A.L. Kennedy on how to write a novel in 4 steps

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How to write a novel in 4 steps

Serious Sweet

Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize: a topical London love story from the brilliant, prize-winning A. L. Kennedy

Kennedy tenderly anatomised London and loneliness in Serious Sweet.

So beautiful that it makes your head hurt.

Serious Sweet is a magnificent novel, showing Kennedy at the very top of her game. Ambitious in scope, daring in execution, full of dazzling apercus and dark comedy… It is a tale of redemption, as serious and as sweet as you could wish for.

In equal measures, funny, sad and addictive… The opening pages had me holding my breath in fear and anticipation… Capturing the relentless hustle of London life to perfection.

A. L. Kennedy shakes her city until the right atoms collide. She stands back to give a picture of the whole of London on one day, and then suddenly swoops down to pick up a tiny detail.

Deeply affecting... Kennedy strips her characters emotionally bare… Serious Sweet portrays intense lives of quiet desperation: it is a novel about hope and muted courage and, at the end of the day, a very tentatively experienced optimism.

A. L. Kennedy's eighth novel is a profoundly moving, often funny, and at points rending depiction of two good people. Serious Sweet is about the heroism of decency; albeit damaged decency... Kennedy is not one of our finest writers simply because of the quality of her prose: she is because of the moral profundity of her work.

This is a bold, cinematic novel... Parts of it are terrifically funny.

Her flair for describing feelings and relationships makes this an engaging window into the messy minds of Londoners and her commentary on the city rings true.

Determinedly and impressively intellectual… A novel of ideas that is deft enough never to be didactic because it asks more question than it answers.

This is an author with a proven ability to see – truly see – and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page.

[Like] Sleepless in Seattle, respun by James Joyce, and set within a London on the precipice of Brexit.

Kennedy is never less than illuminating.

[Kennedy is] witty, sharp, almost too intelligent and a bit provocative.

An uplifting tale of the triumph of niceness over nastiness.

A writer of exquisite precision… A public novel, angrily political… Expressing her idea of a writer’s social responsibility so eloquently… Well-suited to Kennedy’s talent and her characteristically oblique and original way of seeing the world.

What sets this novel apart is Kennedy’s physical and emotional sensitivity to both solitude and tenderness.

Absorbing… Serious without being solemn, sweet without being sickly, it’s an elegant tale about the unexpected places where kindness and sympathy can flourish and deepen.

Kennedy’s comedy is ruthlessly observed – an anti-romance that warms into something moving and profound. It’s also a brilliant portrait of city living.

Two lonely people go about their day in London in this typically Kennedian and utterly wonderful novel… but they find their way towards each other in an agonising love story that’s all about morality and decency in a careless world… Kennedy is a stand-up comedian, and observational comedy runs through this novel in interior monologues that are heartbreakingly familiar and laugh-out-loud sad. Her sentences are some of the best in modern fiction (there’s a springer spaniel called Hector with “black, bewildered ears… [that] made him look as if he’d recently heard dreadful news and still hadn’t adjusted.”) and reading her prose is like eating those fizzy sweets that are both sweet and sour make you wince at the back of your mouth – then go back for more… It’s gorgeous.

Consistently raw and powerful… emotionally exhausting… But there’s a lot to be said for a novel which sets so much store by “affection and tenderness”, and in which the emotional peaks and the possibilities of redemption and renewal are marked by the simple holding of hands.

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 
 
Jon is 59 and divorced: a senior civil servant in Westminster who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work, he is a good man in a bad world. 
 
Meg is a bankrupt accountant – two words you don’t want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your CV. Living on Telegraph Hill, she can see London unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is safety. 
 
As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London – passing through 24 hours that will change them both for ever – they tell a very unusual, unbearably moving love story.

Doctor Who: The Drosten’s Curse

The brilliant Doctor Who novel by award-winning novelist A.L.Kennedy - now in paperback.

Isn’t life terrible? Isn’t it all going to end in tears? Won’t it be good to just give up and let something else run my mind, my life? 
 
 Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word. 
 
 
Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers' Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. 
 
 
Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up…

Paradise

The breakout novel by one of Scotland's best novelists – brave, inventive and brilliant. A.L. Kennedy on top form

A brave and uncompromising book that lingers in the mind, Paradise is A.L. Kennedy on top form

This is a narrative that will not let the reader go - One of the most linguistically inventive and captivating British writers of the age

The book sings its encapsulated pain with the effervescent energy of laughter

Beautifully written...Her sharpest vision yet

One of Britain's most iconoclastic and fiercely independent talents, a writer who repeatedly tests our expectations... Compelling, even consuming

A writer of great power and subtlety, a specialist chronicler of depression... alcohol addiction, yearning and loss

Every sentence of Kennedy's fluid prose is to be savoured... An unflinching book, elevated by the sublime quality of Kennedy's writing. Lacerating comedy is pitted against passages of sheer beauty

Kennedy's lyrical evocation of the mind of an alcoholic draws on, and slyly subverts, a long distinguished tradition of hard-drinking narratives in Scottish literature, from Alasdair Gray to Irvine Welsh

In Paradise, A.L Kennedy weaves her word magic around one woman's determined embrace of alcohol

Almost forty and with nothing to show for it, Hannah Luckraft is starting to realise that her lifestyle is not sustainable. Her soul is unwell, her family is wounded, her friends are odd, her body is unreliable and her drinking is out of control. Robert, a dissolute dentist, appears to offer a love she can understand, but he may only be one more symptom of her problem. From Scotland to Dublin, from London to Montreal, to Budapest and onwards, Hannah travels in search of the ultimate altered state – her paradise.

A 4th Doctor novel

Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse

An unabridged reading of a brand new 4th Doctor novel by A.L. Kennedy.

A.L. Kennedy (Author) A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

An original novel by A.L. Kennedy featuring the Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker in the BBC TV series. 
 
Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. 
 
It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are 
thinking, without anyone saying a word. Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers’ Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction. 
 
Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up...

All the Rage

A dozen stories: a dozen ways of looking at love, or the lack of love. Over five previous collections, A. L. Kennedy has shown herself to be a master of the short form, with a perfect way with sentences and a voice so distinct as to be instantly recognisable.

One of the most consistently dazzling writers of her generation... Kennedy's stories are a little like love: no matter how many times they break your heart, you still come back for more. This collection proves, once again, that it is always worth it.

Kennedy is brilliantly, painfully funny about the fault-lines and disaster zones of the typical relationship

This book celebrates love like a hungry dog celebrates the corpse of a rabbit... Kennedy is, if you like, the Anti-Cartland... Magnificently bleak.

It is Kennedy’s portrayal of the difficulty, if not seeming impossibility, of connecting with other people that makes these stories so moving… Kennedy’s disjointed, angular style and weird, displaced atmospherics really work

A.L. Kennedy's masterful new collection... Stories appear to roam chaotically, like the mind, but of course they are neat, perfect messes.

The book is filled with lyrical beauty, wry humour and acute observation, imbued by a willingness to dig deep and give voice to the reader’s rawest emotions. All the Rage is an outstanding collection, full of stories to be savoured.

[Kennedy] is the god of her own godless world. Her prose moves in more mysterious ways than mere comprehension will allow.

A satisfying diversity of experience and insight.

Full of moments of risk, which Kennedy's characters handle self-consciously and with care... She strings lyrical sentences together effortlessly.

Beautifully crafted... It would be impossible not to admire these stories.

Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thought and holds them palm-up, naked, there for our observation and evaluation. Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear cut and yet capable of great tenderness.

Full of heartache and the ways in which we hurt each other, and ourselves... Fans of Kennedy's quirky expressionism won't be disappointed.

Evidence that, at her best, there’s no-one to touch Kennedy.

This is a sure-footed and intelligently organized collection. These small pieces encompass an extensive emotional territory

An arresting collection that blends poetic imagery, raw emotion and cerebral insight

The dazzling new collection from the Costa Prize-winning author of Day and The Blue Book. 
 
She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best. 
 
A husband and wife wait for a train as their relationship unspools silently around them. A woman contemplates the idea of her lover dying as she queues in a bank. An almost impossibly uncomfortably lunch culminates in a passionate kiss. In this dazzling collection of stories lies the battlefield of the heart, where characters who have suffered somehow emerge – haltingly, awkwardly – into the astonishment of intimacy.

Doctor Who: Time Trips (The Collection)

Groundbreaking Doctor Who adventures by some of the most respected writers in the Universe - now available in one volume

Cecelia Ahern (Author) Before embarking on her writing career, Cecelia Ahern completed a degree in journalism and media studies. Her first novel, PS, I Love You was one of the biggest-selling debut novels of 2004 and a number one bestseller. Her successive bestselling novels are Where Rainbows End, If You Could See Me Now, A Place Called Here, Thanks for the Memories, The Gift, The Book of Tomorrow, The Time of My Life, One Hundred Names, How to Fall in Love and The Year I Met You and have collectively sold 23 million copies. PS, I Love You became an International box office success, starring Hilary Swank and Gerard Butler, and Where Rainbows End was adapted to Love, Rosie starring Lily Collins and Sam Claflin. Cecelia has also co-created the hit American television comedy series Samantha Who? Jake Arnott (Author) Jake Arnott was born in 1961, and lives in London. His debut novel, The Long Firm, was published in 1999 to huge public and critical acclaim. He Kills Coppers, Truecrime, Johnny Come Home, The Devil’s Paintbrush and The House of Rumour have followed to equal acclaim. Both The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers have been made into widely praised TV dramas. Trudi Canavan (Author) Trudi Canavan lives in Melbourne, Australia. She has been making up stories about people and places that don’t exist for as long as she can remember. While working as a freelance illustrator and designer she wrote the bestselling Black Magician Trilogy, which was published in 2001-3 and was named an ‘Evergreen’ by The Bookseller in 2010. The Magician’s Apprentice, a prequel to the trilogy, won the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel in 2009 and the final of the sequel trilogy, The Traitor Queen, reached #1 on the UK Times Hardback bestseller list in 2011. Jenny T Colgan (Author) Jenny T. Colgan has written numerous bestselling novels as Jenny Colgan, which have sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide, been translated into 25 languages, and won both the Melissa Nathan Award and Romantic Novel of the Year 2013. Aged 11, she won a national fan competition to meet the Doctor and was mistaken for a boy by Peter Davison. Stella Duffy (Author) Stella Duffy has written thirteen novels, over fifty short stories, and ten plays. She has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year and twice won the CWA Short Story Dagger. She adapted her novel State of Happiness for film with Zentropa/Fiesta, HBO have optioned her Theodora novels for a TV mini-series. She is also a theatre-maker; Associate Artist with Improbable, Artistic Director of Shaky Isles Theatre. Stella is the Co-Director of Fun Palaces, the campaign for wider cultural engagement for all. Nick Harkaway (Author) Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall in 1972. Author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker and Tigerman, he lives in London with his wife and two children. Joanne Harris (Author) Joanne Harris is the internationally renowned and award-winning author of over twenty novels. Her Whitbread-shortlisted novel Chocolat was adapted to the screen, starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. She is the author of several other bestsellers, including The Lollipop Shoes, Peaches for Monsieur Le Curé and The Strawberry Thief. She has also written acclaimed novels in such diverse genres as fantasy based on Norse myth (Runemarks, Runelight, The Gospel of Loki), and the Malbry cycle of dark psychological thrillers (Gentlemen &amp; Players, Blueeyedboy, and Different Class). 
 
Born in Barnsley, of an English father and a French mother, she spent fifteen years as a teacher before (somewhat reluctantly) becoming a full-time writer. In 2013, she was awarded an MBE, and in 2022 an OBE. She lives in Yorkshire, plays bass and flute in a band first formed when she was sixteen, and works in a shed in her garden. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and served for four years as Chair of the Society of Authors. She also has a form of synaesthesia which enables her to smell colours. Red, she says, smells of chocolate. A.L. Kennedy (Author) A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

Time Trips is a unique and beautifully illustrated collection of Doctor Who adventures from bestselling and award-winning writers including Joanne Harris, Trudi Canavan, Nick Harkaway, A.L. Kennedy and more. Taking you from ancient Alexandria to nameless planets in the far future, these tales are at turns funny, frightening, moving and thought-provoking – short stories that are bigger on the inside. 
 
Time Trips includes: 
 
The Anti-Hero (featuring the Second Doctor) by Stella Duffy 
 
Salt of the Earth (featuring the Third Doctor) by Trudi Canavan 
 
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Time Traveller (featuring the Third Doctor) by Joanne Harris 
 
The Death Pit (featuring the Fourth Doctor) by A.L. Kennedy 
 
A Handful of Stardust (featuring the Sixth Doctor) by Jake Arnott 
 
The Bog Warrior (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Cecelia Ahern 
 
Keeping Up with the Joneses (featuring the Tenth Doctor) by Nick Harkaway 
 
Into the Nowhere (featuring the Eleventh Doctor) by Jenny T. Colgan

A.L. Kennedy

Quite astonishing... A masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form.

AL Kennedy’s latest collection of wise, funny, human short stories came at just the right time. I...emerged feeling better about the world than I had in a while... Kennedy is brilliant at subtly shifting the ground of her stories, gently rotating your perspective so that by the end you’re facing in quite the other direction, not sure of how you got there… [There is] waspish intelligence at work here.

Striking, expertly constructed… Kennedy’s exquisite blending of the limits of pain and courage recall Primo Levi.

AL Kennedy’s seventh collection of stories is a quite astonishing…clear-eyed…masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form; comical, plangent… Words indeed for our times.

Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading.

Connoisseurs of short stories that pack an emotional punch will find plenty to admire in this fine new collection.

Each story invites the reader to enter a very particular struggle with characters who not only feel real, but whose aching vulnerability will resonate long after the moment has ended… Formidably insightful, A.L. Kennedy’s latest collection…is a shrewd examination of life’s defining moments.

[The] title and tone of [We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time] fit our current situation like a bespoke suit… Perfectly judged and moving.

From the brilliant AL Kennedy...a collection of unforgettable short stories about ordinary people wrestling with the lives they have been given as the world spins around them.

Every story is a smasher…thrums with contemporary resonance… If you’re looking to survive your time, you could do a lot worse than cling to these stories.

'Kennedy is a superb writer and the canniness of her observation keeps you reading' Sunday Times 
 
Humour, fantasy, rage and despair both help and hinder the protagonists of these stories as they navigate changing circumstances, accumulating losses, moments of comprehension and tenderness. Here is the woman, hoping for a quiet day at the zoo, who finally snaps at a white man's racist tirade and vents years of fury; the micro-celebrity who practises lines for a chat show on which he'll never appear; and the woman who walks out of her honeymoon suite at midnight, perhaps for good. Unsparing in her close examination of human relationships, A. L. Kennedy proves once again why she is regarded as one of our great storytellers. 
 
'Kennedy dissects the small intimacies of inner thoughts... Her prose is typically direct, her sentences clear-cut and yet capable of great tenderness' Observer 
 
'An author with a proven ability to see - truly see - and whose prose can fire like gunshots across the page' New Statesman

We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time

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A.L. Kennedy

Praise for We Are Attempting to Survive Our Time

Quite astonishing... A masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form.

AL Kennedy’s latest collection of wise, funny, human short stories came at just the right time. I...emerged feeling better about the world than I had in a while... Kennedy is brilliant at subtly shifting the ground ...

Striking, expertly constructed… Kennedy’s exquisite blending of the limits of pain and courage recall Primo Levi.

Quite astonishing... A masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form.

AL Kennedy’s latest collection of wise, funny, human short stories came at just the right time. I...emerged feeling better about the world than I had in a while... Kennedy is brilliant at subtly shifting the ground ...

Striking, expertly constructed… Kennedy’s exquisite blending of the limits of pain and courage recall Primo Levi.

Quite astonishing... A masterclass in the possibilities of the short story form.

AL Kennedy’s latest collection of wise, funny, human short stories came at just the right time. I...emerged feeling better about the world than I had in a while... Kennedy is brilliant at subtly shifting the ground ...

Striking, expertly constructed… Kennedy’s exquisite blending of the limits of pain and courage recall Primo Levi.

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