Ariadne's Thread: In Memory of W.G. Sebald

Philippa Comber

Propolis

In 2015 the artist Nicky Loutit began making paintings and putting down thoughts which evolved as she walked the coast of North Norfolk. New Year's Day Is Black is a visualization of memory; of how our past returns to us when we least expect or want it to. It is a meditation on motherhood, ageing and the journey of a life fully lived. As the child of prominent members of London's cultural elite in the '40s and '50s, her place was that of an infant hanger-on, mostly ignored by the artistic and intellectual crowd she was born into. But beneath that veneer of bohemian eccentricity, Loutit silently endured a life marked by physical, mental and sexual abuse at the hands of some of those responsible for her. Recounting the occasional kindness of the people she knew, including George Orwell, Cyril Connolly and Francis Partridge, alongside the trauma of her abuse, Loutit paints a life which triumphs over regret and adversity. Her story affords those who experience it the chance to be moved and inspired by a remarkable woman in a remarkable way.

New Year's Day is Black

Nicky Loutit

Arts & Photography

A small monastic outpost in 13th Century Wales is rocked to its core when a gruesome discovery is made on the nearby shoreline: a severed human head. It's the first of several to wash up along the surrounding coast, and not long after, the holy brothers stumble across the smouldering ruins of a bardic school with a pile of decapitated bodies inside. Only one survivor, barely alive, is found hiding nearby. He is Cian Brydydd Mawr, the greatest bard of his age, who holds in his head the four `branches' of an ancient, epic Welsh myth cycle: The Mabinogion. Physically weak but strong willed, he asks the monks to put aside their rigid Christian doctrine and commit his oral tales to parchment - before the stories of spirits and shape-shifters, giants and time-travellers, curses and spells, are lost forever...

The Assembly of the Severed Head: A Novel of the Mabinogi

Literature & Fiction

Hugh Lupton

Mythology & Folk Tales

1973. Swallow's Farmhouse in deep, rural Norfolk is home to Your People, a commune of free-thinkers and poets seeking a better way. But beneath the veneer of a nurturing, alternative lifestyle, an atmosphere of jealousy and threat is pushing utopia towards the brink of its inevitable collapse. Raising herself amidst the chaos is a twelve year old survivor, desperately preoccupied with her transition into womanhood. With her mute sister, beloved dog and the re-defining force of her emerging appetites, she marches resolutely towards her future, venturing - with hilarious and horrifying results - through the minefield of an adult world built on hypocrisy and misplaced ideals.

Devoured

Mackmin, Anna

Literary

The Ballad of Syd & Morgan

HAYDN MIDDLETON

New York To California: A journey across the East of England searching for the not quite visible

Biographies & Memoirs

Page, Jeremy

Historical

Playtime's Over

James Kinsley

Contemporary

Jessica Streeting and her family - sister Alice, mother Judith and father Revered Paul Farnham - move east in their ancient London taxi to the deep countryside of Norfolk. It is 1975 and the rector has a new position at the church of St Agnes in the village of Cawston. Here they find a world populated by people who embody both the ancient and new of late 20th century rural life. Children of the soil, whose parents work it and depend on it, living a simple life as old as their church. The musical ones. The clever ones. The artists, accountants, shopkeepers and publicans. Among it all, their vicar plays a role for all people; guide, educator, lighter of the way. Admired and adored he strove to buoy his congregation week after week, unwittingly mythologising himself as he went. The hole he left then, when in a moment he was ripped from the community, was vast. In this epic poem Jess revisits that place, for the first time addressing the grief she so quickly suppressed in the manner of the age. She brings to life in heart-breaking clarity the joy of a world made by industrious children and their imaginations, until unforeseen tragedy muted the colours of that golden time. With a foreword by Stephen Fry - for whom Paul Farnham played an inspirational role - Sea-Change is a book whose potency reminds us not only of the power of shared stories, but also that how they are told can make us all feel like players in their drama.

Sea-Change

Streeting, Jessica

Poetry

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