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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: She wrote a bestselling book - why did its follow-up take 15 years?
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
The best-selling author and the follow-up
Susanna Clarke’s debut novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, was a huge success. But right after her first book tour, she fainted. That led to a long chronic illness which delayed the writing of her much-anticipated follow-up.
(The New Yorker, approx 22 mins reading time)
The following March, Clarke and Greenland were dining at a friend’s house during a holiday elsewhere in Derbyshire when Clarke suddenly announced that she needed to go home and go to bed. “She stood up and stepped away from her chair,” Greenland recalled. “And, instead of walking around the table, she just crumpled. She woke up, and got a little bit further around the room, and then collapsed again. I can remember kneeling down with her on the floor.” He’d never seen her faint before. Clarke has not been entirely well since. “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” meanwhile, has continued to thrive: it has sold more than four million copies worldwide, and in 2015 it was adapted into a miniseries by the BBC.
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