Who is popular today?

A controlling female artist is at the heart of the author’s new novel, Nightshade. She talks about cruel egos in the art world and the logistics of writing alongside her husband, Ian McEwan
Annalena McAfee’s London home, on a quiet cobbled mews not far from Great Ormond Street hospital, seems a fitting place to be speaking about a book full of beautiful flowers. The author’s third novel, Nightshade, is about a botanical artist, and I approach her house through a sea of pot plants. McAfee – elegantly dressed in grey, her silver-blond hair falling about her shoulders – greets me at the door and shows me upstairs to a sitting room. An olive tree shimmers outside the window, jasmine clambers over the balcony.
McAfee makes coffee and we sit on leather chairs. Jane Bown prints line the walls. There are relatively few books in the room, just two shelves with a mixture of her work – I spot both McAfee’s first novel, The Spoiler, which drew on her time as a journalist for the Financial Times and London’s Evening Standard, and 2017’s Hame, set on a fictional Hebridean island. There are also copies, several of them in translation, of her husband’s books. McAfee is married to Ian McEwan, whom I think I hear clattering about somewhere below us several times during our conversation. Continue reading...