During the pandemic lockdown, a lockdown-era academic who layer-paints the words of poems looks after her ailing father while a phone call from a near-stranger and two young girls, one obsessed with the Cottingley Fairies, upend her isolation. Folk tales of a smith, a curfew and a curlew cross with her own story as Smith explores real versus fake and the stories we inherit.
Books mentioned in Companion Piece (6)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “A form of it turns up in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poem about the terrible act and ominous aftermath of the killing of a bird”
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “What book was that? The Scarlet Letter. I took it off the shelf. It was a paperback as old as me and still pristine.”
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare: “like when Shakespeare uses it in Twelfth Night as one of the proofs of love when one character tells another that to prove this love she'd halloo your name”
Hamlet by William Shakespeare: “Gules... It's a word Shakespeare uses for blood... He uses it in Hamlet and that word sable with it too”
Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark: “reading a novel for pleasure, it's called Loitering with Intent, in the ruins of some long-gone rich person's castle”
In Drear-Nighted December by John Keats: “It's from the poem, I say, by Keats, about just that, a tree in winter that doesn't have to miss its summer greenness... Green felicity”