One Small Thing: Amanda Craig

The saviour of my sanity is, as always, my Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Rollo. In this photo he’s looking a lot less well-groomed than usual, after I used my new Remington clippers on both him and my husband during lockdown. Unlike my husband, he submitted to this with an expression of Christ-like resignation, and as a result now sports a pair of furry plus-fours rather like those worn by animals in Beatrix Potter, and a small bald patch on one leg.

Rollo is my cavaliere servante , my constant companion and beloved friend. Every morning he wakes me by jumping onto our bed and bestowing some whiskery kisses before settling down with much joyful trampling on my husband’s stomach. This is the signal that it’s time to get up and give him his breakfast and walk. As we now live half the time in Devon and half in London, he was essential at keeping us to a routine while we went almost mad down here with worry about our children and my elderly mother, left behind in London. Dogs demand an unwavering routine, and this was and is tremendously therapeutic. We had to go out for at least an hour every afternoon, sticking to the boundaries of our parish but safe in the knowledge that this daily exercise was permitted.

As a result, we discovered some fantastic new walks in woods that we were able to watch through all the weeks of this extraordinary Spring: dapples of primroses and rivers of bluebells, all the freshness of new leaves and the exhilaration of the clean, quiet air. When not snoozing in the most comfortable chair at home, Rollo wears an expression of happy bewilderment while racing after squirrels, rabbits and deer that he never comes close to catching. As the grasses lengthen with summer, all you can see is his ridiculous white plumy tail, whirling gallantly. Very occasionally he forgets that he is not actually my lover, and has to be smacked, but he is the perfect gentleman, and his hairy heart is without a drop of selfishness. Needless to say, our kids have missed him far more than they have missed us during our enforced separation. We are fitter, saner and Greener because we can’t bear to be without him for more than a couple of days.

I grew up with cats, to which (like Xan in The Lie of the Land) I am mortally allergic. Discovering dogs has been one of the most transformative experiences of my life, and I now put them in all my novels including the new one, The Golden Rule in which the hero, drunk and despairing, is persuaded not to kill himself because of his dog. “Human beings don’t deserve the love of dogs,” he says, and this is something I feel myself. I do my best to deserve it, and Rollo.

               

Amanda Craig’s ninth novel, The Golden Rule, is published on 2 July by Little,Brown £16.99. It is available at Waterstones, Amazon and from your local independent bookshop through Hive. You can find out more about Amanda's work here.

'If you like your novels wide-ranging, ambitious, socially panoramic, and engaged in the most important issues of the day, Amanda Craig is the writer for you. For more than twenty years now she has been anatomising the state of the British nation with wit and empathy' Jonathan Coe

'She's such a skilful storyteller who vividly dramatises our lives with wit, wisdom and compassion' Bernardine Evaristo

When Hannah is invited into the First-Class carriage of the London to Penzance train by Jinni, she walks into a spider's web. Now a poor young single mother, Hannah once escaped Cornwall to go to university. But once she married Jake and had his child, her dreams were crushed into bitter disillusion. Her husband has left her for Eve, rich and childless, and Hannah has been surviving by becoming a cleaner in London. Jinni is equally angry and bitter, and in the course of their journey the two women agree to murder each other's husbands. After all, they are strangers on a train - who could possibly connect them?

But when Hannah goes to Jinni's husband's home the next night, she finds Stan, a huge, hairy, ugly drunk who has his own problems - not least the care of a half-ruined house and garden. He claims Jinni is a very different person to the one who has persuaded Hannah to commit a terrible crime. Who is telling the truth - and who is the real victim?

The Times - Books for 2020

Sunday Times - Books to look out for in 2020

Observer - Fiction to look out for in 2020, Alex Preston: 'The Golden Rule does what her novels do best, wrapping the reader in a tight, lean narrative, showing the strangeness that lies at the heart of normal-seeming lives'

Daily Mail - 2020 Top Pick, Stephanie Cross: 'Craig's The Golden Rule promises to be a typically sharp and hugely satisfying page-turner about two women who decide to murder each other's husbands'

i paper - 'If there were any justice, the versatile Craig would be one of our most lauded novelists. Her eighth novel [The Golden Rule] takes inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train to spin a story of deception and deceit'

New Statesman - Books for 2020

Financial Times - Books for 2020 'shrewd contemporary satirist Amanda Craig reworks Strangers on a Train'

Praise for Amanda Craig

'Terrific, page-turning, slyly funny' India Knight

'As satisfying a novel as I have read in years' Sarah Perry

'Amanda Craig is one of the most brilliant and entertaining novelists now working in Britain' Alison Lurie