David Dyer's Blog - Posts Tagged "dyer"
Launch of The Midnight Watch
Saturday 5 March 2015.
What a couple of weeks it’s been! The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian was launched in Australia at the beginning of March, which has been very exciting.
Just prior to its release, I attended the Perth Writers Festival. I had never been to Perth before, so I was looking forward to experiencing the city. Well, it was hot! It was the height of summer, and the dry, desert air drifted in from the east. And the light! It poured onto statues and buildings and pavements in torrents, making them glow and ripple. No wonder Tim Winton, a native of these parts, writes so evocatively about it. But do West Australians, I wondered, ever tire of all this brightness?
In contrast, my first panel discussion at the festival was all about the dark and cold: Winter is Coming! Patrick Gale spoke of the vast, freezing landscapes of the Canadian prairies in the early 20th Century, to which he sends his character Harry Cane in his wonderful novel A Place Called Winter. (‘As for the cold, he had never experienced anything like it: a dry, iron clamp upon the land, like death itself, full of unexpected beauty…’). Katherine Rundell told us about the frozen woods of revolutionary Russia, which she describes so evocatively in The Wolf Wilder (‘Stories can start revolutions!’). And I spoke about the freezing and deathly calm night in mid-Atlantic on which Herbert Stone watched the Titanic sink. (‘The ice seemed to suck everything from the world – the waves, the wind, light warmth – everything.’)
In my second panel discussion, Sara Foster, Garry Disher and I considered the question of how we created suspense and foreboding in our novels. Sara spoke of her hero’s dark and isolating secret in All That is Lost Between Us and Garry made us wonder whether his hero Wyatt would get away with his daring heist in The Heat. I discussed the role of dramatic irony in The Midnight Watch: how frustrating it is that we the reader know what Herbert Stone is looking at – the Titanic sinking – but he doesn’t! When he sees distress rockets, and tells his captain, they both then … do nothing. ‘But why didn’t they go?’ people in the audience asked me. ‘Interesting question!’ I said.
Back in Sydney, The Midnight Watch hit the bookshops on 1 March. I was very excited to see the book, upon which I had worked for so long, finally on the shelves. There were positive early reviews, including generous articles in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/b...
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/...
I was very grateful for the enthusiastic support of booksellers throughout Australia, and was pleased to learn that iBooks selected The Midnight Watch as one of their Best Books of the Month.
I am speaking more to the media in the coming weeks, and I look forward to the book’s release in North America and the United Kingdom in April. Watch this space …
What a couple of weeks it’s been! The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian was launched in Australia at the beginning of March, which has been very exciting.
Just prior to its release, I attended the Perth Writers Festival. I had never been to Perth before, so I was looking forward to experiencing the city. Well, it was hot! It was the height of summer, and the dry, desert air drifted in from the east. And the light! It poured onto statues and buildings and pavements in torrents, making them glow and ripple. No wonder Tim Winton, a native of these parts, writes so evocatively about it. But do West Australians, I wondered, ever tire of all this brightness?
In contrast, my first panel discussion at the festival was all about the dark and cold: Winter is Coming! Patrick Gale spoke of the vast, freezing landscapes of the Canadian prairies in the early 20th Century, to which he sends his character Harry Cane in his wonderful novel A Place Called Winter. (‘As for the cold, he had never experienced anything like it: a dry, iron clamp upon the land, like death itself, full of unexpected beauty…’). Katherine Rundell told us about the frozen woods of revolutionary Russia, which she describes so evocatively in The Wolf Wilder (‘Stories can start revolutions!’). And I spoke about the freezing and deathly calm night in mid-Atlantic on which Herbert Stone watched the Titanic sink. (‘The ice seemed to suck everything from the world – the waves, the wind, light warmth – everything.’)
In my second panel discussion, Sara Foster, Garry Disher and I considered the question of how we created suspense and foreboding in our novels. Sara spoke of her hero’s dark and isolating secret in All That is Lost Between Us and Garry made us wonder whether his hero Wyatt would get away with his daring heist in The Heat. I discussed the role of dramatic irony in The Midnight Watch: how frustrating it is that we the reader know what Herbert Stone is looking at – the Titanic sinking – but he doesn’t! When he sees distress rockets, and tells his captain, they both then … do nothing. ‘But why didn’t they go?’ people in the audience asked me. ‘Interesting question!’ I said.
Back in Sydney, The Midnight Watch hit the bookshops on 1 March. I was very excited to see the book, upon which I had worked for so long, finally on the shelves. There were positive early reviews, including generous articles in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian.
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/b...
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/...
I was very grateful for the enthusiastic support of booksellers throughout Australia, and was pleased to learn that iBooks selected The Midnight Watch as one of their Best Books of the Month.
I am speaking more to the media in the coming weeks, and I look forward to the book’s release in North America and the United Kingdom in April. Watch this space …
