Notes From the Road: Eleven Cities, One Novel
The tour ended on a Thursday in a bookshop basement with a broken radiator and about ninety people who had all come out in the rain. It was the best night of the six weeks and it was also the smallest room. I have stopped trying to predict this.
What follows is not a diary. It is the handful of things I actually learned, mostly by doing them wrong in the first three cities.
Read the same passage every night
I brought four options and rotated them for a week, which was a mistake. Rotating means you never learn the passage; you only ever perform it at the level of a second rehearsal.
From city four onward I read the same eight minutes every single night — the scene at the surveyor’s office — and by the end I knew exactly where the laugh was, where the room went still, and which sentence I could afford to slow down on. That knowledge is only available through repetition. The tenth reading is a different art form from the first.
The question you dread is the one to prepare
Every tour has a question that follows you. This year’s was some version of isn’t fantasy just escapism?, usually asked kindly and occasionally not.
I answered it badly in Bristol, adequately in Leeds, and by Glasgow I had something I actually believed:
Escape is not the opposite of engagement. You have to leave a place to see its shape. Every reader who has ever come back from a book has come back carrying something.
Prepare that answer in advance. You will be asked it while tired, in front of strangers, with a microphone that squeals.
Practical things nobody tells you
- Eat before the event, not after. The restaurants are shut and the adrenaline lies to you about hunger.
- Sign standing up. Two hours seated is a back injury.
- Bring your own pen. Bring three. They vanish.
- Ask the bookseller how they want the stock signed before the queue forms — title page, flat, no personalization unless asked.
- Learn one fact about each town that is not from the internet. Ask the person who drove you.
On the audience
The composition surprised me every time. I had assumed the rooms would be readers of the previous book. Perhaps a third were. Another third had read nothing of mine and had come because it was Tuesday and this is what they do on Tuesdays, which is the most heartening fact about independent bookshops I know.
The last third were writers. They ask the best questions, they buy the most books, and they stay behind. If you are touring, the twenty minutes after the signing table clears are worth more than the reading.
The cities, briefly
- Manchester — largest room, most nervous night, three sentences I would like back.
- Bristol — a festival tent in a gale; nobody could hear the quiet parts.
- Leeds — the first night the passage worked.
- Newcastle — a schools event at nine in the morning and the sharpest question of the tour, from a fifteen-year-old.
- Glasgow — the answer finally arrived.
- Edinburgh — two events, one hour apart, do not do this.
- Dublin — the bookseller had read it twice and interviewed me better than most journalists.
- Liverpool — small, warm, ended in a pub.
- Cardiff — the microphone squealed.
- Norwich — sixty people, forty books, the best signing table of the run.
- London — the basement with the broken radiator.
Would I do it again
Yes, and shorter. Six weeks is one week too many; the writing does not survive it, and I came home to a manuscript I had to reread twice before I could hear it again.
But the basement in the rain is why the whole apparatus of touring persists. Nothing else tells you what a book sounds like out loud, in a room, to people who did not have to come.
