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A pod for those who love the latest in fiction, non fiction and poetry. Field is a platform for new and exciting work from across the UK and beyond. If you like what you hear find out more about Field at www.fieldzine.com. You can subscribe and support Field's work via patreon at www.patreon.com/fieldzine for just £3 per month.
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Send a text This month Canongate publish Nation of Strangers, the third ‘instalment’ in a series by Turkish novelist, essayist and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Following on from How To Lose A Country and Together it is, once more, rooted in Ece’s forced displacement from her homeland. Recorded last December at Canongate’s offices Sam met Ece to discuss this deeply personal and unflinching account of being ‘unhomed’. Nation of Strangers is centred on a loss that will resonate deeply with anyone...
Send a text ROBOTS AND KINGS Two wonderful books to start the year. Lara meets up with Rebecca Perry to hear all about her debut novel ‘May We Feed The King’. Already a firm favourite at Field HQ, it is the mesmeric story of a king who resists power and the curator who pursues their forgotten legacy. A huge recommend that is described by A.K. Blakemore as ‘A sort of perfect snow globe, presenting a decadent world in miniature that surprises us with the depth of its reflections on power,...
Send a text Published by Granta earlier this autumn, Ben Pester’s debut novel is the story of Tom Crowley - a Willy Loman figure for our age - who is slowly and terrifyingly absorbed into the hallucinatory and labyrinthine surroundings of his work. From the deceptive nature of Luke Bird’s day-glow cover art to the impenetrability of the novel’s work-speak The Expansion Project is deeply unnerving precisely for its recognisable qualities. The alienation, accountability and obsolesce of c...
Send a text Next February, Canongate will publish Nation of Strangers, the third instalment in a series by Turkish novelist, essayist and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Ahead of its publication we met to discuss the two books that precede it, ‘How To Lose A Country’ and ‘Together - A Manifesto Against A Heartless World.’ Both deal with what Ece has termed ‘cloud fascism’ - the gradual then sudden everywhereness and nowhereness of global autocracy. Rooted in her own experience of the Erdogan regim...
Send a text On this episode we meet Clare Carlisle to discuss Transcendence for Beginners, (Fitzcarraldo Editions). A book written through love and mourning, it is, as the title suggests, explorative, unbound and deeply moving. Ranging widely, from Soren Kierkegaard to George Eliot, The Himalayas to The Isle of Skye, it is a book that offers us devotion and loss as expressions of love. A timely and generative reminder of our own porous and momentary selves and quite simply, a very beautiful b...
Send a text Emma Warren has been documenting grassroots culture for decades. Her most recent book, Dance Your Way Home (a Guardian book of the year) was a celebration of 80s club nights, Irish dance halls and sweaty youth centres. This September, she returns with another piece of expertly researched and lovingly told social history. Once more taking the reader onto familiar ground, Up The Youth Club is a searching look at the rise and fall of a national treasure, highlighting both the s...
Send a text On this episode we hear from playwright Hannah Patterson about her debut novel Ungone. It’s another gem from the mighty Rough Trade Books, the story of a single decision and the strange new world that grows from it. Hannah’s central character Eve is recently returned from an Antarctic research trip to grapple with the decline of her ageing mother. Unable to visit her at the care home in which she lives, she employs Erin, a total stranger, to go instead, pretending to be her....
Send a text 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 ...
Send a text 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 epigrap...
Send a text 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 div...
Send a text 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 tribut...
Send a text 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 c...
Send a text 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 forgettab...
Send a text 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...
Send a text ALL OF THIS UNREAL TIME Published by Rough Trade Books Hopefully, you're listening to this surrounded by mountains of chocolate. What follows is the second part of our conversation with Max. If you’ve enjoyed it, follow the link to get yourself a copy straight from the Rough Trade website. https://roughtradebooks.com/products/all-of-this-unreal-time-max-porter-foreword-by-cillian-murphy As our discussion about All Of This Unreal Time came to an end t...
Send a text ALL OF THIS UNREAL TIME Published by Rough Trade Back this weekend with a double header, we turn to All of This Unreal Time by Mr Max Porter. Described in the foreword as ‘a gift, written in friendship’ it is an elusive, ever moving torrent of apology, love and gratitude. A response to the countless human and non-human lives that intersect with and impact on our own. Written during the first, weird summer months of the pandemic, the piece blossomed int...
Send a text On this episode we speak to Naomi Booth about her latest novel Raw Content. Set during a bleak Yorkshire winter, the book follows Grace, a legal editor whose job demands she reduce unspeakable acts to neatly worded clauses. The care and attention with which Grace approaches this work is only matched by her risk taking outside it. When she falls unexpectedly pregnant she attempts the same compartmentalisation, hoping to keep the new, visceral weirdness that her body is undergoing a...
Send a text On this episode, we speak to Anna Whitwham about Soft Tissue Damage, her startling account of a healing found in controlled violence. Published by Rough Trade Books on 27.03 it charts both the loss of Anna’s mother to cancer and her subsequent choice to battle unresolved anger in the boxing ring. From early sparing sessions to the draining seconds of the final round, Anna writes both with immediacy and unflinching honesty. What emerges is an exploration of the pain we choose, the ...
Send a text On this episode, Ben Markovitz talks to us about his latest novel The Rest of Our Lives. Starting in the midst of a failing relationship, the story follows Tom Layward, a man on the cusp of a life changing decision. Having lived for years in the shadow of a brief affair that his wife Amy pursued, Tom resolves to leave, following their own adult children out into the world. What follows is a road trip of wrong turns and misdirections, across a strangely dislocated and misremembered...
Send a text On this episode Ellen E. Jones speaks to us about Screen Deep, How Film and TV can Solve Racism and Save the World. Many of you will know Ellen from Radio 4’s Screen Shot, in which, alongside her co-host Mark Kermode, she enters the various worlds of Doris Day, jobbing hitmen and the longest running video shop in the world. Screen Deep is written with the same insight, encyclopaedic knowledge and social consciousness that Ellen brings to her broadcasting. (She also does a fa...
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