I went to a wine festival a few years ago in a village in south west France and passed this most wonderful shop front.
The shop itself had been closed for some years – or so it seemed – but the faded, beautiful paint on the doors and fascia led into this most marvellous mural.
A thoughtful, serene woman looked back at me. She sat on a flight of stairs, her bare feet pointing at each other in a comfortable, pigeon-toed pose, arms and hands across her knees.
I don’t know who she was but she had the sort of face you felt you’d known for years. A woman with a calm, kind disposition. A friend. In my head, I named her Estelle.
You could share a glass of wine with Estelle outside a laid-back cafe. You could have a moan about something tricky in your life and then both roar with laughter at the sight of a cowboy-hatted passerby dressed in triple denim in a heatwave, trying hard to swagger but looking more a constipated fool than the epitome of cool.
I’ve thought a lot about that woman in the window ever since. When I revisited the village a few weeks ago for another wine festival, I was looking forward to renewing our acquaintance.
Sadly, the shop front is now completely boarded up. The bat above the door has flitted off and Estelle has been erased forever from her staircase perch overlooking the street.
I didn’t take a photo, it was too sad.
I wanted to remember Estelle as she was when we last met.
The title of my new novel, Plashy Fen, came to me in the middle of the night a few years ago.
I wasn’t happy with the working title I’d given it, as who the hell did I think I was, calling it Dylan’s Wake, in a nod to the author of the wonderful Under Milk Wood, which is one of my favourite books.
And anyway, early beta readers told me they thought it was going to be about the funeral party of someone called Dylan.
I’ve been writing a column for The People’s Friend for over a decade now, after the then editor emailed me out of the blue telling me she’d seen my blog, The World From My Window, and would I like to write for the magazine?
She said (and it’s etched in my mind): ‘I think you might just be the writer we’ve been looking for! I like your ability to write with humour about the minutiae of daily life, but with a touch of emotional depth, too.’
So I introduced my village to Friend readers as Lush Places, named after the fictional newspaper column by the hapless and fictional nature writer William Boot, who, through a case of mistaken identity, becomes a war correspondent for The Daily Beast.
Lush Places from Bluebell Hill
Boot is the main character in Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, which was published in 1938. It’s dated now and very politically incorrect but I loved the juxtaposition of a naïve, gentle writer in the cut-and-thrust world of horrid Fleet Street hacks out to make a name for themselves in a forgotten corner of the world.
I was redrafting my latest novel about Lush Places’s seaside sibling when the new village’s name – and book title – came to me during the early hours of the morning.
There is a line in one of Boot’s nature columns – ‘feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ – which has come to signify an affected style when it comes to nature writing.
I guess the the term plashy fen must have stuck with me. It’s become a bit of a personal joke and serves the purpose of making me check my prose style every now to make sure I’m not coming across as a complete jerk.
So that’s the story of how Plashy Fen got its name.
But the characters, well, they’re a different story…
And the person who’s been there five minutes and think they know it all.
In Plashy Fen, all these characters live – not always harmoniously – side by side.
Over the next few weeks, in the run-up to the paperback coming out, I’ll introduce you to some of them.
I’ve been thrilled with the response to the novel so far. Thank you for all your lovely words of support from home and abroad.
But, to be honest, it’s a bit weird because the people who live in Plashy Fen have been in my head for so long I thought everyone else knew them all – and the imagined village- too.
Hopefully, it won’t be long before you get to know them and decide who are your favourites.
And rather a lot of people I’ve been carrying in my head for several years.
Welcome to Plashy Fen.
If you prefer the paperback – and I know most of my readers do – that’s coming out on Michaelmas Day, 29 September. There is a reason for that date, which will soon become clear.
* (This is the Amazon.com link, do a search for Maddie Grigg, Kindle, Plashy Fen in the relevant country’s platform and you should find it.)
There have been some stinkers in my reading material of late, so I’m delighted to share with you two five star reviews for two very different novels.
Books have taken a little bit of a back seat in recent months as I put the finishing touches to my own novel, Plashy Fen, which will be out very soon, and research a narrative non-fiction story about the ancestor I share with that titan of 20th century American literature, Ernest Hemingway.
But it gives me great pleasure to recommend both these novels, which are well worth a read.
This is the most extraordinary book – and a long one for me to find myself completing with great relish.
It’s difficult to summarise the plot but here goes:
After a prologue set in the ancient past, the novel follows three timelines focusing on three characters inexorably linked by a single drop of water.
We have Arthur, who was born and raised in the Victorian slums next to the Thames but possesses an incredible mind. He learns how to decipher ancient texts at the British Museum and becomes obsessed with the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem written in Mesapotamia during the late 2nd millennium BC. He makes it his life’s quest to find the poem’s missing pieces, out in the dusty field.
And then there is Narin, a Yazidi girl living in Turkey in 2014, and Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who lives on a houseboat in London in 2018.
They lead entirely different lives but their stories are intertwined, with the past catching up with them all.
This is such a big concept book, but told intimately through the stories of the three protagonists. Beautifully written -a novel which will stay with me for a long time.
Katherine Mezzacappa is a voracious writer who has a real knack for finding fascinating true stories and characters from the past and turning them into literary gold, as her novel, The Virgin of Florence (2024), demonstrates.
Lucie Dumas was a real person, a young woman we would never have known were it not for Mezzacappa’s meticulous research and imaginative storytelling skills.
And it’s a good job, because Lucie’s story is important, particularly in an age where misogyny is still alive and well and living like a king, even in 2026.
Lucie is a ‘fallen’ woman, cast out of her native France and separated from the child she bore to become a prostitute in 19th century London.
She encounters many hardships and is then ‘rescued’ by a famous writer, Samuel Butler – to whom she refers as The Monsieur – who ‘keeps’ her in a modest house (with a maid) where she entertains him and other gentleman callers.
Lucie is never a victim but her tale unfolds quietly and with great dignity, a pawn in a world where men take centre stage and women are meant to fit in as they should.
The storytelling and writing are remarkable. I’d gone off historical fiction a bit but Mezzacappa has restored my faith in the genre.
This is a novel which means a great deal -it gives Lucie Dumas a voice and one with which we, the reader, empathise, giving us an unusual and important insight into the place of women in Victorian society.
Maddie Grigg 