Field Ramble – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Send us Fan Mail

Happy Beltane to those that celebrate, here's an extra episode to welcome those longer days that are on the way. 

It’s an extended interview with author and broadcaster Zakia Sewell about the journeys and discoveries that make up Finding Albion, her search for another Britain. Born out of her 2020 radio 4 series (My Albion) - it is a rejection of a narrow and exclusionary vision of Englishness in favour of a unifying sense of national identity. 

Centred around the wheel of the year and a pursuit that took Zakia the length and breadth of  our island Finding Albion is as much an exploration of our shared colonial past as it is the weird and wonderful folk customs and traditions that continue to bind our communities together. 

What emerges is a (much needed) hopeful vision of our future and the offer to pursue a deeper sense of who we are.

'Hopeful and Inspiring' - Caroline Lucas

'Finding Albion offers up much-needed alternative national identities and stories for us to keep close and cherish. A timely book' - Jeremy Deller. 

Huge thanks to Huw Marc Bennett and the mighty Albert's Favourites for the use of Huw's music. 

Music used: 

Carol Haf (Summer Carol) 

Gwenith Gwyn (White Wheat) 

Taken from Huw's latest album 'Heol Las,' get your copy direct from Huw's band camp page. 

If you fancy getting a copy of the Finding Albion why not help the wonderful  Gloucester Road Books (Bristol) celebrate their fifth birthday by ordering it from their website. 

If you enjoyed this episode, follow the pod and share with those you love. x

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

Dreams and Lies

This month Sam talks to Makenna Goodman about her latest novel Helen of Nowhere. Published by Fitzcarraldo and described by Jo Hamya as ‘the perfect fairytale for our times’, it is the story of Man - an academic dogged by allusions of disgrace and a publicly failed marriage. He seeks to start again and live a ‘good life’ far from the city and is drawn into the wilds to view a house which seems to offer him escape.

Set over five acts, Man is first question by Realtor, the estate agent seeking to sell him his dream home and then the eponymous Helen, the house’s former resident, whose ghost dextrously possesses the narrative as all pretence of reality falls away. 

Meanwhile, Lara meets with Ben Lerner to hear all about the quite superb Transcription. The writer, father of one and narrator of Ben's new novel has travelled to Providence where he went to college, and where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety year old mentor and father of his friend, Max. But after his narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. 

What unfolds from this dreamlike, nightmarish, circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate the memories that make us who we are, and a moving exploration of the experience of being a son, of becoming a man and of trying to be a ‘good’ father. 

Our own tape disintegration on this episode was entirely unintended but beautifully serendipitous. If you enjoy the episode, share it with friends, lovers, loved ones and book clubbers.

Big love x

Helen of Nowhere is published by Fitzcarraldo

Transcription is published by Granta

Music used on this episode: 

Hermanos Gutierrez - Nuevo Mondo 

Ian Hawgood - Upwards Eyes EP

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

Sarah Hall needs little introduction. Twice nominated for the Man-Booker Prize and the first and only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice, she has written ten highly acclaimed novels and short story collections. 

This August she returns with her latest novel Helm, the multi-millennial tale of the strange and seductive wind which haunts the Eden Valley of her native Cumbria. The story is one that she has been unable to walk away from; a twenty year project spanning much of her career as a novelist. It is also the first to carry a maker’s mark, a guarantee of its provenance from both author and publisher (Faber) that Helm is entirely human written. 

In our wide-ranging interview we discuss the dangers presented by AI to the arts, the struggles faced in capturing such an elusive presence on the page and the enduring pull of this particular story for her.

‘Sarah Hall’s new novel Helm is incandescently good. It is sexy and funny and erudite and strange, and the prose is dizzyingly good. Up there with her best.’ 

Sarah Perry

‘I’m awed … I wouldn’t think a novel could be at once so taut and so multifarious, expanding one’s sense of what fiction can do.’ 

Sarah Moss

‘Sarah Hall’s writing has conquered the body and the soul and now it conquers the wind itself. She gets better with every word she writes.’ 

Daisy Johnson

Music: Ian Hawgood - A Delicate Connection Not Lightly Broken 

Search Field Ramble in Spotify and iTunes 

Please subscribe & leave us a review while you’re there. x

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

Shortlisted for this years Orwell Fiction Prize, The Accidental Immigrants is a work of political fable for our times. Dedicated to ‘all the people who lose their lives trying to reach a safer shore,’ Jo Mcmillan’s latest novel centres on a desperate British couple who are displaced from their home on a fictional Mediterranean island by a rising totalitarian regime.

Born from a disgust at the decade-long surge of European far right politics and the ineffective centrism that paves its way, The Accidental Immigrants is a novel that urges us to reflect on our own complacency and sense of exceptionalism. In Jo’s own words it is a mini revolution between two covers, a record of her resistance and an exercising of her freedom to imagine.

https://bluemoosebooks.com/books/accidental-immigrants

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

On this episode we hear from Lally Macbeth about her incredible compendium ‘The Lost Folk.’ The distillation of a lifetime’s passion, it is an inclusive and comprehensive take on the meaning of folk, that asks us to rediscover, to cherish and to share the particular and the weird from which all our communities are made. 

From pub signs to tea towels, bonfires to storytellers, this is a book that holds the elusive, the unownable and the collective dear. The Lost Folk’s epigraph is the motto of the Federation of the Old Cornwall Societies - ‘Gather ye the fragments that are left, that nothing be lost.’ And that is unquestionably what Lally Macbeth has done here. Packed from cover to cover with stories and anecdotes, it mixes her own experiences with a treasure trove of customs, curios and finds. 

‘An exceptionally thoughtful and beautifully written celebration of the creative power that lives and breathes within our communities.’ 

Maxine Peake

‘Erudite, questing and endlessly fascinating.’ 

Katherine May

‘A splendid museum full of strange and wonderful things.’

Peter Ross

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

Short story special: Two collections from two great independent presses. First up is Make A Home of Me by Vanessa Santos. Dead Ink Books bring us an exciting new voice in the horror landscape. Eight unsettling stories full of haunted children, impossible reappearances and unnatural forces desperate to be known. Definitely one for fans of Carmen Maria Machado or Matt Hill.

Then we meet Eva Wyles to discuss DeliveryWoman, recently published by Influx Press. A stunning debut that dives into the complexities of human connection and the struggles of modern day loneliness. A collection that comfortably sits alongside the work of A.M Homes or Ottessa Moshfegh. 

Get your copy directly from the publisher rather than feed the beast x

www.deadinkbookshop.com

www.influxpress.com 

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

Saraswati 

Published by Serpent's Tail

It’s hard to talk about Gurnaik Johal’s debut novel without using the word epic. Saraswati is transcontinental, multi-generational and led by a broad cast of characters - if you’re a fan of fiction on the scale of a book like Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, then Saraswati is for you.

Beginning with the re-emergence of a supposedly mythical river, Saraswati follows the descendants of a lone couple Sejal and Jugaad, pursuing familial tributaries that run across borders and time. Weaving in themes of climate change, resurgent nationalism and ancient religious texts, it is a novel brimming with images that live long in the memory. Huge crowds mass at river banks, cities flood, mountains beckon and a single piece of cloth links characters around the world. 

More than anything, Saraswati continually returns to  the power of story telling. The stories we tell to understand ourselves, the stories we are told by those in power and the stories we leave for those that follow.

‘A surging, roaring deluge of a novel.’ 

Jon McGregor

‘Immersive, intimate and epic.’ 

Preti Taneja

‘A bold, intriguing tapestry that pulses with frenetic energy.’

Aube Rey

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

On June 19th Wendy Erskine’s long awaited debut novel The Benefactors is published. Many of you will already know Wendy from her two acclaimed short story collections Sweet Home and Dance Move and you’ll find The Benefactors filled with the same deep curiosity for people, the same raw laughs and the same unsparing honesty.  

Set, once again, in her much loved Belfast it is a broad and embracing portrait of a community that moves from the sexual assault of one of its central characters ‘Misty,’ to explore the isolating and insulating effects of class and money and the regenerative power of love.

At its heart The Benefactors is a novel that asks us to consider both the unknown and far reaching effects of our actions and the enduring place we hold in each other’s lives.

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

On this episode Holly Dawson speaks to us about her debut All of Us Atoms. Faced with the prospect of losing her memory Holly set out to revisit the moments that had shaped her, from the earliest recollections of childhood to her diagnosis. 

What follows is the documenting of a ‘felt’ life. In a series of essays, letters and short stories she weaves together memory, dreams, and reality, grasping hold of the consolations of science and discovering a deep love for the forgettable and forgotten moment. 

At its heart All of Us Atoms is a rejection of the forms and rationalities we are offered for something altogether more satisfying. An archeological dig site, where Holly turns over the soil and sieves it through her fingers to rediscover what’s there, before its lost. 

‘Brilliant, brave, wild and marvellous.’ 

Juliet Nicholson 

‘To read Holly’s writing is to live it.’ 

Helena Bonham Carter

‘I loved this. The smarts, lyricisms, surprises and deep humanity of it all.’ 

Susie Orbach

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine

Send us Fan Mail

On this episode we meet Lucia Lijtmaer to hear all about her upcoming novel Cautery. Published for the first time in English by Charco Press, it is a novel filled with apocalyptic fantasies and a deep mistrust of the supposed greater good. 

Set between modern day Barcelona and puritan New York Cautery follows the stories of two women (one real, the other imagined) who, although separated by 400 years both share a vision of either escaping the confines of society or burning it to the ground. 

It’s a novel that shares some of the same ‘end of days’ terrain as Ali Millar’s Ava Anna Ada as well as the critique of bourgeois, hipster lifestyles found in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, as unnerving as it is compelling. 

'A searing, twisted feast.' Laura Fernández

'Masterful,' CLARIN

Get your copy here

https://charcopress.com/bookstore/cautery

@fieldzine 
www.fieldzine.com
www.patreon.com/fieldzine