“Sitting static, miles from the sea, reading Runcie’s account of childbirth during one of my son’s post-lunch naps had me in tears. It was as visceral and as heroic as any Homeric epic. I may not know Runcie, not live on a coast, have nothing fishy in my background, but hearing her story of pain and broken waters made me feel true affinity. I felt, as she describes in relation to the lives of fishermen’s wives, like a woman standing on the shore, looking at the drama unfolding far out at sea. I felt like someone with salt on my face and air in my lungs; a piece of something greater and more magnificent, enacted by women everywhere.”

“Because this, after all, is what fiction is supposed to do. For the few hours or days or weeks that we are held by a book, it should lead us towards other places and other lives. It should un-centre us, and reorient our imaginations.” A brilliant essay by Malachy Tallack (author of The Valley at the Centre of the World) on how fiction can force us to reconsider ‘remoteness’.

“This is a very fine novel indeed … Anybody who seeks to understand the world as it is today will find enlightenment here.”

“I definitely don’t judge people who become passionately involved in a political struggle, even to the point of taking up weapons in the service of that struggle, in the way that I would have before beginning the book.”

John Wray interviewed in the Guardian about his novel, Godsend, and the intriguing – and maybe risky – political ground it treads.

An extract from Tracey Thorn’s Another Planet in the Observer.

‘This is laugh-out-loud, delightful comedic writing. It captures a mood of escapism and nostalgia that I found incredibly reassuring and cheering. More Keggie, please.’

“A significant literary performance … Godsend builds to a shattering, balefully vivid ending.”

“Tallack shows us the past and future colliding in the present, and illustrates the difficulty of maintaining a culture in a world that is shrinking. The Valley at the Centre of the World is a thoughtful, engaging and valuable addition to the literature of islands. It’s difficult to read it and not think of Britain as a whole, an island currently engaged in an ugly push and pull between those who look inwards and those with their telescopes trained beyond the horizon.”