Alex Nye's Blog: Life Through A Window

Sadie, Call The Polis by Kirkland Ciccone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Sadie, Call the Polis is a dark comedy set in Scotland, where we follow the journey of offbeat heroine Sadie Relish. In 1976, a heatwave 'hot enough to melt concrete' descends on Scotland, and while everyone wilts in the heat, a woman arrives in Little Denny Road with the keys to her new council flat. She is glamorous, indomitable, fierce. In tow are her two daughters, the youngest of which is Sadie. We see everything through Sadie's eyes, who navigates the difficult path she's been given in life. Narrated with Kirkland's special brand of dark intelligent wit, Sadie herself shines through the pages as a likeable, brave, kind, patient character who always deserves better than she gets. I suppose she is a working-class hero (heroine), but the book is completely without self-pity or an agenda. It simply tells it as it is, raw, honest, hilariously funny, cuttingly accurate. I love the way Kirkland deals with sectarianism in such a fresh and invigoratingly funny way. Only humour can tell it accurately, such as when Sadie encounters her new father-in-law's hatred of anything green. In this way Kirkland (and Sadie) manage to highlight prejudice and ingrained assumptions with such effortless grace and wit. Sadie's mother is a sex worker, slipping out of the flat at night in order to feed and clothe and house her two daughters. Sadie watches what is going on around her, and tries to untangle the dark threads of her life. A terrible secret lurks at the heart of her life, but she deals with this the way she deals with everything else, with humour, courage and warrior-like strength. She's an ordinary young woman, like so many ordinary young women, dealing with difficult odds, who is actually extraordinary. Her patience and kindness at the end of the book really shine through. We see her navigate childhood, marriage, pregnancy, motherhood, divorce, single parenthood, and her journey takes her right up to the present day, past the ominous moment of March 2020. I loved this book, and I also loved the writing, which for me is always an essential part of any good read. If I don't like the writing style, then I can't enjoy it. But Kirkland's prose is right there, cutting a nice line through life's matter. Oh, and I also loved the descriptions of central Scotland's iconic landmarks, opening one chapter with a description of the 'two decapitated horse's heads through the windscreen.' Never have the infamous Kelpies (landmark of Falkirk) been described in such a way.



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How many books are too many? The bookshelves in my narrow hallway are sliding sideways with their weight of books, and I have special shelves for my favourites. I've even - yes, I admit it - colour coded my old Penguin classics for years, orange on one shelf, black on another, and whenever I have moved house (which admittedly is not very often) these colour-coded shelves have pride of place. These are old paperbacks I bought as a teenager and then as a student and then as a struggling writer, and they are soft with age, much-loved, treasured for their memories. The hallway is full of those books that might be on their way out, the half-way house spot. They are sliding towards retirement, or being recycled in charity shops. Then I have the really old books that once belonged to my forebears (posh word, but can't think of any other way of putting it), my grandmother, my mother, with inscriptions in them dating back to 1914 onwards. They have delicate tissue end papers, covers like soft moleskin (although it's not), and ghosts lift off the pages and live again in the rare moments when they are opened. Teetering on other shelves I have a plethora of more recent titles, wonderful book cover designs that compete for attention and celebrate all the lusciousness of what lies inside. But... don't be fooled. Never judge a book by its cover, as they say. Although of course we do, all the time, it's an essential part of the whole marketing of books. I've realised I've read an awful lot of wonderful titles recently. Like many, I browse in Waterstones, and order a batch of new ones from my local library in Dunblane, but I also buy books too, lots of them. A recent purchase was STILL LIFE by Sarah Winman, which I can thoroughly recommend. Published by Fourth Estate this is a sweeping novel full of life and colour, unforgettable characters, friendship, war and art. Graham Norton describes it as 'sheer joy', and who am I to argue? I'd agree with that. It has a wonderful life-affirming quality to it, and although it's about art and good fortune and opportunities which few of us probably enjoy - the chance to live in Florence for example - it lacks snobbery, and is full of good humour. It ripples with hope.

Another rain storm is battering down onto the summer house, and I can hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, creeping over the hills. Louie is tucking his nose into his fleecey bed, ignoring the growl of the sky.

I’ve been thinking about the people I’ve covered in Even The Birds Grow Silent – my short story cycle narrated by Death, out in August with Fledgling Press – and wondering why on Earth I left out George Orwell. My narrator, a female Grim Reaper (who is not quite so grim after all) refers to herself as Yours Truly, and writes sensitively about how she met Virginia Woolf on the banks of the Thames, near Monk’s House, and watched her fill her capacious pockets with stones, then felt the mud slip and slide away from beneath her water-logged shoes, how she carried her on the tide in a dark embrace. How three children found her days later, thinking it was a coat caught with seaweed, only to find their dreams haunted forever more. Once you meet me, you never forget. I wrote about Emily Bronte striding across the moors, finding Yours Truly sitting on her favourite tombstone, declaring moodily “you’re in my seat. I sit there, usually.” I wrote about the murderous mother Magda Goebbels, about Leonard Cohen beckoning Yours Truly from the shadows, only to find he’d changed his mind. I wrote about (other stuff too) but I forgot to write about George Orwell.

I could have had such fun visiting him in his rented house on Jura, where the winds blow off the sea, scouring the remote island, and battering the window of the desk where he worked, and wrote 1984. Another story to add to the collection…

Next time, maybe… Because Death visits you all in the end. Not me, of course. I’m impervious, because I’m the one writing it so that gives me a get-out clause.

I’m reminiscing right now about the treehouse we stayed in recently, and wishing I could have a permanent home in the trees, a place to write where birdsong flutes from every branch.

Still, in lieu of actually owning a treehouse, which – let’s face it, not many of us do – my summer house is the next best thing. Being five foot tall and hobbit-sized, I like small safe places in which to write.

The thunderstorm is easing now, so I’m re-appearing from my hole, tentatively.

Happiness is Wasted on Me by Kirkland Ciccone

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Meet Walter Wedgeworth. Growing up in Nineties Cumbernauld, he is like a rare tropical bird in a forest populated by grey sparrows. Walter is the narrator of this novel, looking back over a childhood of shocks and horrors and riebald humour. The story opens with the words "Life would have been better if I hadn't looked inside that box, but not much better." It is April 1992, and Walter, after being chased by bullies, takes refuge in nearby woods and makes a startling discovery - a baby in a cardboard box, now sodden and crumbled by rain. What follows is Walter's journey to eventual self-realisation, as he goes through life showing kindness, caution, sanity, in a world full of insanity. I loved this book, and whenever I put it down, I itched to pick it up again and make sure Walter got safely to the next stage of his journey instead of leaving him in the lurch. It is written in crystal-clear prose, very accurate and real. Although the author is writing about Cumbernauld (instead of the more fashionable Glasgow) he makes the town a major character in itself, so that this is very much a story about place and setting. It is also an extremely moving book, which can make you both laugh and cry. It deals with grief, unexpected loss, the harsh reality of life and death. It also ends on a supremely optimistic note, despite the darkness of Walter's journey. This, surely, is an award-winner, and deserves to be. We frequently read about the need for more working-class narratives within the world of books and publishing, so to overlook this title, would be nothing short of hypocrisy. It is also extremely moving at times, taking you by the throat with a raw intensity and freshness which is credit to the skills of the author. And all of this is delivered in sparkling prose which is a joy and a pleasure to read. I hope we might read more about Walter one day...



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The other day my publisher sent me the final edits for ARGUING WITH THE DEAD, which is to be released on 31st July. Writing an introduction to the book has also given me a chance to reflect on … why another Mary?

Mary Shelley, the narrator of ARGUING WITH THE DEAD, has a strong literary and historical connection with wild Scotland. What fascinates me most about Mary Shelley is how Nature is a huge source of inspiration for her. Mary loved wild landscapes, mountains, rivers and bleak snowy heights, places which were still seen as hostile and unappealing in the early nineteenth century when Mary was imagining the scenes of her famous novel, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. She used wild landscapes – a Hebridean island at one point, and also the Mer de Glace at the foot of Mont Blanc – as a backdrop for her Monster and his terrible tragedy.

People have often misunderstood the idea behind Frankenstein, in part due to the cliched Hollywood portrayal. Mary feels deep empathy for her Monster, who is rejected by his Creator, the scientist. Having created a being out of cobbled-together body parts, Dr Frankenstein is utterly repelled by what he has made, while the Creature himself struggles to acquire language, culture and education. The Creature is, however, doomed to eternal isolation, rejected not only by his Creator but by everyone he comes across. The only person in the novel who accepts the Monster and welcomes him into the fold of human intercourse is a blind man who cannot see what the Creature looks like. The novel poses the question (echoed in a poem called Basking Shark by Norman MacCaig) Who is the real Monster? Without knowing it, Mary Shelley used poignant symbolism which still rings true to this day. Her Gothic tale can be used in schools and colleges to offer profound understanding on issues like equality, inclusion, respect, the importance of education, science and belief, and of course medical and scientific ethics. From that point of view alone, it is an amazing text.

But it wasn’t just the novel itself which inspired me to write ARGUING WITH THE DEAD. It was Mary’s turbulent and difficult life, full of contradiction and conflict, hope and despair.

It was no surprise that Mary came to write a ground-breaking novel. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote A Vindication of The Rights of Woman (a hugely significant text, which was neglected by successive generations until eventually being re-embraced in the 1970s).

Mary’s life was filled with losses and bereavement. She travelled extensively, and witnessed the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars at first-hand. She was a woman of profound ideas influenced by everything she saw and felt. To some extent she was more fortunate than most. Mary found a voice at a time when most women were silent.

Little did she realise that her novel would find its way into the global imagination in the way that it has. Her novel came from a deep place, and that is why it resonates today.

ARGUING WITH THE DEAD bears some similarities to FOR MY SINS. Both have a strong and sensitive female protagonist who is also the narrator, and suffers much in the course of her life. Both have a colourful and eventful history. Both have links with the Scottish landscape which I love, and both are haunted by their past losses. But that is where the similarity stops.

What I hope to do, both in ARGUING WITH THE DEAD and FOR MY SINS, is to inhabit the mind and heart of a significant woman of the past. I hope I have done my two Mary’s – one a queen, the other a great novelist – justice.

A plain brick 1970's semi. It might be just a house, but that is where I entered the worlds of C.S.Lewis, Enid Blyton, Tolkein, Joan Aiken, Mary Norton, Frances Burnett, Tove Jansson... et al... A house which my parents bought for £9,000 in 1970 and sold five years later for £16,000. From the ages of 7 to 12 I lived there, the most significant reading years in our lives, when books and stories lay the foundation work for our futures. Every beautiful story you can imagine - the sparkle and sinister-edged shadows of Peter Pan, for example - was opened for me in this plain 1970s semi.

When I went out to play under the streetlights, I thought of the children in Ballet Shoes for Anna, digging with their bare hands in the earth to find their parents and grandparents lost in an earthquake in Turkey - and I learned that such things could happen, that the earth could swallow people in some faraway country if it decided to heave up out of its volatile rest.

And I learned that small children worked and died in the factories and mills of Lancashire (Midnight is a Place by Joan Aiken) and their lives counted for nothing, and I wondered at the brutality and injustice of it all, while at the same time learning how a narrative could be structured and many-layered like an onion (which led me on, eventually, by degrees, to Wuthering Heights).

All of these worlds and more were discovered behind the facade of this plain 70s semi.

The door to the Secret Garden opened for me and I stepped through, and I read that same passage 30 years later at my Mum's funeral, because... well, just because...

And what thrills me even more is that the copy of Peter Pan I read when I was 8 is the same copy my Mum read when she was a little girl, and which my children later read - a beautiful old book with original illustrations, thick as a Church Bible, published before the invention of the mass-produced paperback and the Penguin revolution.

Never under-estimate the doors and windows and opportunities that open when you read a book as a child. The texture of the pages, the smell, the words and the worlds it creates, weave a magic spell... and I can still step inside those worlds with ease, even now, and see them all clearly in the light of day, as fresh as they were when I was 8. I wonder if playstation games can do that?

And without all of that, I would never have made my own teeny tiny contribution to children's literature...

When I was 8, a teacher, Mr. Grant from New Zealand (who was missing a finger, chopped off in a factory when he was a 12 year old boy) said to me, "What do you want to do when you grow up, Alex?" "A children's writer!" I told him. "Really? Not write for adults?" "Don't think so. Because I'm not an adult yet." Well, I like writing for everyone, adults and children alike, all ages, but a good children's book does have a special power.

And thank you Mr Grant - wherever you are now - for being that first significant teacher in my life who said, "Did you know you can do this?" He read my stories out to the rest of the class every fortnight, and we all sat and listened and the others generously encouraged me and seemed to genuinely look forward to the next instalment.

Of course, in the cruel and cynical publishing world we live in now, the competition for encouragement and captive readers is daunting, but at least I have a few...

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is such a good book. A real classic. When I was a teenager and in my twenties, I read loads of classics before I got on to reading any modern contemporary novelists, and this novel is as satisfying as a fat George Eliot or a Jane Austen, or a labyrinthine Thomas Hardy - although different, because modern. It's set in the Second World War, and what makes this book so engaging are the two main protagonists, whom we meet when they are children, caught up in the engines of war. Werner is a gifted orphan, brilliant with radios, who lives in an orphanage with his little sister after their father went to work in the mines one day and never came home. He longs to be a scientist rather than labour away in the mines like his father. His gift for fixing radios brings him to the attention of the Hitler Youth. Marie-Laure, blind since the age of 6, lives in Paris with her father, who works as a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. The museum is Marie-Laure's childhood and her education, but when the Nazis invade, they have to flee, in possession of an invaluable diamond. They hope it is one of the replicas to put the Nazis off the scent, but could it be the real one? We see the world through Marie-Laure's "eyes". Sounds, smells, touch and taste build up a kaleidoscopic universe full of remembered and imagined colours. These two children, caught up by war, are so engaging, and the whole narrative really explores the injustices which are always at the heart of life, both in war and peacetime. It's a novel about humanity and hope, the little people against the inescapable machine of war - what it does to people's lives, how it is in the little things that they try to exercise control. Werner is an incredibly gifted child, and one of his fellow soldiers says affectionately "What you could have been..." It is also about the importance and the power of radio, beautifully described. Werner and his little sister in their orphanage hear broadcasts from a Frenchman who speaks to his listeners about the beauties of the natural world, he educates, inspires and informs, and they have no idea where his voice comes from until foreign radio is banned in Nazi Germany, and Werner is forced to destroy the radio set he has lovingly repaired. Anyway, a great read. One of those books that will stay with me...



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Set in Swedish Lapland in 1717, this is an evocative, atmospheric and haunting read. Characterization is sharp, deep and surprising. This is the kind of historical novel I love, intelligent, thoughtful, original - and it has Hilary Mantel's seal of approval too!

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love this book... written with perfect simplicity and clarity, it's a beautifully well-told narrative of the relationship of a small girl with her artist grandmother spending the long days of summer on their tiny island. The surroundings and the interactions with the few characters are narrated with minute attention to detail. Jansson sees everything clearly and with great insight and humour. Such a beautiful book.



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There are many factors which make Mary, Queen of Scots a fascinating character to write about. The seed for me was planted when I was a child, and read A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley. Here Mary appears as a mysterious, charismatic figure with a dark past, and a dark future. I wrote the first drafts of FOR MY SINS twenty or thirty years ago - and her story intrigues me as much now as she did then. She is accused of all sorts of things, and has been much maligned in history as a femme fatale, a foolish and weak monarch - neither of which I believe to be true. In fact, she returned to Scotland as a young widow of 18, a devout Catholic in a fiercely Protestant country, and managed to largely negotiate her way through the problems set to entrap her. She was surrounded by not the most helpful of advisers, men who were at best, self-serving and at worst, downright scheming. She was accused of murdering her second husband Darnley in order to marry her third, Bothwell. He was strongly implicated in the gunpowder plot to eliminiate Darnley, so why did Mary then choose to marry him if the world saw him as guilty of regicide? There are factors here which I explore in my novel (released by my publisher Fledgling Press in February) which I think are very important. To a modern audience/readership, these reasons may seem difficult to understand, but I think it makes perfect sense... The dark mysteries of Mary's colourful life are what attracted me to write this book, of which I am very proud. In my version, Mary sits in her English prison cell, at the end of her life, stitching her tapestries while being haunted by the ghosts of her past. She talks to her ghosts about the truth at last, what really happened. She reveals secrets, unmasks lies, confesses what she is guilty of, and who were her greatest enemies.