Zoe Gilbert's first novel, Folk, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and adapted for BBC Radio (read by the brilliant Samantha Spiro). She has just finished turning some of the chapters from Folk into a libretto, for a song cycle that will have its world premiere in 2023.
Her recently released second novel, Mischief Acts, is inspired by the past and future of the Great North Wood, which used to cover a large swathe of South London.
At the Guardian Gilbert tagged ten top forests in fiction, including:
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl BainbridgeRead about the other entries on the list at the Guardian.
I looked first to Bainbridge’s Another Part of the Wood, but there the forest is barely heeded by the bickering campers. No, it is in The Bottle Factory Outing that her doomed picnickers dance constantly across the boundary between park and wood, from football games and flirtation to the sinister shade of the trees. Here, stones are thrown by invisible hands, and far worse is to come. Bainbridge directs her symbolic forest with wicked precision, squeezing the blackest humour from its shadows.
--Marshal Zeringue
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