Christopher
Maclehose and I talked together to Georgina Godwin about the brand new
Mountain Leopard Press and the Earthspinner, his brilliant career
spanning Murakami, Umberto and Steig Larsson, how Rukun Advani helped
him choose the name for his press, how he discovered my first book in
2007 and went on to publish all the books I've written. The "impossibly
glamorous" Christopher (as Georgina describes him) is wonderful to
listen to, and while dogs feature a great deal in this conversation, so
does a motorbike. And the singer Marianne Faithfull. You can listen to the interview here.
"...some people have the mountains in them while some have the sea. The ocean exerts an inexorable pull over sea-people wherever they are – in a bright-lit, inland city or the dead centre of a desert – and when they feel the tug there is no choice but somehow to reach it and stand at its immense, earth-dissolving edge, straightaway calmed. Hill-people, even if they are born in flatlands, cannot be parted for long from the mountains. Anywhere else is exile. Anywhere else, the ground is too flat, the air too dense, the trees too broad-leaved for beauty. The colour of the light is all wrong, the sounds nothing but noise." The Folded Earth For three days it had rained as if the sky had turned into a giant shower. It was my third trip to Ranikhet and yet again I was leaving without a glimpse of the high peaks. It didn’t matter. The sound of rain on a tin roof, the dry spells when the hills were honey-coloured in the newly-washed air: who needs more? Then someone sa