Birthstone

My first attempt at a novel, after 20 years of poetry only. Fearing I wouldn't be able to fill up 200-odd pages, I threw in all my obsessions, like a mad cook. They included: Cornwall, ancient stones, sex, psychoanalysis, Cornish dialect, stockings, suspenders, my mother, my father, my sister. (Well, the last three aren't obsessions, only memorable figures in my life.) The resultant dish ~i still like.

Perhaps strangely, it's my only novel where I've 'explored' Cornwall and Cornish characters and speech.
I revised it for the Penguin paperback edition. My editor had said there were too many 'bodily fluids'! There are still quite a few.

'Fantasy as Freud envisaged it, powerful enough to counter reality, working like free association and allowing the unconscious to take over.'
--London Review of Books