Why great novels don't get noticed now

'Dear Thief’ was one of the best novels published last year. So why haven’t you heard of it? Gaby Wood meets its author, Samantha Harvey

Serious literature: author Samantha Harvey
Serious literature: author Samantha Harvey Credit: Photo: Jason Alden/REX

Last year, when literary fiction seemed to fall either into the category of formal experiment (Ali Smith’s How to Be Both; Will Self’s Shark) or into an essentially 19th-century tradition (Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others; Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North), one book cut through all that by simply being intimate, direct yet oddly mysterious. Last Tuesday, it was longlisted for the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction, a belated flicker of attention for a novel that deserves far more.

Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief was published last September to excellent reviews, and was, to my mind, one of the most beguiling novels of the year. It was the third book by an author whose 2009 debut had won significant prizes and seemed to promise further fame. It was published by Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape, arguably Britain’s most respected editor of literary fiction. It had the marketing and publicity machine of Penguin Random House behind it. Its cover – admittedly a sombre and indistinct affair – carried a blurb from Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, who referred to its “profound beauty”. In The New Yorker, the influential literary critic James Wood singled it out for a sustained hymn of praise, calling it “a beautiful, tentative success, a novel with no interest in conformity”. In short, Dear Thief couldn’t have had more going for it.

But just a few months after its initial hardback publication in the UK last September – and a long way ahead of its paperback publication in autumn 2015 – few people had heard of it, and even fewer could lay their hands on it. In bookshops, it was barely stocked. By last week, it had sold just over 1,000 copies in Britain (compare that with sales of Martin Amis’s books, which generally reach about 25,000).

What happened? The story of Dear Thief is the story of how our best fiction can get lost, and how hard it is for readers to find the books they’ll love.

The novel takes the form of a single letter, written over the course of six months by a 52-year-old woman to her missing childhood friend. At its heart is a theft – the book’s title might almost be seen to stand in place of a first line – which took place 15 years earlier: the theft of the narrator’s husband by her invisible correspondent.

Although this is revealed slowly – it is too painful to address at once – and though the narrator has felt jealousy “whittle [her] down to something dishonourable”, the greater loss turns out to be that of the volatile, unearthly friend, not the husband. Nicholas is still there, occasionally – he comes for dinner and stays over, both their lives dulled by disuse. But Butterfly, as she is known, haunts through her disappearance. When they were girls, she and the narrator used to play a game called “Chair”: in a pitch dark room, one would have to close her eyes and guess whether or not the other had sat down. How could they have lost each other now? The narrator’s relationship with Butterfly is a freighted game of poker, a negotiation with a ghost.

“May I stay a longish while?” Butterfly asks when she turns up on the family’s doorstep, nine years after the women have last seen each other.

“How long is longish?” asks the narrator.

“A decade or two, I’m clean out of money,” comes the reply.

The rest is plain for any reader to see: of course she will live vicariously through them. Of course she will insinuate herself into their marriage. Of course the couple’s baby son will be transfixed by the interloper’s “ragged beauty”.

Because the novel is written in the second person – “In answer to a question you asked a long time ago,” it begins – it gets you in its grip. The reader is instantly implicated in the story: though clearly you are not Butterfly, you are nevertheless somehow thrown into the shape of a character, and into an acquaintance with the narrator that suggests, as if by dim remembrance, that you knew each other once, and well.

Harvey’s language is poetic, in a way that’s brave rather than sentimental, and her intricate observations demand to be dwelled upon. (She has a postgraduate degree in philosophy and speaks about novels as “thought experiments”.)

In terms of temperament, the drama queen is the addressee – an exotic, unknowable woman who is always somehow dying. Yet you infer that the letter-writer is not quite living either: she is stuck in her own drama of defeat. She observes too acutely such things as the fleeting nature of happiness, she flares up from time to time, and she fantasises about violence. “Sometimes I imagine, out of sheer playfulness, that I am writing this as a kind of defence for having murdered and buried you under the patio.”

I meet Harvey in a coffee shop in Soho. She has come up to London from Bath, where she lives and teaches creative writing. As we linger over cake and tea I can’t help being struck by the sense the writer makes of the books: her thought is so vigorous you feel anchored to the spot.

Harvey’s previous two books have had male protagonists: an old man suffering from Alzheimer’s in the case of The Wilderness, and two middle-aged brothers in All is Song. For Dear Thief, she was initially inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, Famous Blue Raincoat, about three people and a betrayal, but more than that she wanted to write about relationships between women, which “often precede and outlive various romantic ones”.

“Common perceptions of female friendships are morning coffees discussing children, bags, periods and agreeing about the misdemeanours of men… mild, soft, nurturing relationships,” she suggests. “In fact, they can be complex, intense (sometimes emotionally violent) rites of passage, give rise to deep jealousy, possessiveness, ardent love, and have the capacity to shape us in ways other relationships don’t. That’s what I wanted to write about – those relationships in their own right, as the love stories themselves, not as side issues in a bigger drama.”

When The Wilderness was published with relative ease, she says, “the serendipity and success of that book tilted my view of what could be expected”. The novel was her MA thesis; it was picked up by an agent and published by Cape. It went on to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Guardian First Book Award, and it won the Betty Trask Award. In the UK, it has sold 24,000 copies in three separate editions.

All is Song had nothing like the same reception; but then, it was a more difficult book, which Harvey herself conceded was “a gamble”. “I kept feeling the impulse to put something more marketable in it, then decided: 'No, I’m going to stick to my guns’,” she said when it was published.

Around that time, Harvey was considered for a couple of prizes, and had strong supporters, but All is Song didn’t quite seem the book to reward. Dear Thief is, without a doubt, stronger and more raw, the book her fans knew she could write. But just when the world should have behaved as if it had been waiting for that very novel to arrive, Harvey’s career seemed to lose momentum.

Her editor Dan Franklin explains, a little despairingly, that “the really difficult thing about her is that she writes serious books, which is not to the modern taste. People like easy-peasy books that slip down without any trouble. How do you have a career in 2015 writing really thoughtful, philosophical books? In a way, the miracle was that The Wilderness worked – not that the other two didn’t.”

And so, Harvey finds herself at the heart of good fiction’s very modern problem. Not so long ago, everyone thought the main threat to publishing was the ebook. But that hasn’t turned out be true: ebooks have been predominantly aimed at commercial fiction, and have, for the most part, worked well. The much greater difficulty, now that bookshops are in decline and newspapers have increasingly little space, is how to tell readers books exist at all. Amazon doesn’t champion anything; Waterstones buys very little upfront and only gets behind a book once it has already shown signs of life. As Tom Weldon, CEO of Penguin Random House UK, tells me, “The challenge in book publishing is not digital. It is how do you get the next great book noticed?”

“I think she’s writing in the most difficult bit of the market,” Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller, says of Harvey, “serious fiction, from a serious-minded publisher.”

Still, I wonder if this talk about the marginality of serious or “difficult” fiction is a little out of date. Last year, Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing won the Goldsmiths Prize – an award invented in order to give prestige to the sorts of books that were generally ignored by mainstream prizes – and then went on to win pretty much everything else. The year before that, Will Self’s quixotically narrated novel Umbrella was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. This year, Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, a complicated idea offered in two flippable parts, has won or nearly won every prize there is. When Faber took on the paperback publication of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, that formidable heir to James Joyce was advertised on the side of double-decker buses. You could argue, then, that the mainstream has moved.

But Jones says sales figures are stacked against that idea: all major publishers turned down McBride’s book initially, and if you’re just looking at the numbers, he suggests, “that was the right decision”. Franklin says “it’s about discoverability”, before adding that the kind of book Harvey writes is unlikely to do well on social media. (That’s debatable; the book recommendations website Goodreads currently carries a large number of excellent peer-to-peer reviews of Dear Thief.) Really, he explains, only a prize or a shortlisting will “break the deadlock”.

In the US, Dear Thief was published by a promising, high-end, multi-platform publisher called Atavist Books. It was founded by media and movie moguls Barry Diller and Scott Rudin, alongside esteemed British literary publisher Frances Coady. Its early publications included works by Karen Russell, Hari Kunzru and Kamila Shamsie. But just after Dear Thief came out, Atavist Books went under. The novel wasn’t promoted, and was barely distributed. The rights were taken over by a traditional publisher, which has yet to bring out its own edition.

As a result, Harvey has found herself having to consider why she writes at all. “Being published is a bit like being entered into a race you don’t even want to run,” she tells me, “but, once running, can’t help but not want to lose. There’s lots of anxiety about your position in that race. Hence my decision to forget the race and simply write, regardless. Even regardless of whether or not I’m published and have readers – that the desire to write (not to out-write others) is all that matters, to keep integrity, to enjoy it.”

“She doesn’t do the lowest common denominator,” says Franklin. “It’s Virginia Woolf, not Margaret Mitchell. She’s writing proper literature, and it’s really difficult to sell.”

So what do you do? I ask him. After all Franklin, who is about to retire, publishes Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan… He has some knowledge of bringing out “proper literature”.

“You publish it and you pray,” he says. “I’ve always believed that if someone’s good enough, eventually they’ll get discovered. And I don’t think it’ll be in one’s lifetime, necessarily.”

My advice would be not to wait until the next lifetime to discover this generation’s Virginia Woolf. The time to read Dear Thief is now.

Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey is published by Cape (£16.99).

To order your copy for just £13.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk