My son Tom got married to the lovely Claire this summer. It was a joyful event. Instead of writing my newsletter I made 50 scones and 4 Victoria Sponge cakes for the pre-wedding gathering. lol

My new novel, The Recent Dead, has progressed through copy-edits and proof-reading and is now onto the stage of drafts of cover copy for the not-quite-finalised but really wonderful cover. April 2027 in Canada, no news yet about a UK pub date (gnashes teeth).

In other news, I made good progress with my libretto about the Soviet-era concert pianist Maria Yudina over the summer and autumn and as of this week have sent a working draft to the commissioners. I’ve had expert help from excellent Big Ideas Person Annette Mees on the overall shape and narrative arc. Then last week I was re-introduced to Gerard McBurney by a mutual friend. Gerard is incredibly knowledgable about Russian music and knows people who knew Yudina. It also turned out that Gerard is great pals with Elizabeth Wilson, the cellist who wrote the excellent - and only - biography of Yudina, Playing With Fire, which came out a couple of years ago.

Gerard’s tales about Shostakovich were particularly useful for understanding the life of the composer a little better; Yudina taught Shostakovich when he was thirteen and she was just twenty years old and their lives ran in parallel throughout the Soviet twentieth century. Elizabeth and I talked about Yudina’s singular approach to money; she spent most of her life borrowing money only to give it away.

Elizabeth also helped me to understand the Russian concepts of vranyo – tall tales or inventive fantasies, I’m lying, you know I’m lying, I know you know I’m lying, but I’m going to continue with this lie because it is so entertaining – and baika – myths or legends – and how these two concepts feed into the Russian love of the absurd. So many of the stories told about Yudina turn out to be untrue and Shostakovich himself was great spinner of vranyo: he hated small talk and so made things up to keep himself entertained.

Don’t get me wrong - if this newsletter makes you think I know anything much about Soviet-era music and musicians, I’m guilty of spinning a little vranyo myself. Which is of course most writers’ favourite thing.

As well as Elizabeth’s books about Yudina and Shostakovich, I can recommend Pauline Fairclough’s very readable shortish bio of Shostakovich.

I gave a keynote at Hypertext 2026; I’ve been experimenting with an AI-assisted tool to turn the keynote into a newsletter post but so far the tool and I have produced a screed of enthusiastic nonsense.

Thank you for reading!