About Brightwell

Brightwell has written three novels and rather more essays, and the two feed each other in ways that are only obvious afterwards. The novels take about four years each and are all, one way or another, about staying: coastal towns after the industry left, a valley after the reservoir, a street after the people who made it interesting moved out. They are quiet books and they take their time, which is a polite way of saying that not much happens quickly in them. The essays are the opposite — short, frequent, and mostly about a single thing looked at closely for fifteen hundred words. They started as a way of keeping writing during the long dead stretches of a novel and turned into the part of the work most people actually read. There are around two hundred of them and they are all free.