Circle of Magic; Susannah Clarke's Spellbinding Novel has Won Her Membership of Jk Rowling's Lucrative Club

Summary

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AT the beginning of the 1990s, Susannah Clarke started making notes for a story. At the time, she was teaching English to Fiat automobile executives in Turin, and then to equally "sweet and overworked" Basque business types in Bilbao, but she was thinking idly about the English winter, and the picture on a jigsaw puzzle she used to have, which showed two old gentlemen in 19th century wigs, reading books in a huge library.

Clarke thought there might be a novel forming in her head, but Italy and Spain were too sunny to bring it out. So she moved back to England, took a day job as a non-fiction book editor in Cambridge, and wrote her own thing in the grey mornings, and on weekends. In the summer she drew the curtains and put on a sound-effects CD of rain falling. She was still writing when Labour came to power, when the millennium turned, when JK Row-ling published her fifth Harry Potter novel.

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Circle of Magic; Susannah Clarke's Spellbinding Novel has Won Her Membership of Jk Rowling's Lucrative Club

"I'm a bad judge of how long something is going to take me," says Clarke. "And my growing panic was partly about how long it was taking. But the real fear was that I wouldn't be able to finish it. The work ahead of me didn't seem to diminish, but the years behind me were piling up."

She says this from across a long table at the offices of Bloomsbury ...

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