On The Pages of the Sea

by Anne Hawk

Today is launch day for a wonderful first novel.

The Pages of the Sea by Anne Hawk.

It’s published by Weatherglass Books, who have put out some other amazing books — Cold New Climate by Isobel Wohl is perhaps my other favourite.

I think this will come to be seen as a really significant debut. It’s a great and loveable novel of childhood, separation, cruelty and curiosity. A book to keep alongside To Kill a Mockingbird and Wide Sargasso Sea and The Bluest Eye.

It tells the story of Wheeler, a very young girl whose mother has left her behind — left her living with two older sisters, three cousins and two aunts — while she travels from the Caribbean to England, to work and make a life. The story is set during the mid-1960s. We stay with Wheeler in her small world — the house, the nearby streets, the school, the port. We live through her bewilderment, her routines, her discoveries.

My involvement with the book goes back a few years.

As it’s now out there, available for you to read, let’s celebrate.

With Anne Hawk at Waterstones Trafalgar Square. Photo credit: Lamorna Ash.

I first met Anne Hawk when I interviewed her — via a grainy Zoom link — for a place on Birkbeck’s Creative Writing MFA.

I’d been looking forward to speaking to her. I was already a fan of her work. Within half a page of that early, different titled version of The Pages of the Sea, I’d known I was reading a real writer — someone whose words felt inevitable, following their own distinctive logic. She knew what a sentence was, and what it could do.

The rest of that 2,000 word sample just confirmed my feeling of excitement and discovery. I’ve only felt similarly about one or two other applications. Usually, I’m looking for potential, not seeing achievement.

But I didn’t offer Anne a place on the MFA.

Well, I did. But I said she really wasn’t best advised to take it up.

Although it was absolutely not what I was supposed to do, I realised, from speaking to her, that what Anne needed wasn’t the teaching and feedback Birkbeck would have offered — she just needed to finish writing the story.

From what I’d read, I felt sure she was already a better writer than many of our graduating students.

And there was something about Anne’s writing voice — a calm, true, private, exacting voice — that made me feel she’d do keeping going on as she had been, without the exposure and competition of a workshop group.

By the end of the interview, I’d offered to help Anne with the novel. When she’d finished some more, I would read that, and give her some notes. She should take her time. Rush was absolutely not what she needed. Take a year. Take three. And then, when the book was ready, I promised to help her to find a publisher. I was sure she’d find one.

That’s what happened.

Neil Griffiths, Anne’s editor at Weatherglass, was taken with the novel just as completely as I was.

The editorial process has been extended and involved. Neil will tell you this is the most complicated work he’s ever done, although the novel couldn’t read any more clearly.

And so all I can do now is hope that you’ll buy, read, share, talk about, reread and delight in The Pages of the Sea.

The audiobook is already available from Spiracle, read by Saffron Coomber. The American edition can be ordered from Biblioasis.