The Angels of L19 by Jonathan Walker - A Soundtrack

THE ANGELS OF L19 PLAYLIST

The Angels of L19 is set in an evangelical church. It’s therefore concerned with the relationship between the spiritual and the material, or between transcendence and immanence. Music is one of the things the novel uses to explore this theme, for in listening (or dancing) to music, we experience transcendence through immanence. We rise out of our immediate circumstances, and we inhabit our bodies more fully, more authentically, than at other times. And since this experience can be solitary (listening through headphones – both my protagonists have a Walkman), or collective (listening to an album at a friend’s house, or attending a concert), it suggests another theme: the individual versus the collective. Our tastes in music are tribal: they both link us to others who share them, and separate us from those who don’t.

The novel takes place in 1984, and my two protagonists, Robert and Tracey, have both individual and shared enthusiasms. In particular, Robert is a U2 fan and Tracey likes New Order.

In early drafts of the novel, I named each chapter after a song: not all from 1984, but all songs that could theoretically have been familiar to the characters. I removed these chapter subtitles later – it felt like a superstructure I didn't need once the novel was sufficiently advanced – but I’ve listed these songs below, with the associated chapter numbers. There is an associated Spotify playlist above, and here.

There are several cases in which the indicated song, or its source album, is discussed directly in the chapter in question, or at least mentioned in passing. I've marked these instances with an asterisk, and included three short excerpts from the novel to illustrate how this works in practice.

1. U2, ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’*

Robert mouths in reply, ‘This song is “Sunday Bloody Sunday”.’ From the introduction to the live version on Under a Blood Red Sky. …

In the studio version of the song, the bass is the easiest instrument to follow, just to the right in the mix. Dur-der-der, der-dun; dur-der-der, der-dun. A five-note pattern, although it sounds like four unless Robert slows it down in his head and counts it out on his fingers. The guitar’s flat: dead chop. Marching forward, no time to waste. The cymbals spill everywhere, washing out to the edges. The violin cuts the song open.

2. The Smiths, ‘This Charming Man’*

3. This Mortal Coil, ‘Song to the Siren’

4. New Order, ‘Blue Monday’*

Robert seems to think that Larry Mullen Jr of U2 is Tracey’s favourite drummer. But if he’d ever thought to ask, he’d know it’s Stephen Morris of Joy Division and New Order. Listening to their records, she likes trying to work out which bits are Morris copying machines and which bits are machines copying Morris.

From the NME and Melody Maker, she knows that Joy Division’s producer, Martin Hannett, made Morris record each drum part separately, in isolation, but Morris couldn’t stop himself hitting the missing rhythms out on his legs; he had bruises after every session. ‘Blue Monday’ is different: it’s programmed on a drum machine. Tracey knows from Top of the Pops that when New Order play it live, Morris abandons his kit and fiddles about with synthesizers. So there’s no way for her to reconstruct the drum pattern by watching him move. Instead, she has to play the original recording on her Walkman in snatches of a few seconds, rewinding the same section over and over again. Like the VCR with a comedy sketch.

‘Blue Monday’ opens with a kick drum. She wasn’t sure at first, because the compression makes the pitch seem higher. But yes, it’s a kick, from the lower body. Except there’s no twitching foot on the record – only hers, here in the garage.

Dum, dum, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, da-da-da-da-da-da-da—

It doesn’t even sound that fast, until you try and copy it.

5. U2, ‘Tomorrow’* 

6. Simple Minds, ‘Book of Brilliant Things’*

7. New Order, ‘Age of Consent’ 

8. The Fall, ‘Eat Y’Self Fitter’ 

9. Peter Gabriel, ‘Intruder’*

10. The Teardrop Explodes, ‘Treason’ 

11. Bruce Springsteen, ‘My Father’s House’*

He puts his headphones on and plays an album Mark copied for him: Nebraska, by Bruce Springsteen. Folk songs. Mark says Springsteen recorded them at home. They were only supposed to be demos, but when the band tried to rerecord them in the studio, Springsteen decided he preferred the original versions. An acoustic guitar chug-chugs along like the bus engine throbbing under Robert’s thighs. The voice is echoey: maybe Springsteen’s house has really big rooms, but it sounds more like he’s playing in an empty church hall. You can hear when he breathes in; the smack of his lips shaping the words around the microphone.

They’re not soppy songs, which Robert likes. They’re about brothers and fathers and people who’ve forgotten how to love each other but keep trying anyway. Mark says love is a choice, not a feeling. You have to keep chug-chugging along – towards a destination you don’t even want to reach.

12. Kate Bush, ‘Get Out of My House’ 

 13. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, ‘Maid of Orleans’*

 14. The Mighty Wah!, ‘Come Back’ 

 15. Echo & the Bunnymen, ‘Thorn of Crowns’ 

 16. Joy Division, ‘Wilderness’*

 17. Magazine, ‘A Song From Under the Floorboards’ 

 18. The Kop Choir, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’*

 19. R.E.M., ‘Camera’*

 20. U2, ‘Wake Up Dead Man’ 
(chapter 20 is a kind of epilogue that takes place in 1997, the year this song was released.)

 21. The Jimi Hendrix Experience, ‘Wild Thing (live at Monterey Pop)’* 

 I’ve also written a series of posts on individual albums released in 1984, which I’ve been putting up twice a week for the two months around the novel’s publication at jonathanwalkersblog.co.uk.

The Angels of L19 is available here.

An extract from The Angels of L19 by Jonathan Walker

The below is from the opening chapter of The Angels of L19 by Jonathan Walker, published later this week.

When he was born again, the walls began to sing.

On Sundays, it’s fish fingers for tea, with watery potatoes and grey butter beans. Robert eats at five o’clock, an hour before Uncle Edward and Auntie Rose, but his aunt often sits with him at the morning-room table.

There are always fourteen to twenty beans: seven to ten mouthfuls, two beans at a time. Mix each mouthful with one-third of a fish finger to disguise the taste and texture. Half a gulp of orange squash to wash it down.

Auntie Rose is sitting at the other end of the table. Apron on; arms crossed. Her eyes follow the fork up to his mouth.

The fluorescent tube above stutters, as if there’s something trapped inside.

By five thirty, Robert’s back in the television room, at the far end of the sofa, near the window. Auntie Rose is at its other end, by the door; Uncle Edward’s in an armchair in the far corner of the room.

‘Aren’t you going to church?’ Auntie Rose asks.

‘Not today,’ Robert says.

‘But you didn’t go this morning either.’

He shrugs. He normally goes twice on Sunday, but last week he arrived at the evening service late, and before he entered the church, he placed a brown paper bag over his head with the words ‘Shame and Disgrace’ written on it in black marker. He couldn’t see where he was going, so he bumped into a few pews before he found an empty seat near the back.

The speaker was from Jireh in Bebington. Quite a good sermon, on the theme of repentance. But Bill Forester said Robert was ‘disruptive’, and he should stay away from church, just for today.

No need to mention any of that.

The Radio Times sits on the empty cushion between Auntie Rose and Robert, folded neatly to tonight’s page for BBC1. She picks it up. ‘Do you want to watch Songs of Praise then?’

He winces. ‘It’s not the same thing.’

‘Alright, I only asked.’

A choral ‘Amen’ comes through the wall from the Foresters next door. It’s a collective sound: Robert can’t distinguish the individual voices of Bill, or his daughter, Tracey, Robert’s best friend, because their whole family comes round for Sunday lunch – aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents – and they stay for the afternoon. And when they meet together, they sing.

Robert knows the Foresters’ habits because he lived next door for several weeks three years ago, shortly after he moved to Liverpool. Auntie Rose was in hospital with golden staphylococcus. Uncle Edward went to the bookies every afternoon, and passed out when he came back. Even though Robert was twelve, the Foresters made him show his teeth at night after brushing. He didn’t mind. He was happy there.

If Robert pressed himself against the adjoining wall, he could hear the singing with his body. Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and mine inward parts for Kirharesh. With his aunt and uncle in the room, he can’t follow the sound down into the dead cavity between the two houses. But he can turn an imaginary volume dial up, chasing the echo back to its source. The background hiss in his head gets louder as the sounds from next door die away.

Robert keeps his eyes fixed straight ahead, but he can feel his uncle’s gaze drifting towards him like a drunk at a steering wheel. If Robert jerks his head left, to catch him out, his uncle stares straight ahead at the television, even though it’s turned off at the wall to save electricity.

Above the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, there’s a seam of glue where the edges on the rolls of flock wallpaper go out of alignment. Solid resistance for a picking fingernail. Nits on a scalp.

His ears pop, and the pressure in the room adjusts. Here is a new thing, but at the same time, a very old thing. A presence.

It first appeared to Robert last summer, when he came home from church camp in Wales. He wasn’t surprised to find it waiting for him. He was expecting a message from God, after giving his heart to Jesus. The only surprise was that the presence didn’t immediately deliver the message. It’s returned several times since then, but Robert’s still waiting for it to speak. It’s only for him. No one else can see it.

It stands in the centre of the room, where it arranges the other occupants around itself like the figures on a clock face. Tick-tock on the mantelpiece. Or is it coming from the presence?

Its body is ivory; at other times, wax. Always hairless, smooth. No articulations or openings, apart from a bubbled vertical slit in the centre of its head, like the line of glue on the wallpaper.

An egg. Sealed, but waiting to split.

Even though the central heating’s on, Auntie Rose pulls her cardigan tighter. Uncle Edward stands up and turns on a bar of the electric fire, which pings and creaks as it turns orange. The light behind the fake coals rotates and flickers. Like the ticking of the clock, the smell of burning dust comes from the presence, not the fire. It draws all sensations into itself.

Silence in heaven for half an hour. Silence in the television room too.

Robert sometimes feels like his aunt and uncle have already died, and he’s living with their ghosts. Or their empty bodies.

***

Tracey always goes to youth group after the evening service, so she doesn’t come home until ten. Like Robert’s, her bedroom looks onto the back garden and has a rectangular bay window. At about ten twenty, Tracey knocks the base of her fist three times against her side of the common wall between their rooms. Robert knows she’s hitting an X drawn there in pencil; he thuds back at the identical X on his side, directly above the disused fireplace. Then they both go to the side panels of their respective windows, and turn to face one another.

Tracey has her Walkman on, the same model as Robert’s, but red instead of blue. She touches her hands to the earphones, then holds her index fingers up in the air, parallel to one another, as if measuring the space between them. She swipes them through the air like drumsticks and mouths the words, ‘This song is not a rebel song!’

Robert mouths in reply, ‘This song is “Sunday Bloody Sunday”.’ From the introduction to the live version on Under a Blood Red Sky. He leaves Tracey alone at the window for a minute, while he goes to find his own Walkman.

In the studio version of the song, the bass is the easiest instrument to follow, just to the right in the mix. Dur-der-der, der-dun; dur-der-der, der-dun. A five-note pattern, although it sounds like four unless Robert slows it down in his head and counts it out on his fingers. The guitar’s flat: dead chop. Marching forward, no time to waste. The cymbals spill everywhere, washing out to the edges. The violin cuts the song open.

Back at the window, Robert looks at Tracey’s hands. Her fingers are hitting the sill so fast they’re almost invisible. Eyes closed, but she knows he’s there. He waits for her to open her eyes again and flutters an imaginary white flag on a pole above his head.

Her nightie is stitched in diamond shapes – like a quilt – with lace at the collar and cuffs. Eczema flares at her wrists, and out in a halo around the tiny metal cross she wears around her neck. Sometimes she uses a steroid cream, and then she glistens. Dragon skin. Beautiful.

When the presence delivers its message, everyone will know that God has chosen Robert. Bill and Tracey will know. 

 ————

The Angels of L19 is published August 19th. Order it from us here.

An interview with Isobel Wohl, author of Cold New Climate

Cold New Climate is the debut novel from Isobel Wohl, and the first novel published by Weatherglass Books. To celebrate its publication, we’re posting this chat between Isobel and Damian Lanigan, co-publisher at Weatherglass, to find out a bit more about Isobel and her writing.

---

Hi Isobel. So you've moved back to Brooklyn?

Yes! I moved back a year and a half ago, after seven years in London. I grew up in Brooklyn, then went to Harvard for two years but actually wound up coming back to the city to finish my undergraduate education in Studio Art at NYU, and then I lived in Manhattan afterwards. So apart from the couple of years in Cambridge I’d spent my whole life in New York City before I moved to the UK.

Why did you decide to move to London?

I felt like I needed a big change after spending so much of my life in New York. I liked the idea of exploring another major city and living in Europe. And I’d been to London as a tourist and enjoyed it. So I applied to do my master’s at the RCA, and I got in and decided to go for it.

Was it hard to settle in London as an American?

Not at first. Because I moved there as a student, I had a ready-made social group, so that made everything much easier. And as an American, and particularly as a New Yorker, certain things felt extremely familiar. On top of that, London is so incredibly cosmopolitan that you don’t feel like you stick out. But then something would happen that would catch me off guard, and I’d realize that the UK and US are in many ways completely different. I think it actually got more difficult as I started to understand the UK better. 

Did you always write, even when you were chiefly focused on visual art?

No! I wrote a lot as a child and teenager, and then when I became more interested in visual art I quit. And then I slowly found my way back to it.

Did you read differently after you moved to England?

I definitely began to read more contemporary British fiction, and more writers published by London small presses. Joanna Walsh’s Hotel had a huge impact on me. When I read it, I was trying to figure out if I was going to write seriously again and how to do that, and I was also doing a PhD in Fine Art, in which writing could become part of the creative component, if I wanted it to. Hotel offered me a way to build relationships between physical objects and narrative outside of any previously defined form or genre, and this was very influential on my PhD and a lot of my writing about artworks and exhibitions, as well as on my fiction. In 2015 I developed an intense obsession with Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, especially the frequently quoted passage referenced in the book’s title, in which the narrator tells us that it would be disappointing if there were a sign next to a pond that said “pond”--a label--because it would ruin the sense of wonder one can have when looking at the natural world. I was--and am--very interested in how language relates to the material world, which I think comes from my background in art: what language captures or makes clear and what it veils or makes distant, and how these two functions and many others can come together to create writing that's somehow more than the sum of its parts. More recently, I absolutely loved Murmur by Will Eaves a deeply empathetic and beautiful novel.

We asked you to write a novel having read some of your short stories. Were you daunted?

No, although I was very surprised. I immediately thought of the scraps of what would become Cold New Climate, languishing somewhere on my hard drive. I’d begun working on the project a few years before but had had to put the work aside, and I had always wanted to pick it back up. I suppose I had an intuition that the premise would carry me through the process of writing, because I was so interested in it and because I knew that it had to be a novel and not anything shorter. Of course there were many challenges as I continued to write, but at the outset I had a great sense of momentum. 

Cold New Climate is your first novel; can you tell us a little about how the idea evolved?

It was after Trump was elected. I was thinking about resentment and disappointment, and how they motivate people to do things they otherwise might not do. Or maybe those emotions give people permission to do what they’d really like to do—tough to say. But the basic situation came to me as a way to explore revenge. Which I think is interesting: that it wasn’t fundamentally about sex, at least not when I started writing the book.

Lydia is a complicated character. Did your views of her change as the book progressed?

Yes, I think so. I do feel sorry for her, and I always have. I don’t think she’s a bad person--if that's even a useful concept, which it probably isn't.

How did you decide between first person and third person?

Honestly, I never really considered writing the novel in the first person. I think I always wanted to be able to pull back, in addition to showing the characters’ perceptions and thoughts. It seems necessary to allow some uncertainty about how Lydia and Caleb understand what’s happening between them. And a more impartial third person is used more and more as the novel progresses. 

Do you read fiction while you're writing it?

Yes, but I try not to read anything with a narrative that’s too closely related to what I’m working on.

Do you have a strict daily writing schedule?

I want to! I can’t keep to one for very long. It’s more like little sprints: a few days of good adherence there, and then a messy day, and then back to the routine. I do my best to make sure I write in the morning.

The book has a very surprising and revelatory ending. Was the idea for that there all along? 

Not at all. I have no idea where it came from. It was a big surprise to me too.

Are there similarities in terms of creative process between how you make art and how you write?

I write in lots of little pieces and then edit the text together. So, in a way, yes: my paintings tend to be pretty layered, so there’s a similarity there. But I think there are some inherent material differences. You can tinker with a sentence forever, but if you keep tinkering with a brushstroke you will have a big mess. And when I write I revise a lot. In a physical artwork there’s a material limit to that, which is actually useful, because it becomes obvious that you’re destroying your own work. In writing you have to exert the discipline yourself.

 I am also a big fan of copying what I’m working on, either by hand or retyping from a printed draft. It’s great when I’m stuck, because I usually find something in the writing I’m copying and begin to riff on it. It also makes me a more honest and adept self-editor; when it comes to figuring out whether a sentence needs to be altered or cut, my emotional reaction as I actually make the same words again on a new page is often more trustworthy than my thoughts as I stare at my screen or print-out. You could say that this shows an inclination towards the materiality of the writing process.

Are you working on another novel?

Not quite yet. I’d like to be. The fiction I’m working on now feels sort of in between forms: the ideas don’t seem to have quite enough ballast to become novels, but they also want to reach beyond the short story; I'm not used to the extreme economy any longer. I’m hoping they’ll resolve one way or another. Maybe one of them will turn out to be a novel, or something new will present itself. 

Thank you Isobel, we're very pleased that Cold New Climate is our first book.

an extract from Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl

The below is an extract from Chapter One of Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl, the first book published by Weatherglass Books. If you like what you see, you can pre-order the book from our shop, and receive it in March, a month ahead of official publication.

In the mornings Lydia looks out over the hills at the wind turbines and watches each crisp white blade move across the blue behind it and become perpendicular to the horizon. As each one passes the zenith of its motion another blade follows, and another, as the first blade is coming back up. Lydia watches and drinks coffee. She decides not to read the news.

Stray cats rub past her lower leg and occasionally climb onto her breakfast table. There are tortoiseshells, black ones, white ones with brown and ginger spots. Some are fat and glossy. Others are bony and irritable. These hiss.

Don’t feed them, Liz said that Marty’s cousin said, when Lydia called to say she’d arrived at the house that the cousin had agreed to lend her. It’s cruel. Apparently people do it all the time, people feel bad for them and feed them for a while but soon the cats show up expecting it and of course no one wants them around pestering so they stop and the cats starve, by that time there are kittens and that’s why there are more and more and more of them. Taking over the town. Robert says feeding them’s like hurting them. The future ones who will be more likely to be born, that is, because they’ll suffer. Do you want me to tell Tom you made it all right?

When the day gets hotter she goes into the house and opens her laptop and begins to work at the kitchen table. She can hear the cats rubbing against the wooden door and meowing to be let in. The current project is an energy drink called ENGINE. The company board says that they do not want the packaging to look too industrial because they do not want anyone to associate ENGINE with engine fluid, so Lydia comes up with can designs in pale green and silver, evasive and full of pep. There is no Wi-Fi but she has a dongle and most of the time this works all right.

She cannot entirely stop herself from Googling in fits of boredom the weather this coming week and double-checking how to say Hello, how to say Do you speak English and May I sit and With you. May I sit with you. Someone will say that to her soon. She would like to understand it, and then she can say I don’t speak Greek, possibly in Greek but also possibly in English to underline the point. Anyone who will be able to speak to her in English will understand if she says in English I don’t speak Greek.

She tweaks a design and sends an email suggesting that the brand reconsider biodegradable material and receives in reply an email with a reiteration that the material suggested is outside of the packaging budget. Would she please stop going over old territory. Lydia apologizes. The cats sound lonely.

In the late afternoon she walks up stony paths and into the town. She goes to the bakery, where she says hello to the girl who told her about the wind farm dispute. They no longer speak about the climate.

On the way home Lydia sometimes stops at the convenience store, where in the back of the glass cold case there is good yogurt in a round terracotta dish covered in plastic wrap. This yogurt, the label says in English, is locally produced. She buys some, and also eggs and cheese and sometimes gummy worms, which are near the register and difficult to resist. When she gets home she puts these items away in her cupboards and refrigerator.

I don’t want to check in with you, she texted Tom back on the fourth day of her absence, that’s why I’m away.

The Aegean is a darker blue than it was in the pictures she saw on the internet. She eats anchovies and whitebait alone at the seaside cafe.

One day a man in a Panama hat sits at the table next to hers.

I don’t speak Greek, she says.

He looks at her quizzically and says, Okay. Then he opens his newspaper. When the waiter comes he orders an ouzo in English.

The bodies of the anchovies are silver-white on the back. When they were cleaned they were sliced open along the long tapered belly and there is a groove where the spine was. Lydia likes the salt and the lines in the white flesh pattern. The sun sets. When the striations of color are close to fading Lydia walks back up the road to the town, past kittens, who follow her for a few minutes before giving up and lying down by the roadside.

 *

Each night Lydia orders a small beer at the town’s only bar and sits at a stool near the high table in the sandy front yard. La Isla Bonita and Africa and Romeo and Juliet play on repeat. From the television near the open door Lydia can sometimes hear a brisk commentator announce some sports event she cannot see and cannot understand. She can tell when there’s a goal because of the cheering that blares from the speakers. She tries to use her peripheral vision so that the people exiting and entering cannot tell that she is watching them.

Across the street she can see the unfinished new town hall and sometimes, once it is dark, teenagers who step past the slices of unused white stone. The girl at the bakery told Lydia that the government started to build this new building but then quit halfway through because they found they did not need it and also they had no money. Lydia asked if this was connected to the cost of the wind farm. The girl scoffed and asked if Lydia had heard of the debt problem. She said she had.

Well, said the girl, and shut the case of pastries.

Often at night a pair of moonlit adolescents enters the structure one after the other; often one offers the other a hand as they make their way up unfinished steps, giggling, and pass through gaping doorless rectangles; often it is the boy who offers a hand to the girl but not always, and one night Lydia believes there are two girls but she cannot say for certain because it is very, very late and they are fast and careful.

Lydia wonders who will sit at her table.

The young men who enter the bar, Lydia notices, generally come in groups with young women. The older ones sometimes come alone.

On the third night a man comes up to her and asks, Do the Americans really like Trump?

Lydia says that some do and some don’t.

When the bar closes she walks again down the winding path to the house. It is very steep.

Around one A.M. she wakes up hungry. In the anodyne light of the fridge she puts a slice of wet white cheese on a chipped plate and eats it with her fingers.

* 

When Lydia met Tom she was very young and he was middle-aged and knew Italian. He still knows Italian but now Lydia sometimes notices that there are small drops of clear or yellow sputter on his pillow. When she wakes up in the borrowed house she’s glad not to see it. She sits outside on the terrace and sees the sun come up in pinks and wafty blues and oranges.

Sometime in the past couple of weeks he went to a faculty meeting, unless it was cancelled or he decided not to go. At any rate there was a faculty meeting scheduled on the whiteboard calendar that hangs on their metallic fridge door on the Upper West Side. Caleb’s birthday was circled in blue, a big 19 scrawled on top. She won’t be there.

On the ninth of October Lydia was supposed to have a drink with Liz, and she hasn’t seen her in months, though that’s not unusual. Now that Liz and Marty have kids it’s tough, or that’s why Liz says she doesn’t have time. Still Liz was instrumental in the Greece plan for emotional reinvigoration, even if she did not entirely understand why it was necessary. In her most affected moment Liz said, Lydia, boredom is the price of intimacy.

Lydia remembers when they were inseparable.

By the roadside she finds what she thinks is wild oregano and picks a few sprigs. When she gets back to the house she checks online to see if she is right before she eats it. She is. She picks the leaves off and puts them on sliced ripe tomatoes. At least she does not have to go to dinner with Tom’s friend Bob Mackenzie, who has a habit of spitting in flowerpots.

Sometime in the second week she realizes she wants to text Tom about the sunrise but does not have service, and anyway she has said she will not do that. On Caleb’s birthday she sends him an email and embeds a photo of the landscape. It shows the turbines.

---

Cold New Climate is published on April 15th.

Pre-order it from Weatherglass Books now, though, to receive the book in March, a month ahead of official publication.

Weatherglass Books: Newsletter #1

Weatherglass Books: Newsletter #1

Finding talent really is the most exciting and rewarding thing. My co-publisher Neil and I started Weatherglass because we shared a belief that mainstream publishing is missing a trick. The big houses are increasingly driven by the remorseless logic of the market, meaning that many books that deserve an audience are left unpublished. In particular, the types of books that Neil and I most like are often overlooked, even if their intrinsic literary merit is acknowledged by those who reject them. 

Now is not the time to unpack the various elusive meanings of 'intrinsic literary merit', but, having read scores of submissions, I feel confident in stating that you know it when you see it. We have already found a set of wonderful, serious, witty, beautiful, fascinating books, and, gratifyingly, we are getting to bring them to our readers.

Our first three books have great diversity of subject matter and tone, but what they all share is a complete uniqueness of voice. This last term is as hard to pin down as 'intrinsic literary merit', but again, once you come across it it's unmistakable. I think it comes down to a single human being trying really hard to speak to you as honestly as possible. There are plenty of people out there who can 'write well', but what distinguishes our authors is that you can feel the power and sincerity of their impulses in every sentence: in each case, there is a sense that this story just had to be told. 

In addition, our books all speak to some really big themes, but always through the means of character. I think that the books we truly love present us with imaginary people who become as real to us as people we know.  As a teenager I was torn between music, cricket and books. Holden Caulfield, Tess Durbeyfield, Adrian Mole, Catherine Sloper, Lucy Pevensie, Billy Fisher, Katherine Lind, Hamlet (of course), Elizabeth Bennet and Edward Ashburnham were as present and demanding on my consciousness as Morrissey and Viv Richards. The study of literature at university tries hard to make us forget, but novels are about the people portrayed within them. Any old thing can have an important theme. Compelling works of fiction dramatise the lives of characters and make us deeply concerned about the fate the author describes for them. All Weatherglass's books so far display this quality: we see the people, we hear them and most of all, we're fascinated by them.

Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl is our first novel, scheduled for April 2021. Isobel is originally from Brooklyn but studied as a visual artist in London. Neil found some short stories she'd written and thought she had the makings of a very fine novelist. We asked her to consider writing a book and we were pretty much stunned when it came back to us. We'd rarely read a debut of such assuredness and brilliance. You can tell she's an artist: some of the observations have a Van Eyck-ian attention to detail. But she also has a fantastic ear for dialogue, a subtle and compassionate sense of character and a salutary seriousness of purpose. The end of the book is an absolute artistic coup. We could not be prouder that this is our debut novel.

Our second novel, The Angels of L19 by Jonathan Walker, is also full of music. But what really compelled us about this story of a group of Evangelical Christian teenagers in the 1980s was its bravery. Against an utterly convincing rendering of Liverpool in the 80s it renders the conflicts between everyday life and demands of spiritual experience with great originality and power. As a novel it could not be more different from Isobel's but the two books share many characteristics: they are observant, thoughtful, funny, empathetic and, most of all, they are honest.

We'll publish one work of non-fiction in 2021: Play It Hard by Luke Meddings, an original, highly intelligent exploration of the music of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys as they all influenced each other (and tried to out-do each other) in the miraculous period of 1963-67. Luke has been immersed in this music for years and he has delivered a book that expresses his insight and love with a very Beatles / Dylan / Wilson combo of sweetness, wit and virtuosity. As well as being packed with telling biographical material, it will make you listen to the music in whole new ways: I can't think of a stronger endorsement than that. 

Angels and Play it Hard will come out in the autumn of 2021.

provisional artwork: covers revealed very soon

We have other books on the way, but for now we'd just like to say thank you for signing up to our newsletter, and an especial thanks to those of you who have become Founder Readers. Your support is truly appreciated. There is always optimism when you start a new business, but optimism tempered by the feeling that the whole thing could be a complete disaster. In the current climate it seems focusing on doom has become a widespread habit of mind. Weatherglass is a small repudiation of such gloominess: Neil and I are doing something we love, and something we think has value. At the very least, the future looks very interesting. So far, we think that our optimism is justified, and having you sign up is a crucial validatory factor. We really can't wait to get Cold New Climate in peoples' hands and be off and running.

Best wishes to all,
Damian