Field Ramble

Send us Fan Mail First up this month’s Sam speaks to Max Lury about his unsettling debut No Ghosts . After being reunited at Annie’s memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend. Harlow, discovers fragments of the dead – faces, gestures, glances – in AI generated videos;  Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode Sally Hayden joins us from Beirut  to discuss her latest book This is Also A Love Story . Sally is a multi award winning journalist for her writing and photography, most recently winning journalist of the year at the Irish journalism awards in 2025. Her first book, My Fourth Time We Drowned won Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2022 and Non Fiction Book of the...

Send us Fan Mail The ancient town of Weimar looms large in German history; a crucible of democracy and dictatorship and home to Goethe, Liszt, Schiller and Nietzsche. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out o...

Send us Fan Mail Happy Beltane to those that celebrate, here's an extra episode to welcome those longer days that are on the way.  It’s an extended interview with author and broadcaster Zakia Sewell about the journeys and discoveries that make up Finding Albion, her search for another Britain. Born out of her 2020 radio 4 series ( My Albion ) - it is a rejection of a narrow and exclusionary v...

Send us Fan Mail Dreams and Lies This month Sam talks to Makenna Goodman about her latest novel Helen of Nowhere. Published by Fitzcarraldo and described by Jo Hamya as ‘the perfect fairytale for our times’, it is the story of Man - an academic dogged by allusions of disgrace and a publicly failed marriage. He seeks to start again and live a ‘good life’ far from the city and is drawn into the wild...

Send us Fan Mail This month Sam talks to Madeleine Dunnigan about her debut novel Jean . It is set over the long, blazing summer of 1976  at Compton Manor, an isolated boarding school on the south downs. An oubliette, attended by a ragged assortment of boys who have all run out of road elsewhere. Jean is there too, searching desperately for himself among a violent mix of prejudice, antisemitism an...

Send us Fan Mail This month Canongate publish Nation of Strangers, the third ‘instalment’ in a series by Turkish novelist, essayist and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Following on from How To Lose A Country and Together it is, once more, rooted in Ece’s forced displacement from her homeland. Recorded last December at Canongate’s offices Sam met Ece to discuss this deeply personal and unflinching accou...

Send us Fan Mail ROBOTS AND KINGS Two wonderful books to start the year.  Lara meets up with Rebecca Perry to hear all about her debut novel ‘ May We Feed The King’ . Already a firm favourite at Field HQ, it is the mesmeric story of a king who resists power and the curator who pursues their forgotten legacy. A huge recommend that is described by A.K. Blakemore as ‘A sort of perfect snow globe, pre...

Send us Fan Mail Published by Granta earlier this autumn, Ben Pester’s debut novel is the story of Tom Crowley - a Willy Loman figure for our age - who is slowly and terrifyingly absorbed into the hallucinatory and labyrinthine surroundings of his work.  From the deceptive nature of Luke Bird’s day-glow cover art to the impenetrability of the novel’s work-speak The Expansion Project is deeply unne...

Send us Fan Mail Next February, Canongate will publish Nation of Strangers , the third instalment in a series by Turkish novelist, essayist and journalist Ece Temelkuran. Ahead of its publication we met to discuss the two books that precede it, ‘ How To Lose A Country’ and ‘ Together - A Manifesto Against A Heartless World .’ Both deal with what Ece has termed ‘cloud fascism’ - the gradual then su...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we meet Clare Carlisle to discuss Transcendence for Beginners, (Fitzcarraldo Editions) . A book written through love and mourning, it is, as the title suggests, explorative, unbound and deeply moving. Ranging widely, from Soren Kierkegaard to George Eliot, The Himalayas to The Isle of Skye, it is a book that offers us devotion and loss as expressions of love. A tim...

Send us Fan Mail Emma Warren has been documenting grassroots culture for decades. Her most recent book, Dance Your Way Home (a Guardian book of the year) was a celebration of 80s club nights, Irish dance halls and sweaty youth centres. This September, she returns with another piece of expertly researched and lovingly told social history.  Once more taking the reader onto familiar ground, Up The Yo...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we hear from playwright Hannah Patterson about her debut novel Ungone . It’s another gem from the mighty Rough Trade Books, the story of a single decision and the strange new world that grows from it.  Hannah’s central character Eve is recently returned from an Antarctic research trip to grapple with the decline of her ageing mother. Unable to visit her at the care...

Send us Fan Mail Sarah Hall needs little introduction. Twice nominated for the Man-Booker Prize and the first and only writer to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice, she has written ten highly acclaimed novels and short story collections.  This August she returns with her latest novel Helm , the multi-millennial tale of the strange and seductive wind which haunts the Eden Valley of her na...

Send us Fan Mail Shortlisted for this years Orwell Fiction Prize, The Accidental Immigrants is a work of political fable for our times. Dedicated to ‘all the people who lose their lives trying to reach a safer shore,’ Jo Mcmillan’s latest novel centres on a desperate British couple who are displaced from their home on a fictional Mediterranean island by a rising totalitarian regime. Born from a di...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we hear from Lally Macbeth about her incredible compendium ‘The Lost Folk.’ The distillation of a lifetime’s passion, it is an inclusive and comprehensive take on the meaning of folk, that asks us to rediscover, to cherish and to share the particular and the weird from which all our communities are made.  From pub signs to tea towels, bonfires to storytellers, this...

Send us Fan Mail Short story special: Two collections from two great independent presses. First up is Make A Home of Me by Vanessa Santos. Dead Ink Books bring us an exciting new voice in the horror landscape. Eight unsettling stories full of haunted children, impossible reappearances and unnatural forces desperate to be known. Definitely one for fans of Carmen Maria Machado or Matt Hill. Then we...

Send us Fan Mail Saraswati  Published by Serpent's Tail It’s hard to talk about Gurnaik Johal’s debut novel without using the word epic. Saraswati is transcontinental, multi-generational and led by a broad cast of characters - if you’re a fan of fiction on the scale of a book like Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension, then Saraswati is for you. Beginning with the re-emergence of a supposedly mythica...

Send us Fan Mail On June 19th Wendy Erskine’s long awaited debut novel The Benefactors is published. Many of you will already know Wendy from her two acclaimed short story collections Sweet Home and Dance Move and you’ll find The Benefactors filled with the same deep curiosity for people, the same raw laughs and the same unsparing honesty.   Set, once again, in her much loved Belfast it is a broad...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode Holly Dawson speaks to us about her debut All of Us Atoms . Faced with the prospect of losing her memory Holly set out to revisit the moments that had shaped her, from the earliest recollections of childhood to her diagnosis.  What follows is the documenting of a ‘felt’ life. In a series of essays, letters and short stories she weaves together memory, dreams, and r...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we meet Lucia Lijtmaer to hear all about her upcoming novel Cautery . Published for the first time in English by Charco Press, it is a novel filled with apocalyptic fantasies and a deep mistrust of the supposed greater good.  Set between modern day Barcelona and puritan New York Cautery follows the stories of two women (one real, the other imagined) who, although s...

Send us Fan Mail ALL OF THIS UNREAL TIME   Published by Rough Trade Books  Hopefully, you're listening to this surrounded by mountains of chocolate. What follows is the second part of our conversation with Max.  If you’ve enjoyed it, follow the link  to get yourself a copy straight from the Rough Trade website.  https://roughtradebooks.com/products/all-of-this-unreal-time-max-porter-foreword-...

Send us Fan Mail ALL OF THIS UNREAL TIME  Published by Rough Trade  Back this weekend with a double header, we turn to  All of This Unreal Time by Mr Max Porter.  Described in the foreword as ‘ a gift, written in friendship ’ it is an elusive, ever moving torrent of apology, love and gratitude. A response to the countless human and non-human lives that intersect with and impact on our own. Written...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we speak to Naomi Booth about her latest novel Raw Content . Set during a bleak Yorkshire winter, the book follows Grace, a legal editor whose job demands she reduce unspeakable acts to neatly worded clauses. The care and attention with which Grace approaches this work is only matched by her risk taking outside it. When she falls unexpectedly pregnant she attempts...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode, we speak to Anna Whitwham about Soft Tissue Damage , her startling account of a healing found in controlled violence. Published by Rough Trade Books on 27.03 it charts both the loss of Anna’s mother to cancer and her subsequent choice to battle unresolved anger in the boxing ring. From early sparing sessions to the draining seconds of the final round, Anna writes...