Edinburgh Book Festival round-up: Kit de Waal | Laila Lalami | Mary Costello and Elaine Garvey | James Runcie & Fenella Humphreys

What is the best book ever entered for the Women’s Prize over the last 30 years? Kit de Waal didn’t hesitate. The Safekeep, by Yael van der Wouden, about a lesbian affair in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was, she said, the kind of brilliant book you almost hate reading when you’re also meant to be writing a novel of your own.

As De Waal was also the chair of the judges for this year’s prize, this is not such a great surprise, but apparently all her fellow judges agreed with her. “Even though it’s a debut novel, it stood out from the rest from as early as page five: it’s a thriller, a romance, historical... you never feel you are reading something contrived.”

Laila Lalami | Contributed

Predictably enough, she thought the Women’s Prize is still more necessary than ever, given that the patriarchy is still in charge and publishing’s glass ceilings haven’t been completely broken. Against that, we were told, the Women’s Prize does more for book sales than the Booker, with sales van der Wouden’s novel soaring by 1,400 per cent on her win.

Women writers, said American novelist Laila Lalami, are still treated more condescendingly by male journalists, who often ask what part of their lives they draw on in their fiction. This was, she said, “a bizarre and inappropriate question”, as it downplays the role of the creative imagination.

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Really? In the audience were acclaimed Irish writers Mary Costello and Elaine Garvey. In their own event on Thursday, they were asked about the extent to which their fiction drew on their own lives without it sounding remotely bizarre or inappropriate. The short story Costello read from her new collection Barcelona drew, she said, on her own fascination with suburbia and a hatred of cruelty to animals – so visceral, in fact that two decades ago she was “almost disabled by it”. From what she said, Garvey’s debut novel The Wardrobe Department about a woman swithering between her job in the London theatre world and her west of Ireland roots had at least some echoes with her own life.

But let me tell you about the one event in this year’s festival that moved me the most. On Thursday afternoon, James Runcie talked about his wife Marilyn Imrie, who died of motor neurone disease precisely five years ago to the day. Her life, death and the madness of grief that followed are the subject of his book Tell Me Good Things.

I knew Marilyn the tiniest possible bit, but enough to know that she was indeed all the good things James tells about her. I know him an equally miniscule amount but enough to admire his charm, wit and boisterous indiscretion.

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This wasn’t an ordinary book festival event. There was no book signing, no chair, no chat. James stood at a lectern and, for about five minutes at a time, took us through his wife’s final illness using the extended metaphor – appropriate for an acclaimed theatre director like Marilyn – of preparing for a first (or this case, last) night. Miraculously, he has found love again: he got married to Lucinda last month.

Between readings, violinist Fenella Humphreys played. I’d never heard her, nor did I know the chosen pieces – from Boyle, Ysaye, Bach, and Piazza – each played with perfect control and delicacy. Only with the opening bars of Seonaid Aitken’s Glasgow Reels, paying tribute to Neil Gow’s Lament for the Death of his Second Wife, did I recognise anything, then only briefly before it spun out into an exuberant, finger-blurring frenzy. She played with breathtaking brilliance and – after so much sorrow – true joy.

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