Linda Grant | an introduction to China Court by Rumer Godden
Linda Grant
Photo © Charlie Hopkinson
It has been utterly wonderful, and a total pleasure, to work with acclaimed novelist Linda Grant on our forthcoming winter publication: a brand new edition of Rumer Godden's China Court.
Every Manderley Press publication features an introduction by a contemporary author with connections to the place at the heart of each book. In this case - Cornwall.
Linda Grant has been one of my favourite authors ever since an enthusiastic customer in the bookshop I worked in pressed a copy of The Cast Iron Shore into my hands and insisted I read it immediately. I stayed up all night devouring this wonderful novel, and I still have the very same book - now much-loved and rather dog-eared, but stunning still with its glamorous pink cover.
So when I discovered that Linda Grant has been visiting Cornwall for nearly thirty years and has a special love for the china clay port of Fowey (which is not too far from St Austell, where China Court was set), everything slotted beautifully into place.
Fowey has provided literary inspiration to many authors, including Kenneth Grahame, Leo Walmsley and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (who greatly influenced Helene Hanff, whose book Letter from New York we have just re-published!).
But it is Daphne Du Maurier who is most famously linked to this wonderful Cornish town - and her home of Menabilly - which became the setting for several of her novels: most notably Rebecca, in which Menabilly became Manderley.
Du Maurier … Menabilly … Manderley … Fowey … Quiller-Couch … Hanff … Godden … Grant: all literary dots, which when joined, provided the inspiration for Manderley Press, and then as if by magic, our sixth publication: China Court.
Anyway, I digress - Linda has crafted a superb introduction to China Court and I can't wait to share it with you.
She will also be joining us for a very special event at Lamb House in Rye on 8th December to celebrate the house where Rumer Godden lived for a time, and the brand new edition of China Court too. I'll be posting more information soon - and if you'd like to be the first to hear, make sure to sign up for our newsletter (see below). In the meantime, save the date!
Linda Grant was born in Liverpool, England in 1951, and read English at the University of York. Her first novel, entitled The Cast Iron Shore (1996), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. Her second, When I Lived in Modern Times (2000), won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and The Clothes on Their Backs (2008) was shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Linda’s seventh novel The Dark Circle (2016) was shortlisted for the Bailey’s Prize and the Wingate Prize, A Stranger City (2019) won the Wingate Literary prize for 2020, and her latest novel, The Story of the Forest, was published to international acclaim in 2023. Linda has lived in London since 1984.