Between the covers: what's really going on in the world of books

They say it can be hard having a writer in the family. So what’s it like having two?

Katharine Norbury explained at The Independent Bath Literature Festival that it can be weird when “a writer’s wife” becomes an acclaimed author in her own right.

Appearing alongside the Weathering author Lucy Wood, Norbury explained that she was a film and script editor married to the well-known novelist Rupert Thomson when she started writing a diary of a particularly eventful summer.

One day, she saw the details of a short story competition on her husband’s laptop. “It was for non-fiction, so he wasn’t going to enter, so I entered something … and then I won.” Norbury soon connected with an agent, and began turning her diary into a book.

“I started making a tapestry,” she confessed. “A huge one. And every time he came into the room, I hid my notes under it ...” The book became her exquisite memoir-come-travelogue, The Fish Ladder (top), and when her publisher at Bloomsbury was about to write to The Bookseller to announce its publication, Norbury realised she had better tell her husband.

He has forgiven her, but now she is working on her second book they tend to travel together less. When a couple are both writers, she says, every time anything interesting happens they look at each other wondering: “Who is going to make this into a scene?”

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Also at the Bath Literature Festival, some wise words from the 73-year-old author and psychiatrist Arlene Heyman.

Her first collection of short stories is called Scary Old Sex, and it lives up to its title, including two characters for whom “making love was like running a war: plans had to be drawn up, equipment in tiptop condition ... there was no room for maverick actions”.

But Heyman is pragmatic. “However you’re getting it on,” she counselled, “keep getting it on.”

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In December Between the Covers reported on seven-year-old Roraigh Curran, from Lancashire, who was flown to Cape Canaveral to see a copy of a book with his name in it blasted into space.

The book, The Incredible Intergalactic Journey Home, is from Lost My Name, which personalises books for children.

On Thursday, World Book Day, Tim Peake (above) read out the book. Said Roraigh: “It’s amazing anyway that someone is reading my book from space, but it’s spectacular that it’s a British astronaut!”