James Purdon

Pen Pals

Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011

By

Faber & Faber/Harvill Secker 248pp £20 order from our bookshop

There’s always something slightly uncomfortable about reading other people’s mail, though we’re happy to relax the taboo if the correspondents are famous enough, even more if they’re safely posthumous. It isn’t often that we’re invited to read letters between living writers, which makes Here and Now something of a novelty: a near-current record of correspondence between two major contemporary authors over a three-year period.

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