In this extended love letter to children's books and the wonders they perform, Francis Spufford makes a confession: books were his mother, his father, his school. Reading made him who he is. To understand the thrall of fiction, Spufford goes back to his earliest encounters with books, exploring such beloved classics as The Wind in the Willows, The Little House on the Prairie, and The Chronicles of Narnia. He recreates the excitement of discovery, writing joyfully of the moment when fuzzy marks on a page become words. Weaving together child development, personal reflection, and social observation, Spufford shows the force of fiction in shaping a child: how stories allow for escape from pain and mastery of the world, how they shift our boundaries of the sayable, how they stretch the chambers of our imagination.
I'm a writer of non-fiction who is creeping up gradually on writing novels. I write slowly and I always move to new subject-matter with each book, because I want to be learning something fresh every time, both in terms of encountering history and people and thinking which are new to me, and also in the sense of trying out a new way of writing. My idea of a good project is one that I can only just manage. I've written a memoir of my childhood as a compulsive reader, an analysis of the British obsession with polar exploration, a book about engineers which is also a stealth history of Britain since 1945, and now "Red Plenty", about the moment in the early 1960s when it looked as if Soviet communism really might be beating the capitalist west in the race to abundance. But "Red Plenty" isn't exactly history, and it isn't exactly a novel either: it's a fusion of the two, to try to bring the world of the early-60s USSR alive. It's a comedy of ideas, and a sad story about the cost of ideas, all at once. I haven't finished my slow crabwise crawl into fiction yet; my next book, or maybe the one after next, will be a full-on freestanding novel with (I promise) no notes at the back of it at all. But this is where I've got to so far. I hope you enjoy it. The book has its own website at www.redplenty.com, where I've put out-takes, Soviet jokes, background material on the main characters, clips from Soviet music and film of the time - generally, things I used or enjoyed when I was doing the writing.
(Oh, biography. I was born in 1964, I'm married with a six-year-old daughter, and I teach on the MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, London.)
