In a 2013 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Rupert Thomson acknowledged the strange place he occupies in the literary world. ‘If I had a dollar,’ he mused, ‘for every time I’d heard someone say, “Why aren’t you more well known?…”’
Looking back on his reviews, you can certainly see what he means. For more than 30 years, virtually all his novels have been not only warmly acclaimed; they’ve also been greeted with the sadly inaccurate declaration that now, at last, he’s bound to achieve the wider fame he deserves.
But, as Thomson also acknowledges, in the past decade those missing dollars have taken on a less metaphorical significance. After starting his career in a ‘golden age’ when novelists got decent advances simply for being very good, these days he finds himself in a post-recession world where units need to be shifted.
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