Lara Pawson, author of the brilliant and just-published This is the Place to Be, is tearing pages out of my novel Foxy-T and tacking them up around London—in a good way.

Here’s one she Tweeted earlier.

This has nothing to do with me, or perhaps it does in that Lara mentioned it and I loved the idea, but I am not involved as such, and have no idea where Lara has put the pages—although actually I’m pretty sure that I do recognise the location above.

Lara has form, too. Earlier this year she did something similar with Julian Stannard’s poetry collection What Were You Thinking—distributing the pages en route between London and the Midi-Pyrenees area of France, and followed that with pages torn from Joanna Walsh’s Hotel which were—in Joanna’s words—‘scattered in French hotels, restaurants, guestrooms…’

Part peripatetic performance, part pamphleteering, part book art, it’s a lovely, slightly Quixotic, and actually extremely elusive and ephemeral idea—distributing the pages of a book in this way, to be seen or not.

Is it also perhaps a way of externalising the reading experience, or of sharing either particular and favourite passages or a general enthusiasm? I don’t know, but I feel like I’m in great company, and when I get a chance I’ll ask Lara more about it. If I find out I’ll let you know.

As with Pawson’s previous two escapades, the pages of Foxy-T are being photographed and tweeted in situ.

This time around however, Lara has suggested an added dimension to the Foxy-T Twitter trail. She has said that the person who locates and tweets the most pages will win a signed copy of my novel. I was delighted to agree to this suggestion, and I have a copy here, ready to sign for Lara to send to the winner!

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Praise for Foxy-T

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