Mm

... um, The Sea Lady, The Golden Child, is that right? And the, the wonderful 2016, The Dark Flood Rises, which is your last novel, and I think you've said you're not going to write anymore.

In fact, there's a beautiful essay in this collection which talks, called Unfinished Portraits, which is partly about sort of why, and about not finishing things, and the unfinished nature of things.

Just to, to go on introducing you before I hand over to you, you've also written biographies of Wordsworth and Hardy.

You're a great frequenter of libraries.

They figure largely, especially in a wonderful last but one essay in here.

And you've written lots of non-fiction journalism, a beautiful sort of memoir about jigsaws, which I love.

And, and though there's so much been written about it since, and quite rightly, because it is a hugely interesting question.

Now here's Tessa Hadley reading Gold Watch by John McGahern.

Gold Watch.

It was in Grafton Street we met, aimlessly strolling on one of the lazy, lovely Saturday mornings in spring, the week of work over, the weekend still as fresh as the bunch of anemones that seemed the only purchase in her cane shopping basket.

"What a lovely surprise," I said, and was about to take her hand when a man with an armload of parcels parted us as she was shifting the basket to her other hand, and we withdrew from the pushing crowds into the comparative quiet of Harry Street.

We had not met since we had graduated in the same law class from University College five years before.

I had heard she'd become engaged to the medical student she used to knock around with and had gone into private practice down the country, perhaps waiting for him to graduate.

"Are you up for the weekend or on holiday or what?" I asked.

he, he knows out there in the night, in that silence, death is everywhere.