All literary roads lead to Highbury Hill

 
31 January 2014

“It’s the moment every novelist dreads,” said Piers Paul Read. “When a member of the family says: ‘I’ve written a novel — could you look at it?’” It happened when Read’s younger daughter Beatrice’s soon-to-be husband Tim Walker, now the Indy’s man in LA, asked him to read his new novel Completion. (He liked it — phew!) But there was one other connection.

In his novel Walker has a Highbury house that is the setting for a series of children’s books called The House on the Hill. Piers Paul Read wrote a play in the Seventies called The House on Highbury Hill. Was this flattery from son-in-law to father-in-law? “Pure coincidence,” said Walker, at the launch at Lutyens & Rubenstein in Notting Hill last night. “The first I knew about it was when I Googled the title The House on the Hill, to check whether there were any children’s books of that name. And there it was.”

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