The two-up, two-down terraced house on a cobbled Hebden Bridge street does not look like the headquarters of a multi award-winning publishing house.
There is no gleaming edifice, no sign and certainly no reception desk. The green front door leads straight into Kevin Duffy’s living room, the nerve centre of Bluemoose books, his independent literary hit factory.
It is at a cluttered table in the corner that Duffy has built a business with a success rate that billion-pound publishers regard with envy.
The sordid details of literary marriages have always found a fascinated audience; one would indeed be hard pressed to find better examples of the tension between the larger-than-life aspirations of genius and the quotidian banalities of everyday existence. Kingsley Amis certainly expected his first and second wives to make his life easier and make companionable domesticity available when literary success was proving elusive or otherwise unsatisfying. Lives of the Wives provides examples of literary unions that test this precept. Take for instance the de facto “marriage” between the writer Radclyffe Hall (born Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall) and her lesbian partner Lady Una Troubridge. Hall was biologically female but dressed and lived as a man (having described herself as suffering from “inversion,” where she was a man trapped in a woman’s body). It was not only the manners, clothing, and affect that Hall took on. At twenty-seven, Hall fell in love with Mabel Batten, who was fifty-one. This relationship endured until she met Una Troubridge, wife of a high-ranking naval officer and proceeded to fall in love with her. It was Troubridge who was the “wife” in the relationship, abandoning whatever interests she may have had to decipher Hall’s poor handwriting, lack of punctuation, stylistic excesses, and then type it all up (with new titles) to submit to a publisher. The devotion endured even when Hall proceeded to become completely infatuated with her Russian nurse. Even after Hall died, Troubridge surrounded herself with editions of Hall’s books and laid fresh flowers before her picture every single day.
In a country where nearly every iota of our psyches and our physical spaces has been captured for the purpose of generating a profit, the ongoing existence of public libraries feels not just radical, but astonishing. What few public goods and systems we have are perpetually embattled. Public restrooms are disappearing. Public benches are being ripped out, casualties of the nation’s “war on sitting.” Public parks are disproportionately available to those who can pay. And yet, in spite of the many and concerted efforts to diminish, starve, and control them, public libraries live on. Here is a place where the unruly endeavor of sharing—and even co-owning—a space is met, not with the carceral impulse to discipline, but rather the impulse to support and to hear out. A place where everyone’s right to a bathroom, a place to sit, clean water, quiet—is clear, and assumed as a matter of course. A place where your ability to exist as a human being doesn’t depend on your ability to pay. Such an experience is so rare in the 21st century that it’s no wonder that people really, really love libraries.
In Emily Habeck’s beguiling first novel, Lewis and Wren have been married for only a few weeks when Lewis is diagnosed with a Carcharodon carcharias mutation. That explains his nose turning to nothing but cartilage, his intense thirst and appetite, and all those loose molars. By the end of the year, Lewis will transform into a great white shark. When he tells Wren the bad news, she quips, “They say the first year of marriage is the hardest.” The joke has a hard kernel of grief at its center — because, of course, “there would not be another year to measure against this first one.”
This isn’t only a whimsical concept, though it’s that too. “Shark Heart” succeeds because it doesn’t function solely on the level of metaphor. In the world of the book, human-to-animal mutations are a lamentable but very real fate, like metastatic cancer or mental illness. The process is described with such specificity and physicality that the fantastical becomes, if not mundane, then at least believable. An acquaintance at the gym swimming pool is pregnant with peregrine falcons; another woman’s brother is becoming a zebra. Wren herself is no stranger to the brutality and loss of such mutations; they’re a defining fact of her upbringing, though Habeck withholds this past from the reader for as long as possible.
“Disobedient” was everything I’d hoped for and so much more. Fremantle has immense talent and tells the story of an amazing and inspiring woman with wit and certainty.
As in every Schaffhausen novel, the suspenseful plot is combined with a thoughtful treatment of family tensions and the toll police work takes on a dedicated officer. The characters, including the many stalking suspects, are well drawn, and the prose is tight and vivid.