The Nerd Daily recently had the opportunity to chat with Garth Nix, whom readers know as the bestselling author of The Old Kingdom, The Seventh Tower, and The Keys to the Kingdom series. His latest novel, The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, drops on September 22nd. In the interview, Garth tells us about the things about writing fantasy he enjoys the most, building secondary worlds, his favourite books, and a lot more!
Hello, Garth! Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us! Would you talk a little bit about yourself for readers who might not be familiar with your work?
I’m an Australian author who has been writing and being published all around the world for a long time now. My first book came out in 1991, so I am 29 years old as an author, or in the more usual years, fifty-seven. I mostly write fantasy and science fiction, often for children or young adults but not always, and my best-known books are Sabriel, the first book in the Old Kingdom series, and Mister Monday, the first book in The Keys to the Kingdom series. Which can be confusing, “Kingdom” being in both series titles. I also write short fiction, which has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. You can read some of my more recent short fiction for free at tor.com.
I’ve been a full-time writer since 2001, but before that, I was a part-time writer who also worked mostly in many different jobs in publishing, from bookseller to literary agent, and I spent some time in IT marketing and PR, and also served as an Assault Pioneer in the Australian Army Reserve when I was much younger.
What can readers expect from The Left-Handed Booksellers of London?
It’s a fantasy thriller, set in a slightly alternate 1983 United Kingdom where an extended clan of magical booksellers have the additional task of policing the mythic entities of the Old World. They are “licensed to kill . . . and sell books”. The story concerns an apparently quite usual young woman called Susan who goes to London to try to find her father who she never knew, and finds her serarch overlaps with an investigation by the left-handed bookseller Merlin (the left-handed are the field agents, the fighting ones) and his sister Vivien, a right-handed bookseller (the right-handed are the controllers and researchers).
What were your inspirations behind writing this story about badass booksellers?
I was a bookseller, a long time ago. It was one of my favourite jobs and I probably would have continued doing it much longer than I did, if the owners of the bookstore I worked in hadn’t decided to retire and close the business. I worked with some great people there, and have met many wonderful, complex booksellers over the years since. It seemed only natural to imagine booksellers having secret lives, in this case involving the mythic underlayers of the world.
But there was also a very direct inspiration that occurred when I was on tour for my book GOLDENHAND in 2016, and I was signing in the Port Terminal Waterstones in Leith, Edinburgh and I noticed the bookseller helping us was left-handed and commented on it, and he said “we’re all left-handed here” and I said something about the mysterious left-handed booksellers of Leith and I should write a story about them.
What’s your favourite thing about writing fantasy?
What I like about fantasy is that I get to draw the boundaries I will work within. This is not the same as being able to do absolutely anything within a story, because elements need to work together, a hodge-podge of invention very rarely adds up to anything. But writing fantasy I am not restricted by the boundaries of absolute realism, I just need to make it work within the boundaries I have chosen. I suppose you could say I get to work from a palette that has many more colours, though I still have to be very careful about mixing them, so as not to create something horrible.
What kind of research goes behind the creation of the fantasy worlds?
I am always engaged in passive research. I read lots of non-fiction, particularly history and biography, and often use information I have gleaned from my reading. But I mostly don’t know I’ll do so, or be researching for a particular purpose, I read for pure interest. That said, quite often I will know some basic fact or snippet of information that I want to employ in a story, but I need to know more and that’s when I will do some active research to expand upon what I already know.
Without spoiling anything, is there a particular scene/character in the book that you enjoyed writing the most?
I can’t pick out any particular scene as one I enjoyed writing more than any other, mainly because by the time I’ve revised everything numerous times I can’t remember whether the original draft was easy or not! I did enjoy writing the scenes actually set in the two bookshops (the New Bookshop which sells second-hand and collectible books and the Old Bookshop which sells new ones) because I could draw on many happy memories of working in and visiting bookshops.
While all the characters were great, I’d admit I loved Merlin the most. Can you tell us something about him that couldn’t be included in the book, maybe a scene that didn’t make it into the final version?
I did write a scene in a pub where Merlin gets in a fight with several stuck-up university students who are harassing him and Susan, and he employs all the components of a Ploughman’s Lunch (wedges of cheddar, chutney, bread etc) as weapons, but it was too much of an unnecessary diversion so I took it out, even before my editor could say “I like this but it slows down the main story”.
As Merlin tells Susan, the right-handed booksellers are ‘for the books’ while the left-handed are ‘for the hooks’. If you were born in Susan Arkshaw’s London as one of the St. Jacques family, what do you think you would’ve been, a left-handed bookseller, a right-handed one or an even-handed one?
I’d like to think I would have been a left-handed bookseller in my late teens and twenties, a right-handed one in my 30s and 40s, and now an even-handed bookseller!
Can we expect a companion novel/sequel to The Left-Handed Booksellers of London (hopefully with more Merlin in it) in the future?
I do have notes and a title for another book. We shall see . . .
What’s next for you?
My next book is a return to my Old Kingdom series with Terciel and Elinor, which is a prequel to Sabriel and is about her parents. All being well, it should be out in October 2021.
And last but not the least, do you have any book recommendations for us?
A recent YA book I’ve enjoyed is Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer; in adult literary fantasy I was mesmerised by M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise; and I greatly enjoyed Comet Weather by Liz Williams, a contemporary novel cleverly infused with mythic and fantastical elements.
