Sterile Sun

"It’s effectively three linked stories. The first story’s about a very young girl – an underage girl – who falls on hard times and ends up being looked after by someone who then asks her to do a favour for them… and it ends up in prostitution. One of the older prostitutes she meets is then the subject of the second story, and then there’s a third one. They’re all first-person narratives. I found it via The Neglected Books Page , and there was a glowing review of it, so I looked into it a bit more. The first page says, ‘Because of the nature of this book, it is only on sale to medical professionals, counsellors, social workers,’ so it was not on sale to the general public, because it was about underage prostitutes and it was written in 1936. But it’s a wonderful piece of fiction. Caroline Slade was one of the founders of Yaddo. Precisely. So I started looking into her and got a second-hand copy of the book, and as I read it I was thinking ‘This is remarkable.’ It’s very stark. When you consider when it was written, it’s unusually frank. It’s not erotic in any way, and it’s not rude, it doesn’t have any bad language as such, but it tells it like it is, and doesn’t pull any punches. So I’m reading it thinking, ‘Well, this feels like Steinbeck’ – there’s also a slight James Joyce feel to some of the narrative – and I said to myself, ‘If Steinbeck had written this, it would still be in print. It would be hailed as a cutting-edge classic.’ “If Steinbeck had written this, it would still be in print. It would be hailed as a cutting-edge classic” Part of my job as a publisher is to hope that one day I might track one or two of these books down and be able to do something with them. But this is the one I’ve made the most effort to find. I’ve written to people linked to Yaddo and all sorts of other people, and the secretary of Yaddo has come back with stuff, but I’ve yet to be able to track down anyone who knew Slade, or knows her descendants – no one has been able to put me in touch with them. And, of course, it’s still in copyright. I think she died in the 1960s or 70s. It’s much easier when you find something like this and it’s out of copyright, because you can just go for it. Sterile Sun is a masterpiece. Out of all of these books, it’s the one that I think most readers would take to. I would love to bring this back out, or if someone else did it, I’d be over the moon. It’s a book that deserves another run. It wouldn’t do a Stoner , but it could do half a Stoner . Today, now that the media is gradually waking up to there being women’s stories that need to be shared that perhaps haven’t been shared before, it does feel like the right time. And these ones are gob-smacking, because, as you said, these things happened. I suppose it’s a bit like the film I, Daniel Blake (2016) – I’m a white, middle-class man in the south of England, so I don’t have the experience depicted in that film, and yet I can watch it and immediately understand and see that, yes, things really are that bad for people today. My reaction to this book was similar. I read it thinking, ‘My god, this stuff actually happened to people.’ It’s incredible. There is a moment in the second story where you realise what has happened to the girl in the first story and it is chilling. It stopped me in my tracks for a moment."