For our first episode, I travelled to The Fens near Ely, England, an atmospheric area of rich black soil and wildlife filled wetlands, to talk with Jill Dawson (www.jilldawson.co.uk) at her home.  Jill is the author of five novels: Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, Wild Boy, and, most recently, the Orange Prize longlisted Watch Me Disappear.

Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Tina Humber, a British-born marine biologist now living in the U.S. with her husband and daughter. Her life appears ideal. Then, after a long absence, she returns home to the Fens for her brother's wedding. Surrounded by the hauntingly flat, dark fields of her childhood, an underground river of forgotten, and often ambiguous, memories burst forth.  She begins to relive, in trickles and then torrents, the disappearance of her best friend Mandy during the 1970s.  She turns her scientific eye to these recovered facts hoping to assemble a true report of what happened. But memory doesn't work that way she soon learns as she begins to probe her past, confronting the complexity and contradictions in her dead father's life, her adolescence, and the lies adults tell children to explain the inexplicable.

Inspired by the recent Soham murder case, which occurred not far from the novel's setting, Watch Me Disappear is an important and compelling book that provides a richly perceptive gaze into female adolescence, sexual awakening, and how we talk about (or don't talk about) sexuality, death and violence.

The Fens is also home to an RAF base.  You can hear jets overhead at various times during our conversation.  We ignored them. I hope you can too. I did what I could to minimize the planes and other background noise while editing, but I wanted to maintain the naturalness of the conversation and realness of the setting as much possible. I think that's what makes this conversation so wonderful and interesting. Sound editing is always a compromise, especially for a newbie. You may hear
a faint tinny background noise like a mad scientist's laboratory if you turn your volume up too high. The upshot is that if you set the volume at a moderate level our voices should be front and centre.

We begin the conversation with Jill reading a short excerpt from Watch Me Disappear and then move into the first part of our discussion about the novel. This is a two part conversation. I'll post part two in Mid-June.

Thanks for listening.

Wayne Milstead likes to read. His fiction appears in Ambit, Matter and other anthologies. His nonfiction appears in various publications, including the forthcoming Traveler's Tales: The World is A Kitchen (August 2006)

Listings for independent bookshops in the UK, some with online ordering

The Guardian’s list of Best UK Bookshops

Listings for independent bookshops in the US, some with online ordering. Also try BookSense.

Some favourites:


U.K.

London Review Bookshop — Bloomsbury, London

Foyles — Charing Cross, London (Not exactly a quaint village shop, but a booklovers cabinet of wonders, and a London institution)

The Bookseller Crow on the Hill — Crystal Palace, London

The Owl Bookshop — Kentish Town, London
(no website, but worth a trip, and I don’t say that just because I gave my first reading there.)
209 Kentish Town Road, NW5 2JU
020 7485 7793

Kew Bookshop — Kew, London

Daunt Books — Marylebone, London (also the Hampstead branch)

QI Bookshop — Oxford


U.S.

Malaprops Bookstore & Café — Asheville, NC

Bookpeople — Austin, TX

The Concord Bookshop — Concord, MA

Just Books — Greenwich, CT

Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers — New York, NY

Four Seasons Books — Shepherdstown, West Virginia

Politics and Prose Bookstore & Coffehouse — Washington, DC