Since this is the first blog post, I thought it might be a good idea to explain how the Tuesday Night Readings work. The audience starts to gather just before 6pm in the Darwin College. I particularly enjoy the informality with which the readings are handled. Before they start, everyone can grab a drink and talk to fellow students and colleagues. The audience is diverse: from undergrads to PhD students, to senior members of staff. The latter means that it is easy to get into a discussion on all sorts of topics before the readings start. Last week, there was a student talking to another about chaos theory, there was a group discussing Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and another group having a heated argument about the thickness of their raincoats. Then, everyone seated, white wine on one hand and a camera on the other, I saw Amy Sackville come into the room and everyone went quiet.

She read the beginning of her new novel, Orkney. Her writing flows with beautiful and direct images all paced by a very calculated – but never contrived – rhythmic style. William Skidelsky from the Telegraph describes Orkney as “impressive, intense and daring” and I think, judging by its reception, the audience agreed.

After the reading, there was a question and answer round. She explained the importance of the location as the base of the structural and conceptual framework of the novel, the layering work behind it, as well as the connections between technical choices (such as her distinctive approach to speech) to thematic concerns (the on-going play between presences and absences in the novel as a whole). You can get Amy Sackville’s Orkney here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Orkney-Amy-Sackville/dp/1847086640