If you like thrillers, I can’t recommend Alex Marwood’s The Wicked Girls highly enough. It’s a smart, tense story that takes a female Johnson and Venables and picks up their lives 20 years on. It’s very good on human psychology and almost unbearably tense. It’s also terrifically humane. It’s out on kindle now, but in paperback very soon. Do read it. She deserves to be huge.

There is almost nothing I can add to the plaudits for Jeannette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, so I’ll simply say read it, if you haven’t already. It’s beautiful and raw and makes you realise how little of what you read, fiction or otherwise, achieves any level of honesty at all. Astonishing.

Future releases to look out for: Jonathan Harvey’s All She Wants. This is a very original, very funny romp through the rise and fall of a northern soap star. It took me to a world I knew nothing about, and has the stamp of authenticity, given that Harvey is a writer for Coronation Street. This is his first novel. His next one, he says, is going to be darker in tone. I can’t wait to read it.

Later this year do order Lisa Jewell’s Before I Met You, which is (I think) her first dual timeframe book, and follows the life of a young girl on a mission in Soho, coming up against the foibles of the Primrose Hill set, and the linked life of a woman in the 1920s. I have expressed publicly before my admiration for Jewell’s way with character. In my opinion nobody in commercial fiction does original characters like she does. The delectable Sandy Beach (you have to read it) is a case in point here. Beautiful.

Other things I’ve read and enjoyed: Noah Hawley’s The Good Father, and the twin behemoths that are the Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series. In fact, the Hunger Games paperbacks are in official danger of falling apart, having been through every member of our family apart from the seven-year-old (and that’s only because we forbad him. He was DESPERATE. And keeps whispering ‘mockingjay” in a pleading manner as we walk past).

And talking of children, the seven year old and I have just read our way through David Walliams‘ entire oeuvre. I hadn’t honestly held out much hope for the first, Mr Stink, as there are few celebrity books that seem to stand out as actual books rather than extensions of the celebrity brand, but here I’ll make an exception. It was funny, quirky and made us both weep slightly embarrassed tears (“it’s, um, very dusty in here Mum, isn’t it?” “Yes, yes it is”). They also benefit from illustrations by the sublime Quentin Blake.

All I will say, is that if you have a young child who reads ‘older’, as Child#3 does, having to explain hospices (Gangsta Granny) to a tearful child over breakfast does slighty dim what was otherwise pure enjoyment. But that’s far from a criticism of Walliams.

I have a TON of new proofs (should that be prooves?) to read over the next few weeks, so if I don’t have a massive crisis of confidence over retaining my own voice in amidst everyone else’s quirky, compelling or unputdownable voices and throw them all in the garage singing lalala with my fingers in my ears, I will post again soon.

ps the only other thing I wanted to say (and I’m too overexcited to care if this sounds like a terrible swank) was that Marian Keyes told me yesterday that she loved Me Before You. Marian Keyes! When she tweeted me I was so star-struck I actually couldn’t type anything for 12 hours. I am 42.

I promised my publicist I wouldn't actually sit on their laps

I have a friend who says being an author is basically being paid to be disappointed once a year. There have been years when, I have to admit, I have almost agreed with him.
This is not one of those years.
Perhaps it should have been. I began my ninth novel – Six Month Contract – out of contract. It is fair to say that even when starting it I knew the book would not be an “easy sell”. Books about quadriplegics tend not to be, especially when you throw in the words ‘carer’ and ‘Dignitas’. When I tried to describe the plot, people gave me the same look you give the woman who sings songs on the bus and tries to show you her socks.
Even when I finished it and Penguin – that iconic publisher – bought it, I still felt anxious. There were brow-furrowed discussions about how best to pitch it. “This may be the book that kills my career!” I would joke to friends. And a little muscle would tick in my jaw and my voice would go a little bit too high.

Can you feel my nerves from there? You can?

Today, eighteen months after I finished it, I sat on a sofa under studio lights discussing it with Richard and Judy. Yup, the Richard and Judy. Because Me Before You, as 6MC is now titled, has made it onto the R&J book list for Spring 2012 and I’m having one of those rare moments where you feel so nauseatingly delighted and grateful you could do an actual free-form Dance Of Joy*.

As any author will tell you, the R&J list is, even without the television show, the biggest possible boost to a novel. But more importantly – it’s RICHARD AND JUDY. I watched them when I was a student, when I worked nights, pinned to a sofa as a nursing mother. These days I follow Richard on Twitter (he tested me on Binky’s epic scaling of unopened letters) and I tried very hard not to make a complete gushing arse of myself.
I failed.

Because this is the thing about Richard and Judy: if you are of a certain age, you think you know them. You’ve read about Judy’s womanly ops, and you’ve winced at Richard’s cheesy jokes and you’ve scorched your eyeballs with his Ali G impression and it’s like meeting members of your family. Iconic members of your family. Members of your family that make you sweat with nerves. (‘Why are you so nervous?’ My husband had asked that morning. ‘You’ve met far more famous people.’ Me (incredulous face): ‘It’s RICHARD AND JUDY’)
I told myself this was stupid. I asked myself: What would Sebastian Faulks do? (answer: not say the word ‘arse’ within thirty seconds and get mildly hysterical when the microphone dropped down his top).
But, like the absolute professionals they were, they warmed me up with five minutes of friendly chat and then, on camera, talked knowledgeably and with enthusiasm about the book. They used the word ‘quadriplegic’ without fear. Judy (who has enviable hair, btw) said it made her both laugh and cry. They wrote nice things in my copy and joked about finishing their own books (they are both writing novels). They were, frankly, exactly as you would expect from their screen personas. I came out beaming, and without once involuntarily blurting out OHGODILOVEYOUBOTH.
I can’t really say anything else about today that won’t make me sound like even more of an idiot than I already do. My gushing adoration of Jilly Cooper during an interview last year showed me that when faced with one of my idols I will never be a ‘cool’ person (and I have to face the fact that this will now be evident on film).
But discussing the book that should have killed my career with Richard and Judy (RICHARD AND JUDY!) showed me that yes, publishing can often mean being paid to be quietly disappointed. And that every now and then, if you’re lucky, you have a moment that makes you feel like anything is possible.

The book is out now. I hope you enjoy it.

...other good books are available

*I may have done such a dance. So shoot me.

Were they a smorgasbord of unheralded literary – and not so literary – delights? Did they enlighten me? Point me to places in Waterstones I might not otherwise have sought? Did they heck as like. The choices of of Margaret Drabble? Julian Barnes? Alan Hollinghurst? CHECK. Books by Julian Barnes? Alan Hollinghurst? Margaret Drabble? Ohhh yes. *pause for weary sigh *
Some lists were more imaginative, but the same names popped up with wearying regularity. Antonia Fraser and Andrew Motion, John Banville and Hilary Mantel… you get the picture. All of these people are amazing writers, yes. Their talent is indisputable; it’s no doubt why they make so many repeat appearances in these pages. But I can’t help feeling these features are a rather weary ring-round of the same old faces. They feel, to me at least, increasingly like an irrelevance, with no energy or surprises; a waste of an opportunity.
I thought of the books I’ve enjoyed this year; often books by people who don’t appear in the broadsheets. Where were the commercial novels, the funny books, the first novels, the graphic novels? Where was Caitlin Moran’s critically lauded feminist tract How To Be A Woman? Or Alan Partridge? Where were the phenomenally successful authors that we never see in these pages? Writers like Sophie Kinsella or Jodi Picoult? I’d LOVE to know what they are reading. I’d even like to know what Katie Price is reading. I’d actually be reassured to find that she actually reads books.
I’ve just read my way through 30-odd first novels for the Costa Book Awards, and many of them I have since pressed on people, delighted to have found amazing new voices, unheralded books I’d never have read otherwise. (I think I saw ONE of these in the books pages)
Taking all this into account, I thought I’d open the floor for some of my favourite writers – and readers – to submit their own. I’ve kicked off with some of my own (I’ll no doubt kick myself for those I’ve forgotten) Please do add to the list.

Mine: ( from the Costa Shortlist:)
City of Bohane by Kevin Barry: an extraordinary, rollicking and perfectly plotted swagger through a post-apocalyptic Irish turf war.
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson: rich, gripping (and very funny) family saga told by a girl sent to live with her grandparents in Congo.
The Last 100 Days by Patrick McGuinness: If anyone had told me I would be gripped by a tale of Caucescu’s Romania I would have laughed. But this is a fascinating and wryly humorous tale of an innocent abroad.
Pao by Kerry Young, an epic tale of multicultural Jamaica and of a young man negotiating his way through its fledgling political system.

Excluding books by people I know (for obvious reasons), I also loved Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, which made me laugh until my stomach hurt, Essie Fox’s The Somnambulist, and Charles Frazier’s Nightwoods, whose sentences I kept pulling apart just to study their brilliance.
I also really enjoyed the Alex Rider graphic novels, which I’ve been reading with my sons. Gripping and beautifully drawn.

Stella Duffy, author of Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore: “One of the novels I most enjoyed this year is Zoe Strachan’s novel “Ever Fallen in Love” (Sandstone Press) for many reasons, not least the smart pace and lovely writing, but also for its honesty about relationships (family and romantic), a welcome take on the university novel from a different class perspective (not about posh kids finding themselves at Oxbridge – woo hoo!) and for proving it is possible to set a ‘gay novel’ outside a major metropolis.”

Jenny Colgan, author of Meet Me At The Cupcake Café The book about the world economic crisis, Boomerang, by Michael Lewis, is gripping reading, and essential for anyone trying to get a grasp on where we are, financially speaking. The Big Short, his previous book, is even better. He’s an absolutely peerless journalist on the trail of the biggest story of his life.

The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs was funny, sad and compulsive, and SJ Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep was as clever and engrossing a thriller as I can think of. Like most of the rest of the world, I dived into A Game of Thrones for months on end and started muttering ‘winter is coming’ ominously in response to almost any question. But the book (although it was published in 2010) that most took my breath away, made me heartbroken, then overjoyed this year was completely unpredictable- it was Andre Agassi‘s staggeringly honest, sad, frank, fascinating autobiography, Open. Whether you’re a tennis fan is immaterial; if you’re a life fan, you have to read this book.

Chris Manby, author of Kate’s Wedding: I’ve just finished reading Jeanette Winterson’s memoir ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?‘ in which she talks about the childhood that inspired ‘Oranges are not the only fruit’ and her recent search for her birth family.  It’s a wonderful read.  Laugh out loud funny at times.  Twist of the guts sad at others.  Winterson writes about the importance of the written word as a means of escape.  She says, ‘I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues.  We are not silenced.  All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech… we get our language back through the language of others.  We can turn to the poem.  We can open the book.  Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.’

I never imagined I had much in common with Jeanette Winterson but it turns out that I do.  We’re both adoptees, unlikely Oxford graduates and novelists. On the subject of adoption and the long shadow it casts over the lives of everyone involved, I found that Ms. Winterson had certainly ‘deep-dived’ the words for me.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Yes, it's feminist drama, but still entertaining! (picture courtesy of The Guardian)

I’m not a huge theatregoer. I struggle to dispel the suspicion that a lot of it is more fun for those taking part than those paying to watch. I loved War Horse enough to watch it twice; but then it’s hard to believe that life-sized wooden horse puppets are getting anything from being ogled by me and 600 blubbing middle-aged provincial women.
Despite all this, yesterday me and my prejudices headed for London with a friend to see one of the last performances of Caryl Churchill’s resurrected Top Girls. Challenging, modernist drama! Feminist drama! I know. I can feel your waves of envy from here.
And it’s fair to say I was a bit trepidatious. Olivia Poulet, who stars as three different characters, and who, for reasons too complicated to detail here, I was about to meet, had warned me that the first act was “a bit trippy”. She wasn’t wrong.
A 14th century Viking woman sits at a dining table with, amongst others, a female pope (the wonderful Lucy Briers), a geisha, a Scottish philanthropist (Stella Gonet), and a 1980s Joan-Collins lookalike played by the exquisite Suranne Jones.
The talk overlaps, the timing stagey and unnatural, so that it takes about ten minutes for the brain to adjust to both the surreal setting and the choppy bursts of dialogue. Uh-oh, I thought. This is going to be a long evening. And then, suddenly, I, and the rest of the audience were sucked in.
In fact, I was gripped by this production, which has been critically well reviewed by both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph (not a publication known for its love of surreal 30-year-old feminist stage productions).
The shoulder pads and “we-must-act-like-men-to-succeed” schtick may feel a little dated, but it hasn’t lost its power to shock. The second act features two young girls in a Norfolk garden. At one point one apparently licks menstrual blood from the other’s finger; a moment which prompted the whole of one side of the audience to shriek with revulsion. (Um, guys, it’s not, you know, real)
But it is also moving in its examination of the price women pay for success, and what they are prepared to tolerate. It is especially poignant in its treatment of Poulet’s character, a young woman who is plainly doomed to fail in the new, cold, go-getting climate of the 1980s. What seemed most extraordinary to me was the way Poulet seemed to physically alter with each character; here solid, plump and plain, here as a secretary ten years older, desperately trying to fit a higher social bracket. “It’s what good character actors do,” my companion, who is familiar with the ways of thesps, told me.

It's not real blood, people. You're quite safe.

I had arranged to meet Olivia in the pub afterwards. And that was the biggest surprise. I turned from my drink as the door opened, waiting to see the woman I had witnessed on stage, and looked away. That slightly lumpen creature couldn’t be this slight, pretty girl standing in the Clarence? But it was. This wasn’t a matter of make-up, or prosthetics; just that weird alchemistic way of seeming, temporarily, to inhabit somebody else’s skin.
I had a great night, for lots of reasons. In part because it is fun, when you spend much of your working life alone, to hang out with other writers, and especially with actors, who are a different tribe entirely. In part because of the ‘rock’n’roll’ taxi me and my companion got home. But for that brief, mildly bewildering experience of human morphing alone, the evening would have been worth it.
It’s on until the end of the month. Do catch it, if you get the chance.

Me and Damian. Yup, it's tight. And that was *before* dinner.

I am a quarter Scottish. My segmented heritage shines through in my peelly wally complexion, my love of haggis, and my grandmother’s Mac-based surname. Despite this, I have only been to Scotland once. So when Damian Barr, salonniere of the much-feted Shoreditch Salon, asked me to be the guest author at the Turnberry Luxury Reading Weekend, I jumped at it.
The Turnberry weekend is a relatively new concept, borrowed from a similar event at Tilton House. It combines five star accommodation with serious food, a private dinner with an author (in this case, me; for the lucky predecessors: David Nicholls) and a lot of lying around in a very nice hotel chatting with other like-minded people. If your normal weekend is spent wrangling children and other large animals, eating fish fingers and shouting at X Factor, then it is, as the young people say, a no brainer.
For the first time in my life I was offered a loan dress, from the vintage dress agency Juno Says Hello. They sent me three in a black box lined with black tissue and when it arrived I had a nanosecond of understanding how it might feel to be one of those film stars who gets sent stuff for the red carpet (except mine was for a dining room in Ayrshire)
The dress is a 1950s shape and has mink sleeves (before you pelt me with eggs, they are possibly fake) and it has the tiniest waist I have worn since pre-children (ie prehistoric) days.
I was SO excited to fit it that I didn’t actually read the itinerary for the weekend. I should have done; it contained the words: Chef’s Tasting Menu – Five Courses.
Have you ever eaten five courses while acutely conscious of not just your waistband, but every, straining invisibly-sewn seam therein? I have. On the first night (1st course: welsh rarebit, pot of posh baked beans, three fried eggs with truffle shavings. Yup, I did say first course) I was wearing a Vivienne Westwood skirt and jumper. By course three (Gyozo dumpling in Bovril and smoked spring onion reduction) I knew I was defeated. And by course five (posh chocolate sundae with home-made marshmallows. I know, this is why I’m not a food writer) I was pleading for a waistband amnesty.

The dining room. Yes, I know I should have taken pictures of the food. But I was too busy eating it.

By day two I had learned my lesson. I eschewed the Burns Breakfast (haggis and hollandaise sauce) and spent the afternoon walking determinedly with two of the guests; Sophia and Carol. (We talked so much that we managed the rare feat of getting lost between the hotel and the sea – in a hotel which actually looks out on the sea). I only ate two puddings at lunch. I sweated in the steam room.
And yes, I made it into the dress. The dinner was astonishing. I can’t even describe it other than it involved, at various stages, foie gras, crab, and 24hr cooked Orkney lamb. I talked books, read from my book Me Before You for the first time, and then got so overexcited by the audience reaction that I insisted on reading them more of it. Possibly half the book. They were very patient.
It was a really special weekend. I’d highly recommend it, if you want a break from normal life, and a landscape that you might be unfamiliar with (the great island rock Ailsa Craig looms unexpectedly out of the sea depending on weather conditions; herons swoop by like pterodactyls. The golfers are friendly). Even travelling home on a budget airline didn’t put me off.
And I was so relieved that I had not split the dress from bust to hem, as I probably deserved, that when I got home I emailed Juno Says Hello and bought it.
I may well wear it for the Costa Book Awards in January (I am a judge). But I’ll check the menu first.

To the Lighthouse (avoiding all golfers on the way)

Why, yes, I *do* like dogs. (pics by the very wonderful Andrew Crowley)

It’s dangerous meeting your heroes, especially literary ones. At a party, I once spied one of my favourite writers; someone whose writing had inspired me to do it myself, whose work I could quote paragraphs from, like an embarrassing student. “Go and say hello,” my agent urged, when I told her what this woman meant to me.
I said hello.
Reader, she could not have brushed me off more effectively if she had been holding a dustpan and brush and been called Basil. Twenty seconds later, I walked back to my agent, mortified. “She’s probably shy,” my agent said, firmly. I have never been able to read this woman since without the faint metallic taste of mortification in my mouth.
So it was with some trepidation that I agreed to interview Jilly Cooper and her husband for the Daily Telegraph. I have loved Cooper since I was twelve (even though her description of Rupert Campbell Black “batting a bread roll with his cock” destined me for years of disappointment). Unusually for someone of her fame, I have never met a single person with a bad word to say about her.
It was only driving to their house that I really thought about the fact that I there not just to interview my hero, but to dissect her marriage. In one day. Yup – that’s always a good way to endear yourself. I started to imagine some hack turning up on my doorstep and analysing my marriage based on one day’s experience, and it made me go cold.

I am not pleased to be here at all. Oh no.

Anyway, having said all that (and at the risk of drawing down the wrath of the blog-reading gods) I don’t want to talk too much about the day itself. There’s a sort of account of it here. They tolerated my intrusive questions with astonishing grace. But I will say that it started with an embrace of the kind that you don’t normally get from a global literary superstar and only ended when I realised, lolling outside in the unseasonal Cotswold sun, that I should have been on the road hours ago and that as Jilly would plainly never be impolite enough to suggest one should leave, it was going to be up to me to extricate myself from the Cooper household.
I left like a limpet being prised from a rock. I’m guessing it’s a fairly common response among their guests.
I wrote the piece, then spent another week in a state of mild anxiety. She would hate it. My shorthand would be inaccurate. The subs would change my words. Either way, she would hate it.
Today the postman delivered an envelope addressed in looping handwriting to DARLING JOJO. Cooper is, of course, the kind of person who would greet a familiar roadsweeper with that regardless. But it is going with my prized things, my love letters and finger paint pictures and unidentified children’s teeth.
Sometimes meeting your heroes exceeds every expectation.

Best. Post. Ever.

How to be utterly upstaged by a dog.

Too flat out to write the account I want tonight, but I just wanted to post this lovely picture by Daily Telegraph photographer Andrew Crowley, who took the shots for my interview with Jilly and Leo Cooper last week.

I especially love William the Dog on the sofa, who had to be restrained by no fewer than three people to prevent him from hogging the shots of Leo and Jilly together. His look of guilty pleasure when he was finally allowed in front of the camera was quite something.

The piece – the first interview Jilly and Leo have apparently given together in their 50 year marriage – will run in this weekend’s Daily Telegraph. It was one of the best – and most moving – days of my working life. I hope that comes across.