One of my favourite poems is Rhapsody on a Windy Night, by T.S. Eliot. I learned it by heart when I was eighteen years old and preparing for my Speech & Drama Licenciate exam with my old friend and teacher, Herbert Davies. It’s a bleak and haunting poem about time and its passage, in which the speaker walks along a moonlit street at midnight, each streetlamp revealing striking images in the present that recall memory fragments from his past.

I’m not sure whether I loved the poem back then because I was already fascinated by themes of past and present, or whether the poem played a role in sparking my interest, but whatever the case, as I walked along the street last night, and the streetlamp hummed with silvery light, I found myself remembering the lines of Rhapsody, and my old friend, Herbert, and his drama studio on Tamborine, and his dog named Jess, and his long thin fingers, and his cigarettes that always fell to ash before he finished smoking them, and the way he laughed, and the stories he told, and what it was like to be eighteen years old and discovering poetry and language; and I fell to thinking about the ever-growing space between now and then and all the things that have happened in between.

And even as I experienced a swell of melancholy, I also felt a spark of awe at the power and comfort of poetry: that twenty-five years after I first encountered Eliot’s words (and more than one hundred years after he wrote them) they could still come to me like an old friend on a cold and windy night in London in October 2019.

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(I’ve written more about Herbert and the part he played in my reading life here.)

The Clockmaker’s Daughter will be released in paperback in both the UK and the US this spring, sporting an all new jacket in each place. In the UK, the paperback edition will hit shelves on the 18th of April, while in the US copies will be available a little over month later on the 21st of May. There are also bonus features aplenty: the UK edition contains a letter to readers and a brand new afterword; while the US edition includes a handy Chronology of Birchwood Manor and a Book Club Reader’s Guide.

Finally, a reminder as to what it’s all about…

Long before I was a writer, I was a reader. My parents taught me how and, from the moment I discovered that wonderful other worlds lived within the black marks on white pages, I was hooked. The older I get, the more aware I am that childhood reading – indeed, all reading – is a type of landscape every bit as shaping as the geographical landscape outside the window. Herewith – my life in books!

It’s done! I’m delighted to tell you that the new book is finished and will be published in September/October 2018. It’s another big one, as you can see from the rather large stack of pages on my kitchen table, and spans a number of periods between 1850 and the present day. It’s set partly in Victorian London and partly inside a big old house called Birchwood Manor, which is tucked within a quiet bend of the Upper Thames.

There are secrets and mysteries aplenty and characters to whom I can’t imagine saying goodbye. Giving balance to any sadness I feel at coming to the end of my time with them, is the utter excitement of knowing that soon they will be your friends, too. I am so looking forward to sharing them with you. (I wrote about the incredible magic of reader/writer mind-meeting in my essay for the 10 year anniversary edition of Riverton.)

I have posted more info about the publication dates and the story itself on The Clockmaker’s Daughter page, and will add cover images and all other information – including further international publication dates – as it comes to hand. I’ll be on book tour around publication so now is a good time to let your local bookseller or publisher know if you would like me to visit your town. I look forward to seeing you then and talking books; in the meantime, I’ll get back to polishing the story and helping my characters pack their suitcases. Happy reading and best wishes always. X

As promised, the new US and Canadian paperback jackets. All with gorgeous stepbacks (a hint of which you can see in the pics below). I love the way they capture the idea of stories within stories – gateways from one place or time to another, hidden texts, mysteries, secrets and hidden truths. A few of my favourite things, in case you hadn’t noticed…

PS The scattered-petal image at the top of the post appears inside Secret Keeper.

I have been remiss in not posting sooner about my new Australian paperback jackets. If you’re in Australia or New Zealand and have a habit of getting lost amidst the shelves of your local bookstore, you might already have seen them? The hope was to capture a sense of history, mystery and secrets – of texture and layers of story – of past and present – and to reflect my (apparently insatiable) love of peel-y old wallpaper, houses in need of a lick of paint and forgotten photographs of people whose lives were once vivid and urgent. And of course I also wanted them to be beautiful to look at. (And cradle. And sniff.)

I love them, and hope you do, too.

Stay tuned, US and Canadian readers – there’s a new family of paperback covers coming your way, too. Similar brief, different results, equally beautiful jackets.

Happy New Year! This morning was so glorious that I couldn’t resist a walk across Regent’s Park. It was finger-tinglingly cold, but incredibly beautiful. Those bare branches! The long wintry shadows! The low sun turning the sky from gold to blue!

I’ve been working on book 6 and look forward to sharing it with you as soon as it’s ready. The story is set in a number of places, both geographical and temporal (no surprises there!), but the main historical storyline takes place in nineteenth-century England – a treat for me because it’s one of my favourite worlds to find at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

2016 was a year of contrasts and I’m glad to see 2017. TS Eliot (close to my heart for a number of reasons, not least because I was introduced to his writing by my dear friend Herbert) wrote that ‘last year’s words belong to last year’s language, And next year’s words await another voice’. I always love the sense of possibility at the turn of the New Year and look forward to finding as many of the right words as I can in 2017.

Wishing you much happy reading, much happy writing, and much happiness generally as you travel along this year’s path.

Kate

Hello dear readers, you might remember the Book Break episode I filmed in Cornwall last summer with the lovely Leena? (You can watch it here, if you missed it.) Recently Leena and I caught up again to talk Summer Reads. If you’re looking for a recommendation, whether fiction or non-fiction, summer or not, you might see something in the video that piques your interest.