The Sexy Side Of Editing

A funny, fast-paced novel about the literary calling and the joys of creating.

- Maggie Trapp

‘What I’m trying to say is that literature is a vocation, a life’s work with no end and no hope of satisfaction or reward. A novel is just the by-product of the novelist’s desire to understand. Understand what? Everything. Or, at the very least, one thing.”

This capacious, idealistic, earnest definition of what it is that serious writers do is part of a speech that Helen Owen, a much-admired English writer in John Purcell’s novel The Girl on the Page, gives at a literary awards ceremony.