Nick Bantock is best known for his groundbreaking Griffin and Sabine books. The first trilogy of the series stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for three years and was published in 18 languages. Critics described his marriage of art and literature as the birth of a new genre. As an author-artist, Bantock has created 35 titles, including The Venetian's Wife, The Forgetting Room, and The Museum at Purgatory. He was born in the U.K. and trained as a fine artist; for many years, he was a leading book cover artist in London. Bantock lives in Victoria, British Columbia. The Corset and the Jellyfish (Tachyon, November 7, 2023) is a collection of illustrated stories.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
A hundred 100-word stories. Tiny, richly illustrated tales that pull you into a multiplicity of wondrous-strange worlds in the blink of an eye.
On your nightstand now:
Just finished Tombland by C.J. Sansom and Warlight by Michael Ondaatje. There's a point in Warlight where the young narrator is helping smuggle greyhounds to and from a London racetrack. There's a scene where he's sitting on a drifting canal barge at two in the morning that gave me such a sense of hiraeth that I could have sworn I was sitting next to him.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. As a young lad, I remember laughing so hard, I fell out of bed. I've never gone back to it, for fear of finding out it wasn't quite as funny as I thought it was.
Your top five authors:
Kurt Vonnegut--his books changed the way I saw the world; John Steinbeck; Ursula K. Le Guin; John le Carré; Michael Ondaatje.
My tomorrow's list would almost certainly be quite different.
Book you've faked reading:
I can't be bothered to pretend. If it feels badly written or pompous or self-indulgent, I tend to give it the hoof pretty promptly.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Wouldn't be my choice of word, but I get the drift. Three books I've repeatedly recommended:
East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Such a marvelously written (still modern) story about time, place, and the human condition.
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters. Best tale of twisting intrigue I've encountered.
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy. To my mind, it is the gothic fantasy book that everything has to live up to.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I was a cover artist for many years, so this is a loaded question for me. In truth, I refuse to buy a book with a poor cover. I'll wait for another imprint, rather than encourage bad art. Last book I bought because of the cover (and the title) was The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker. And lo, I loved the story.
Book you hid from your parents:
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence. The well-thumbed pages were a complete giveaway.
Book that changed your life:
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I read it in The Hague when I was 17. A small book with a massive message.
Favorite line from a book:
Struth, that's an impossible ask. Instead, here's one of my favourite opening lines: "In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages." That's from Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume.
Who wouldn't want to know what follows?
Five books you'll never part with:
That's a tough one, because it suggests the specific physical copy of the book is significant. I'm not very sentimental, so my idea of a keeper is a rare book that contains wisdoms and is also an object of beauty. One that jumps to mind is a lovely early illustrated copy of The Rubáyát of Omar Khayyám. I memorized my first literary line from it: " 'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days/ Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays."
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Slaughterhouse-Five by Vonnegut. In retrospect, it taught me that I had a place in the world and that I was free to express my thoughts and ideas.
Top five books you'll probably never read, even though other folks say they are brilliant:
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie; War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy; Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. My reasons for not reading these classics are varied, but mostly it comes down to the word daunting.