness of touch, neatness of phrase and talent for observation enliven the darkness of the material...For something so chilling, it is terrific entertainment." - The Sunday Times.

and, er, there was this one, from the Carnegie Shadowing Scheme:

"you're all wrong. wrong wrong wrong. its the lamest peice of drivvel i have ever had the missfortune to pick up. the charecter was an annoying girl that would be knocked over in a moderatly strong draft! the setting was weak and a bit cliche, the thing with the granny was funny but unnessercery. ect. ect. ect." - 'Slattybatfast'.

Ah well, you have to take the rough with the smooth!

Above: Spanish cover for The Vanishing of Katharina Linden. The Spanish title is 

Unshockable Hans, which was my original working title for the book. Unshockable Hans 

is a genuine Bad Münstereifel folk legend and in some ways the real hero of the book! 

 

The Lost Island of Introverts

Earlier this week, my daughter and I were sitting in the doctor's waiting room; she was playing Flappy Birds and I was wishing I had remembered to bring a book. Rummaging rather hopelessly amongst the available magazines (waiting rooms always seem to be heavy on Woman's Own, The Lady and stuff about racing cars) I found a copy of Psychologies with a front cover story about introverts, and how they cope in a world of extroverts, based on a book about this topic by Susan Cain. I'd never read Psychologies before, feeling that writers have quite enough introspection without adding to it, but this article interested me. I ended up reading most of it aloud to my daughter. 

One of the big differences between extroverts and introverts is that extroverts find spending time with groups of other people energising; introverts can manage it, but it runs their energy down rather than increasing it; after a while they feel the need to recharge their batteries with a bit of quiet time. My daughter and I agreed that we both fall into the latter camp. She talks about her "hamster ball" of personal space deflating if she spends too long in a rowdy group; I myself once sneaked off during a loudly extrovert party and hid for five minutes in the ladies', imbibing the peace and quiet and wondering whether it would be possible to shin down the drainpipe, go home and read a book. 

On the way home we discussed how gorgeous it would be to live in an introvert nirvana, a place we dubbed the Lost Island of Introverts. In fact, we got rather carried away planning it. The Lost Island of Introverts, we decided, would have no loud music and no rowdy parties. There would be no loud shrieky conversations in the street. 

There would be no little dogs going yipyipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip. The animals on the Lost Island of Introverts would be peaceful ones: we would have coo'ing doves, loads of purring cats, and at night there would be owls. 

Above: the Asleep Cat, indigenous to the Lost Island of Introverts.

Instead of nightclubs, karaoke bars, etc, the Island's entertainment would consist of vast libraries and museums. There would also be beautiful sandy beaches, but either they would be huge or the number of people allowed on them at once would be limited, so that everyone could have their own space. 

"Heavy" conversations, when required, would be conducted via email or instant messaging. And, my daughter declared, if you wanted something in a shop you would just point at it and it would be handed over in blissful silence (I think doughnuts may have been mentioned at this point). 

Sigh. If anyone comes across a brochure for this wondrous place, I'd love to book a week...

La la la la la not listening!

My friends told me not to go and see it, but I did. "That's two hours of my life I'm not getting back," said one of them. He was talking about The Monuments Men, the new movie in which George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman and - oh, loads of famous people - save art masterpieces from the Nazis at the end of World War Two.
Well, I went to see it anyway, mainly because I'd heard it featured the Ghent Altarpiece (a painting in which I have a personal interest), and I'm very glad I did, because I loved the film. I'm glad I didn't let myself be put off.

If someone in Hollywood had sat down and created a film tailored specifically to all the things I like, it probably would have been something like this. It has Ghent in it, and Bruges, and Paris, and bits of Germany, including Remagen, which I visited several times when we lived in Bad Münstereifel. It has dialogue in Flemish, French and German, which always gives me a bit of a kick because I rarely get to practise any of those in Crieff. It has the Ghent Altarpiece, of course, and all the main characters are really interested in it. (If I could step into the world of that film for an hour I'd have someone who'd listen to me going on about it without flinching.) Oh, and it has George Clooney and Matt Damon.

The story, as you may know, is about the small team of museum directors, art historians, etc who are tasked with rescuing pieces of art stolen by the Nazis during the War, before the Nazis can destroy them in a fit of if-I-can't-have-them-nobody-can or the Russians can pinch them. The events on which the film is based are true but have (obviously) been dramatised. The Ghent Altarpiece really was stolen by the Nazis and really did end up in a salt mine in Germany. It was recovered by the Allies and eventually returned to Saint Bavo's cathedral in Ghent (see pic above), where it still resides today. If you are interested in seeing this amazing painting, there is a fabulous website here which allows you to explore it in gorgeous detail.

The Ghent Altarpiece has a certain notoriety as the most stolen artwork of all time; you can read a recent Guardian article about its theft-ridden history here. It hasn't survived all of its adventures entirely intact; in 1934 a panel was stolen and never recovered, although according to the article, "a detective with the Ghent police remains assigned to it, inheriting the case from his predecessors." (NB I should think that is a fabulous job, but likely to lead to obsession.)

The reason for my particular interest in the Ghent Altarpiece is that it was a major inspiration for my upcoming novel The Demons of Ghent (out on June 5th). When I was planning my Forbidden Spaces trilogy, I decided to set the middle novel in Ghent simply because I had been there once for four hours and fell in love with the city! Before I started to work on the book I went back for a week and spent days walking around Ghent, taking photographs, filming and making notes. I also went and stood in front of the Ghent Altarpiece and stared at it. It's a stunning artwork, huge but incredibly detailed, with brilliant jewel-like colours. It also has some intriguing and weird aspects to it: for example, the central figure of the Mystic Lamb (representing Christ), who stands on an altar in a formal, almost heraldic way, with a neat jet of blood arcing out of his breast into a chalice. Nearly all of the figures on that panel and those to either side of it are gazing at this bizarre scene. A few are looking away. One single figure to the right of the Lamb stares straight out of the painting, meeting the viewer's eyes with a challenging expression. I found this distinctly unnerving! Why did whichever of the Van Eyck brothers painted this figure choose to have him doing this? It feels as though there is a message in that direct gaze.

I was so fascinated by the Altarpiece that not only does it have a role to play in the plot of The Demons of Ghent, it also features in an early and dramatic scene in the book. Heroine Veerle De Keyser stands in front of it, where I stood, and notices some of the things that I noticed. She's a girl known more for her climbing ability and house breaking habits than art appreciation, but she feels the painting's power just as I did.

I was charmed to see, by the way, that the Belgian premiere of The Monuments Men was held inside Saint Bavo's cathedral in Ghent earlier this month. I wish I could have been there!

Above: my book doesn't have George Clooney in it, 

but it does have this rather handsome chap on the cover!

Age inappropriate reading

Twitter is a great consumer of writing time but it is also a place where I have met many interesting people, seen some beautiful and startling images, picked up some actual work and had some fascinating discussions (all conducted in chunks of 140 characters, which at least has the benefit of preventing any of us from turning into the Bore at the Party).

Today a question from brand-new Twitter pal @RosieScribble caught my eye: Quick question. Anyone read a Young Adult book and if so which one? Interested in the number of YA books actually read by adults. Thanks. 
I write (and read) YA novels so this topic interests me a lot. Gentle reader, believe it or not, I was once a teenager. That‘s me on the left there, at the tender age of eighteen, a terrifying thirty-one years ago. I am now almost old enough to be my own Granny. And yet, I love to write and read books with much younger protagonists. Why?

I know I‘m not the only one. A report in Publisher‘s Weekly in 2012 revealed that 55% of YA books are purchased by adults, and that 78% of the time these adults are buying the books for themselves, not for a teen relative. I‘ve never had such accurate statistics on the readers of my own novels, but I do receive at least as many comments, emails and social media messages from adults as I do from teens. The last of these was from the mother of an adult friend of mine (ie over 60) who had borrowed her copy of Silent Saturday and "has not been able to stop reading it."

So what is going on here? Are we all a bunch of wistful kidults? Are adult books "too hard" for some readers? Are YA books easier and more relaxing to read? (Considering the subject matter of some of them, I‘d say no to that last one, at least as a generalisation.)

Personally, when I am writing my novels (as opposed to my adult ghost stories) I don‘t consciously try to change my style because I am writing "YA". When I was still that fresh-faced teen pictured above, I was cheerfully reading Edwardian adventure novels and English classics. I didn‘t need to have the vocabulary narrowed or the content dumbed down just because I had only just reached voting age. If I feel like putting a word like "palimpsest" into one of my novels (The Glass Demon, actually) I don‘t hold back. Unusual words are what Google is for, anyway.

So I don‘t think the style of my books says ADULTS KEEP OUT. What about the age of the protagonists? Pia Kolvenbach, the heroine of my first novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, was only ten years old, although the story is related from the viewpoint of someone a decade older. Lin Fox in The Glass Demon is seventeen. Perhaps the oldest of my heroines will eventually be Veerle De Keyser from Silent Saturday, who is seventeen for most of that book but will be nineteen by the end of Urban Legends, the third book in the trilogy.

As a writer, I am drawn to younger protagonists. I like the fact that a younger heroine may be open to ideas that an older person might dismiss. Pia, for example, is prepared to entertain the idea that the series of disappearances in her home town of Bad Münstereifel has some kind of supernatural explanation, and her investigations with her friend Stefan proceed on this basis. An adult might allow such an idea to pass briefly across their mind, but they‘d probably think twice about sharing it with anyone else, let alone breaking into someone‘s house and searching the cellar because of it.
And then there is Veerle in Silent Saturday, who spends her spare time doing urban exploration - breaking into derelict buildings and opulent villas whose owners are away. Of course, there is nothing to stop an adult having a go at this. I‘ve done a wee bit myself (the derelict ones, not the villas). But first I had to pick the kids up from school, put the washing in, think about what we were going to have for dinner...yes, there‘s a reason Veerle does more of that stuff than I do.

I think there‘s more to loving YA than just the practical aspects though. All those of us who are now adults were once teenagers; many of us still carry that hopeful younger person within us. (I suspect my Inner Young Person is even younger than that, actually, since I still like playing with Lego and reading The Mousehole Cat). I remember when I was approaching my eighteenth birthday I felt slightly sad about it because seventeen was the magical age; it was the age of the princesses in all the fairy tales - the age when dragons might be fought, quests set out upon, and handsome suitors eyed sneakily from the tower window. Get past that, and you were stuck with the rather mundane task of living happily ever after.

Fairy tales are considered classics. They are retold by the old to the very young. They are analysed by psychologists. They are remade as glossy Hollywood films. They don‘t automatically become worthless or uninteresting when the reader has reached an age at which they couldn‘t climb onto their snow white charger without help and they‘d think twice about whacking a dragon with a broadsword in case they put their back out. I think the same is true of YA. That‘s why I‘m going to keep on reading it and keep on writing it.

Older people: read more YA to smile more...

French demons...

Yes, I said I wouldn't go on about M.R.James for a bit...come to that, I said I didn't really review stuff either.
So I'm now as loaded down with my own transgressions as a pack pony. Still, in the interests of sharing all interesting new material relating to the ghost stories of M.R.James, I really felt I ought to mention this new adaptation of Canon Alberic's Scrap-book by The Holiday Movie Company! Do take a look...if you dare!

Maker Simon Glidewell (who also plays Dennistoun in the film) says, "Only two of us made this (directing, acting, camera, sound, lighting, editing) to demonstrate to new film makers what is possible with limited resources and no money. The film follows the original story very closely, being shot in the south of France." (Only two of them, that is...and the thing. Brrrr.)

The action of the story has been made contemporary, which I don't think impacts negatively on it, although perhaps nowadays a collector might not look so disparagingly upon "a stupid missal of Plantin's printing, about 1580" as they did a century ago! The film was made on location in Saint-Michel l'Observatoire. I have been to St. Bertrand de Comminges (above) where the story is set, and if it was not possible for practical reasons to shoot there, I think Saint-Michel l'Observatoire made a fair substitute. It does have the steep narrow streets that typify Comminges, and some stills of Comminges are blended into the visuals.

Daniel Girault makes an intriguing sacristan, seemingly with a rather less tender conscience than the sacristan in the original story: he seems eager to strike his bargain, and rather gloating!

I enjoyed one particularly Jamesian touch: the sacristan's crouching posture in the church recalls James McBryde's illustration of the same moment in the story.

I shan't say any more. Watch - and I'd love to hear what you think!