On Knowing which Book to Write

A week on and the evenings are growing softer and the lights from the cafes and the shops are spilling out on to the pavements when I come home late-ish from the library. Walking down our local high street I pass the Polish drinking caf; then a tiny Italian restaurant which every summer comes to life and spills out onto the pavements; a Greek taverna and bakery; a restaurant serving spicy food with a Caribbean feel; and a cafe, open from early morning til tea time where the kids behind the counter are tall and lanky and serve you with sweet smiles. We’ve lived here for a while and these streets feel like home.

Meanwhile my book is back from the typesetters and has been proofread, the book jacket is designed and I have had my first meeting with the publicists, all of which means that the book is no longer my private obsession but a team project, which is a lovely feeling.

(My book is called ‘The Years of the Wizard’, it’s being published by Duckworth on 9th October 2025 and it’s about the history of Renaissance magic.)

And so people are starting to ask me, How did you know which book you wanted to write? Which is a very good question.

Because on a good day, with a glass of wine in my hand, I can think of endless books that I might want to write. But that’s all daydreaming and most of these ideas slip out of my head as fast as they get into it. Instead I have learnt to wait for the other books, the few that endure in my imagination, long outlasting the ups and downs of my life, and thus demanding to be written. These are the books that I have learnt to focus on, the books that endure in my imagination until I start to write them down, whereupon somehow they seem to write themselves. (Well, not exactly but sort of.)

So where do they come from, these ideas that endure? I can only tell you that it feels as if they come from deep down in my subconscious and the deeper their roots the more likely they are to endure. (Also, the more likely they are to turn out to be good but that’s the subject for another post.) And so I have learnt to wait, to see if a book idea takes root. As J.G.Ballard said, Nurture your obsessions. You will need them. And he was right.

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But there’s something else as well. I talk of book ideas as obsessions but the truth is that I write best when I don’t try too hard and when I feel free in my head. I also have a very contrary brain and the more determined I am to write another book the more likely my subconscious is to resist it. (In fact I once became so determined to write a book and get it published and make some money and prove to the world that I could do it, that I spooked myself and couldn’t write at all for fifteen years.) And so for me the best way to ensure that I will write another book is to approach the project in a sideways, somehow playful way, by telling myself that it’s a free world and that I don’t have to write another book if I don’t want to. Which pretty much guarantees that I will.

So here I am, thinking about another book (well, maybe) in some impossible combination of obsessed but playful.

All that said, it is difficult even now for me to figure out quite why the history of magic (which is the subject of my coming book) so captured my imagination, except that it is such a good story and full of extraordinary characters.

Meanwhile I have been reading Kevin Barry’s book, ‘The Heart in Winter’, which tells the story of two lovers who abscond to the badlands of America in the 1890’s and are chased by gunmen hired by the ex-husband of one of the lovers. It’s not only lyrical and emotional, it’s also beautifully constructed with a narrative swerve on the last page that fills me with admiration. (I had one of those ‘Oh, that’s so clever, I wish I had thought of that’ moments.) It’s the best book I’ve read in ages.

(As for the pic above, it is from the Tarot exhibition at the Warburg Library which is just finishing as I write this. Tarot is part of the strange story of magic. This particular image is from a Tarot pack designed by Frieda Harris, working with Aleister Crowley, during WW2.)

See you next week.

Rachel

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