I, Spy: Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958) and Ways of Escape (1980)

For anyone interested in exploring the geneses of and backgrounds to Graham Greene's novels (not to mention his plays, screenplays and travelogues), I can highly recommend Ways of Escape (Bodley Head, 1980, dust jacket design by Michael Harvey). A kind of sequel to A Sort of Life (1971) – Greene's autobiography, which covers his life up to the age of twenty-seven and the publication of his fourth novel, Stamboul Train (1932) – Ways of Escape is part memoir, part book-by-book exploration of the author's backlist, drawing on his introductions to the 1970–1982 Bodley Head/Heinemann Collected Edition of his works along with assorted essays for assorted newspapers and magazines. I read the whole thing last year (after buying a first edition for a fiver at the Lewes Book Fair) and touched on it briefly in my review of The Ministry of Fear (1943) and my year-end books top ten; but I'm minded to dwell on it a little more in regard to another Greene book I read last year:

Our Man in Havana (Heinemann, 1958, dust jacket design by Donald Green – said wrapper also to be found, naturally, in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s). The story of a middle-aged Havana-based vacuum-cleaner salesman, Jim Wormold, who winds up spying for British Intelligence – after a fashion; he fabricates all of his reports – Our Man in Havana also featured in my top ten books of the year, placing at number ten, just below the ninth placed Ways of Escape in fact. While I enjoyed it, I'd venture that it isn't as rich a piece of fiction as, say, the aforementioned The Ministry of Fear, or The Quiet American (1955), or The Human Factor (1978). However, like those novels it does deal with matters of espionage – a subject Greene had plenty of experience with, having spied for the Secret Service in Africa during the war – and in many ways is perhaps more illuminating on the realities of spying than any of them.

Greene notes in Ways of Escape that Our Man in Havana started life as an outline for a film, written shortly after the war at the request of the Brazilian director Alberto Cavalcanti but never developed into a full screenplay. (In the event the book was filmed – after publication – by British director Carol Reed.) "I thought I would write a Secret Service comedy based on what I had learned from my work in 1934–4 of German Abwehr activity in Portugal," Greene explains, before continuing:

I had returned from Freetown – and my futile efforts to run agents into the Vichy colonies – and been appointed to Kim Philby's sub-section of our Secret Service, which dealt with counter-espionage in the Iberian peninsula. My responsibility was Portugal. There those Abwehr officers who had not been suborned already by our own service spent much of their time sending home completely erroneous reports based on information received from imaginary agents. It was a paying game, especially when expenses and bonuses were added to the cypher's salary, and a safe one. The fortunes of the German Government were now in decline, and it is wonderful how the conception of honour alters in the atmosphere of defeat.

I had sometimes thought, in dealing with Portugal, of how easily in West Africa I could have played a similar game, if I had not been content with my modest salary. I had learned that nothing pleased the services at home more than the addition of a card to their intelligence files. For example there was a report on a Vichy airfield in French Guinea – the agent was illiterate and could not count over ten (the number of his fingers and thumbs); nor did he know any of the points of the compass except the east (he was Mohammedan). A building on the airfield which he said housed an army tank was, I believed from other evidence, a store for old boots. I had emphasised the agent's disqualifications, so that I was surprised when I earned a rating for his report of 'most valuable'. There was no rival organisation in the field, except SOE, with whose reports mine could be compared, and I had no more belief in SOE reports than in my own – they probably came from the same source. Somebody in an office in London had been enabled to add a line or two to an otherwise blank card – that seemed to be the only explanation.

So it was that experiences in my little shack in Freetown recalled in a more comfortable room off St James's gave me the idea of what twelve years later in 1958 became Our Man in Havana.

In their absurdity and especially their apparent veracity, Greene's recollections of spying in Ways of Escape and their fictionalised versions in Our Man in Havana remind me of W. Somerset Maugham's magnificent Ashenden, or, The British Agent (1928). Admittedly there's less humour in the latter, but despite the differences in tone (although less marked differences in the clarity of their prose; Greene and Maugham were both beautifully clear writers), in its own way Our Man in Havana strikes me as being as authentic a (fictional) depiction of spying as Ashenden. And regarding the lighter tenor of Our Man in Havana, as Greene reasons, "It seemed to me that either the Foreign Office or the Intelligence Service had amply merited a little ridicule."

Incidentally, the chapter on Our Man in Havana in Ways of Escape is revealing in ways entirely unrelated to espionage as well, not least when Greene recounts the episode in Cuba when he tried to score some cocaine. And equally incidentally, the copy of Our Man in Havana pictured in this post is a first edition (and first impression) I bought on eBay last year, partly because I wanted to read the book, partly because I love Donald Green's wrapper, but also because this particular copy bears the ownership signature of a Georgina Greene on the front free endpaper. I haven't been able to establish any kind of familial connection with Graham Greene, but Greene did have quite an extended family – he had five brothers and sisters – so you never know. In any case, as a collector of books himself, in particular signed editions, Graham Greene would surely have approved of the purchase.

Bandits by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1987)

According to Elmore Leonard, Bandits (Viking, 1987, dust jacket illustration by James Hussey, jacket design by Bet Ayer), much like his previous novel, Glitz (1985), grew out of an idea for a film. (Glitz had begun life, bizarrely enough, as an Ernest Tidyman screenplay for a Sidney Poitier-starring sequel to In the Heat of the Night.) Leonard told John Williams for Williams's 1991 book on crime fiction and America, Into the Badlands: "Bandits came about when a film producer said, 'How would you like to write the script of a big caper movie: several old pros get together for one last heist,' and I said, 'Sure, but I want to write it as a book first and I want to set it in New Orleans.'"

Leonard's researcher, Gregg Sutter, however, remembers it differently. In an article for the spring 1986 issue of The Armchair Detective ("Advance Man: Researching Elmore Leonard's Novels Part 2"), Sutter explains how Leonard was hired by TV producer David Gerber "to write a cop action-adventure series – with total freedom to select subject matter, characters, and location". The show, Wilder, never made it past the script stage, "But just as Split Images spawned Cat Chaser, Wilder would provide the foundation for Bandits."

Whatever the case, Bandits is a curious entry in Leonard's canon – "perhaps a little over-researched and occasionally uncertain in tone" in Williams's (fair) assessment, certainly one of the writer's more overtly political novels. Starring one Jack Delaney – thief (his speciality is turning over hotel rooms), ex-con, and another in a long line of lovable Leonard rogues (see also Jack Ryan from The Big Bounce and Unknown Man No. 89, Ernest Stickley, Jr. from Swag and Stick, and Jack Foley from Out of Sight and Road Dogs) – the story deals with the struggle between the Nicaraguan Sandanistas and Contras, except as already noted it's set in New Orleans and, this being an Elmore Leonard novel, there's a sizeable score to be taken down too.

"[P]lanning the book, I had to think of something for these guys to steal," Leonard told Williams, "so I read in the paper about money being collected privately for the Contras. And I thought that this money could be sitting in one place and these guys could find out about it so I introduced the ex-nun who enlists them and told them what was going on down in Nicaragua. But I've been asked if I wrote that book to get my political views across. I didn't. It was only something for these guys to steal. Of course you do get politically involved when you have to explain what's going on and you have to show some passion for one side or the other... and of course it's going to be for the former nun against the Contras."

For sure, by the novel's close it's pretty clear where Leonard's sympathies lie, but then the book is all about choosing sides; more than once Jack wonders which side the various protagonists are on, indeed whether he himself is "on the side he thought he was on or on a different side". That Jack eventually reaches the same conclusions as his creator shouldn't come as a huge surprise – his deliberations reflect Leonard's own, the author literally working things out for himself on the page as the novel progresses – but the getting there is engrossing, and as a glimpse of a questing and inquisitive creative mind at work, Bandits has much to recommend it.

Elmore Leonard's next book after Bandits was Touch – at least, his next published book; Touch was actually written in the 1970s. The next book he wrote, however, was Freaky Deaky (1988).

NB: Proffered for this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

Glitz by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1985)

Glitz (1985) was Elmore Leonard's first major bestseller – "the book that put him over the top", as Leonard's researcher Gregg Sutter put it in an article in the spring 1986 issue of The Armchair Detective ("Advance Man: Researching Elmore Leonard's Novels Part 2"). Leonard had had successful novels before, and especially so as his career entered its fourth decade in the 1980s – John Williams, in his 1991 examination of crime fiction and America, Into the Badlands, notes that "Stick [1983]... was the first of his books to hit really big" – but the rapturous reception the writer's twenty-third novel received was of a different order altogether: the American first edition reprinted half a dozen times, no doubt helped along by a glowing review in the New York Times by Stephen King ("Glitz may be the best crime novel of the year").

Why Glitz should have been quite so successful I'm not really sure. It's a good Elmore Leonard novel – which is to say it's by definition a cut above much other crime fiction – but he'd written better ones before: LaBrava (1983), Split Images (1981), City Primeval (1980), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), others besides. (I would include the brilliant Touch, which I read – and loved – last year, but though written in the 1970s, that one wasn't actually published until 1987.) Maybe it was the surface glamour of the thing, from its title to its choice of locales – sunny Puerto Rico and the bright shiny lights of Atlantic City's casinos, a far cry from the urban grit of Leonard's Detroit stories and his laconically sun-drenched but still low rent Florida tales.

Certainly the story is in keeping with previous novels, taking the form of a meandering but deadly game of cat-and-mouse between a typically deranged criminal, in this instance loathsome rapist and murderer Teddy Magyk, and a male lead, convalescing (after a shooting incident) Miami cop Vincent Mora, who's cut from the same cloth as prior Leonard protagonists like Bryan Hurd (Split Images) and Raymond Cruz (City Primeval). Except that Vincent can lay claim to a rather different heritage: he was originally written as a role for actor Sidney Poitier.

As Gregg Sutter explains in his article, Glitz actually began life as a script for a sequel to Poitier's 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. Leonard was hired to work on Shaft author Ernest Tidyman's initial treatment, which had been deemed "too much like the original book and movie", but as the screenplay developed, the notion of the film being a sequel was dropped and Poitier's character became first a Philadelphia cop "drawn into conflict with people in high places", then either an "Atlantic City cop" or "a homicide investigator for Atlantic County", and finally "Vincent Mora, a retired Detroit cop living in San Juan, Puerto Rico". At which point, Poitier realised "the movie was turning into a book", and told Leonard to "Go write a book". Which Leonard did.

None of which, I realise, explains why Glitz became such a huge bestseller, but it's an interesting bit of backstory at least.

The copy of Glitz pictured in this post is a 1985 British Viking first edition of the book – as opposed to the 1985 American Arbor House first edition – which I picked up in Colin Page Antiquarian Books in Brighton last year for a fiver. It was part of a big collection of crime fiction the bookshop had only just bought in and put on the shelves – as mentioned in this Patricia Highsmith post in September – and which also included a British first edition of Elmore Leonard's next novel, which I also bought for a fiver – a novel which like Glitz started life as an idea for a film: Bandits (1987).

NB: Proffered for this Friday's Forgotten Books roundup.

Desmond Cory's Mr. Pilgrim in Pilgrim at the Gate and Pilgrim on the Island (Muller, 1958 / 1959)

I've read just over half a dozen Desmond Cory novels since I first came across the somewhat overlooked thriller writer four years ago – largely entries in his Johnny Fedora spy series – and while I've enjoyed all of them, none have been quite up there with the first Cory I read, the beautifully written, curiously languid Undertow (the twelfth Fedora instalment, and the first in the Feramantov quintet). The early Corys I've tried – Secret Ministry (1951), Intrigue (1954) – have been pacy enough (almost madcap in the case of Secret Ministry), while the later ones – Hammerhead (1963), Feramontov (1966) – have been dense and quite compelling... but they haven't been Undertow – by definition, obviously, but also in terms of literary accomplishment.

And then I read the two novels featuring lesser known Cory protagonist Mr. Pilgrim: Pilgrim at the Gate (Muller, 1958) and Pilgrim on the Island (Muller, 1959). I'd been wanting to try them for a while and actually laid my hands on a very nice, inexpensive first edition of Pilgrim on the Island three years ago, but Pilgrim at the Gate proved rather more elusive in first (as is frequently the case with Cory novels) – until last year fellow Cory enthusiast Chris Hiscocks pointed me in the direction of a cheap ex-library copy in Australia. The copy in question is actually a Shakespeare Head edition – the Australian publishing arm of Frederick Muller – and is missing its front endpaper, but crucially it does still have its splendid S. R. Boldero-designed dust jacket (which has taken its place in Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside Boldero's jacket for Pilgrim on the Island).

For the uninitiated – which I imagine will be most people reading this post – Mr. Pilgrim is a kind of postwar Scarlet Pimpernel, except that rather than smuggling aristocrats out of France he spirits defectors out of East Germany. Or at least that's his stated MO; in fact in the first book, Pilgrim at the Gate, he has a more vengeful purpose in mind in that he's really hunting former Nazis hiding out in the East, appropriating a West Berlin travel agency set up by Nazi war criminal Egon Hoffman, Pilgrim Tours (the name being "A quaint coincidence," as Pilgrim puts it shortly before killing Hoffman) in order to facilitate this highly personal mission (Pilgrim is a concentration camp survivor).

The adventure which follows is absorbing enough, but the best things about the book are Pilgrim himself – who, by dint of his palpable absence throughout most of the novel, takes on an almost mythic countenance – and the occasional philosophical jousts – verbal and physical – he engages in when he does appear. One discussion in particular, about the German civilian population's acceptance of Nazism and how totalitarian regimes thrive on innocence, is fascinating:

"Innocence demands a closed system; demands laws it doesn't have to question. Communism is an excellent answer. Or Catholicism. Or Nazism. That's the whole point. You can accept any of these, if you accept innocence as the inevitable lot of mankind."

"Wouldn't a better word be... ignorance?"

"Oh no. Ignorance is merely lack of knowledge. But innocence implies the acceptance of a belief to the exclusion of all others; it's a lack of understanding."

Trudy took a deep breath. "The alternative, though, is not to believe in anything. To treat life purely as a question."

"Life is a question," said Mr. Pilgrim. "Innocence won't accept that awful fact. And that's why innocence is dangerous."

These philosophical and political discourses continue in the second novel, Pilgrim on the Island, which deals with Mr. Pilgrim's efforts to extract East German Under-Minister of Propaganda Otto Berendt (genuinely extract in this instance, rather than assassinate) and which is an even better book than its forbear: engrossing, deeply felt and on a literary par, I believe, with Undertow. Here, though, the subject is invariably Communism:

"Communism will succeed, though, in spite of everything you and your friends can do."

Mr. Pilgrim shrugged. "We're not so important as you suppose. Communism will succeed if the people find it satisfactory; and if they don't, it won't."

"They do find it satisfactory."

"I'm one of them," said Mr. Pilgrim. "And I don't."

Just as compelling are the political manoeuvrings Berendt becomes embroiled in as his opponents move against him – one extended sequence in a Committee meeting where Berendt realises the game is up is utterly gripping – and the practical manoeuvrings Mr. Pilgrim engages in as he tries to spirit Berendt away – whilst also simultaneously using him to identify the instigators of the coup. That the thing culminates in a Mexican standoff, with subterfuges uncovered, motives laid bare and guns pointed, is merely the delicious icing on what is by any standards an excellent – and lovingly baked – slice of espionage.

Linked in Patricia Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Books round-up, 5/2/16.

The Ten Best Books I Read in 2015

For this, my final post of the year, I present the ten best books I read in 2015. As has been the case with every one of my year-end books top tens since I started assembling such things six years ago, barely any of the books in this year's top ten were actually published this year – in fact just one, by an author who in 2013's top ten was the sole representative of that year's new publishing too – and so this post will as usual be of absolutely no use to anyone in discerning the prevailing trends in publishing over the past twelve months. But it may be of some use in discerning the prospective trends on Existential Ennui over the coming months, in as much as I've yet to get round to reviewing just under half of the books in this top ten – nor a good number of the books in my big long list of the books I read in 2015, from whence this top ten is drawn – and so whatever prolix piffle I eventually manage to cobble together about them may well form the substance of at least some of Existential Ennui in 2016.

Unless of course I decide not to blog about any of them. Or indeed blog at all. Merry Christmas, and a happy new year!

10. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1958)

Informed by Graham Greene's experiences working for the Secret Service during the war, Our Man in Havana may be a fairly frothy confection (the fate of poor Dr. Hasselbacher aside) but it still effectively skewers what Greene perceived as the credulity of British Intelligence. "It seemed to me that either the Foreign Office or the Intelligence Service had amply merited a little ridicule," he wrote of the novel in Ways of Escape. Speaking of which...

9. Ways of Escape by Graham Greene (Bodley Head, 1980)

Part autobiography, part travelogue, Greene's book-by-book saunter down memory lane is not only illuminating as to the origins of many of his novels, short stories and plays (the background to, and inspiration for, The Quiet American, for example, is extensive, incorporating diary entries) but frequently arresting and eye-opening too, not least when he discusses his fondness for opium, marijuana and cocaine.

8. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Picador, 2014)

I noted in my top ten of the best graphic novels I read in 2015 that I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic dystopias, and Station Eleven is a fine example of the sub-genre – elegantly written, strangely uplifting and with a fascinating and compelling internal mythology (as evidenced by the one-page Dr. Eleven comic book insert in my copy of the first edition).

7. The Holm Oaks by P. M. Hubbard (Joseph, 1965)

In my review of The Holm Oaks I ventured that it "might be the quintessential Hubbard novel", and further suggested that "the novel could almost be seen as a prototypical eco thriller". True to form I neglected to say whether it's any good or not, but its appearance in this top ten should offer some guidance there.

6. Eleven by Patricia Highsmith (Heinemann, 1970)

Graham Greene – who, as is becoming clear, features heavily in this top ten (to paraphrase New Order, everything went Greene for me this year) – wrote in his foreword to Eleven that Highsmith in her short stories "is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader, and how admirably and with what field-craft she hunts us down". Quite so.

= 5. private i / Foreign Exchange by Jimmy Sangster (Triton, 1967 / 1968)

I think Hammer Horror-meister Jimmy Sangster's two spy/crime thrillers starring ex-British Intelligence operative turned private investigator John Smith might have been the most purely enjoyable novels I read in 2015 – "kind of early le Carré crossed with Len Deighton's unnamed working class secret agent and with a dash of Adam Hall's Quiller mixed in for good measure", as I put it in my review.

4. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday, 2015)

A companion novel to Life After Life, A God in Ruins is as evocative in its own way of life during wartime as Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear (about which more shortly); but it's also a beautiful – and beautifully written – meditation on the big stuff of existence: love, death, family, chance, choice.

3. Carol by Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury, 1990)

"If [Todd] Haynes's film brings [Carol] and Highsmith to a new audience, so much the better, because Carol deserves to be widely read, especially by those who might otherwise dismiss Highsmith as a crime writer," I wrote in my review, adding that "it's recognisably the work of the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), This Sweet Sickness (1960) and The Cry of the Owl (1962), and as good in its own way as any of those novels". Still haven't seen the blummin' film yet though.

2. Touch by Elmore Leonard (Viking, 1988)

I was surprised by how great Touch was; it's such an overlooked novel in Leonard's backlist that I wasn't expecting it to be up there with the likes of The Big Bounce (1969), Unknown Man No. 89 (1977), Split Images (1981), Stick (1983) or LaBrava (1983). But it really is that good, boasting among its scenes "a climactic, brilliant, farcical TV interview conducted by a rictus grinning hairpiece-bedecked towering shit of a host which is about the best sequence I've read in a Leonard novel", as I put it in my review.

1. The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene (Heinemann, 1946/1960)

When I reviewed The Ministry of Fear in July I praised the novel's "unexpected depth" and Greene's "vivid evocation of London during the Blitz, penned while the bombs were falling"; I highlighted the "undercurrent of pain and suffering which weaves through the story" and the themes of "the spirit of adventure and the loss of innocence" that inform the narrative; and I stated in closing "that The Ministry of Fear is the best of Greene's novels that I've read... and by far the best book that I've read this year". Couldn't have put it better myself.

The Ten Best Graphic Novels and Comics I Read in 2015

Around this time of year, for the past six years, I've posted a top ten of the best books I read that calendar year. Given that the vast majority of the books I read in any given year were first published decades prior to that year – I am, after all, a collector of old books – it's a supremely pointless and arbitrary exercise, of no use to anyone in discerning which books actually published that year were any cop; but it's become something of a tradition, and so I persist with it even in the face of widespread indifference. (2015's iteration will be along shortly, as if anyone gives two hoots.) However, this year I wound up reading more graphic novels than is usually the case; and since a lot of those graphic novels were published in the last year or two, and I continue to read a reasonable number of comic book series as well, it struck me that this year I was in a position to proffer an additional top ten, one with slightly more relevance to at least one sector of contemporary publishing.

Hence this top ten of the best graphic novels and comics I read in 2015 (drawn from these big long lists of everything I read in 2015). I make no great claims for it being representative of the general thrust of comics and graphic novels in 2015; apart from anything else, half of the graphic novels I've picked were published in 2014. But it is at least in touch with prevailing trends and tastes in comics (unlike my best books top tens, which tend to be in touch with little other than my whims), and so might prove diverting for anyone with an interest in such things.

10. Ruins by Peter Kuper (SelfMadeHero, 2015)

Laced with autobiographical elements, Kuper's handsome travelogue is revealing on the subject of Mexico – its recent past and history, its culture, cuisine and, yes, invertebrates – and wise on the joys, revelations and tragedies that can either strengthen a relationship or rend it asunder.

9. Black River by Josh Simmons (Fantagraphics, 2015)

I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic dystopias, but Jesus this was bleak, even by the standards of the sub-genre. A band of women and a lone man roam the eviscerated wastelands of North America, their destination hazy, their only certainty that violence and death awaits them. "I'm scared all the time," mutters the lone bloke at one point. Reading this, I knew exactly how he felt.

8. Megahex by Simon Hanselmann (Fantagraphics, 2014)

I wondered back in February whether Megahex was perhaps one of the best graphic novels of 2014 – but since I didn't get round to reading it until this year, it's now one of my best graphic novels of 2015.

7. Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoet (D&Q, 2014)

Another one from 2014, and another one that for many folk – including J. Caleb Mozzocco and Brian K. Vaughan – was among the very best graphic novels of last year. I liked it a lot too when I read it earlier this year. As gorgeous and unsettling as its title suggests.

6. Lazarus by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark (Image, 2015)

What was that about being a sucker for dystopias...? Rucka and Lark's vision of a world suffering under the tyrannical yoke of untrammelled capitalism remains to my mind the sharpest – and most terrifyingly plausible – vision of the future currently being published in comics form.

5. East of West by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta (Image, 2015)

Mind you, Lazarus has stiff competition in the serialised dystopia stakes in the shape of East of West. Month by month it's a toss-up as to which is my favourite of the two, but on balance Hickman and Dragotta's machiavellian, ravishing, deeply depressing take on the end times just about edges it. I think.

4. Sky in Stereo by Mardou (Revival House, 2015)

I wrote about Sky in Stereo, Mardou's quietly magnificent fictionalised memoir, in 2012 and 2014 when bits of it were published as minicomix, but its publication this year as a graphic novel – in expanded form – affords me the opportunity to include it in my ten best of 2015 too. Hurrah.

3. Avengers / New Avengers / Secret Wars by Jonathan Hickman, Stefano Caselli, Mike Deodato, Kev Walker and Esad Ribic (Marvel, 2015)

Hickman and co.'s sprawling, enthralling, befuddling Avengers/New Avengers epic culminated in nothing less than the demise of the entire Marvel multiverse, with Secret Wars acting as a by-turns brilliant and maddening extended coda. The perfect jumping off point for weary Marvel fanboys.

2. It Never Happened Again / Haunter / New Construction by Sam Alden (Uncivilized / Study Group, 2014–2015)

A bit of a cheat, I suppose, picking three books by Sam Alden instead of one; but I bought and read all three of these this year and they're all, in their own idiosyncratic ways, superb, especially the extraordinary and troubling pair of stories in Alden's latest offering, New Construction.

1. Beauty by Kerascoet and Hubert​ (NBM, 2014)

Rich, rewarding, arresting: those were the kinds of words I used to describe Beauty when I wrote about it back in April, and my opinion hasn't altered since. In fact fuck it: I might as well go the whole hog and quote myself: "The story of a peasant girl who gets more than she bargained for when she's granted exceptional beauty, and set against a backdrop of grandeur, squalor and the changing seasons, [Beauty] shows how man's basest desires cause wars to be fought and kingdoms to fall. So it goes."