Bookersatz review of TMM, and getting studied.

Horrible weather today - huge winds sweeping the trees outside the house - but it's still a lovely day: in fact my day has been made by Helen Hunt on Bookersatz, who has reviewed Too Many Magpies and really likes it, concluding:

Too Many Magpies is an incredibly thoughtful novel and as such will appeal as much to the mind of the reader as to the heart. I definitely recommend it as a book to lose yourself in.

If you haven't already read it and this whets your appetite to do so (which of course I'm hoping it will!), I am very pleased to say that the book is at this very moment being reprinted again, and copies will be available direct from Salt sometime this week. Meanwhile Amazon and The Book Depository have copies.

Helen says that she'll also be publishing a review of Balancing on the Edge of the World by another of her reviewers. Speaking of which (ie stories), we were driving along in the car the other day, all packed up like sardines, and someone said, 'Oh by the way, my mum is teaching one of your stories this year.' The story is 'Compass and Torch', which is included in Balancing, and is on the new AQA GCSE syllabus beginning this year. It's such a funny feeling: once upon a time there I was teaching schoolchildren with the stories of famous writers, and now here I am with one of my stories being taught by others. And so strange that something quite so personal as a product of one's own imagination can become part of something quite so public and institutional as an exam syllabus, with people sitting poring over it and devising questions about it for others to answer, as if it's no longer anything to do with you... And especially when it's set on what the family call 'the Compass and Torch walk', the mountain walk here in Wales that triggered the whole idea of the story for me...