Downtown Helsinki is not somewhere you might expect to rediscover the work of one of Britain and Ireland's great novelists, but rummaging around the excellent Stockmann bookshop on Esplanadi searching for a birthday present for a friend I was thrilled to find a beautiful new edition of The Siege of Krishnapur, by the late JG Farrell.
Farrell, who died far too young in 1979, wrote a captivating "trilogy" of novels about the end of empire, mirroring the breakdown of British colonial power with the fragmentation of the personal lives of his characters. The Siege of Krishnapur, which won the Booker prize in 1973 is the most celebrated of three, but the other two, The Singapore Grip and Troubles, are both wonderful novels.
Troubles is perhaps one of the two or three most significant and influential books in my life*. I had it as an A-Level set text in 1989 - alongside, inter alia, The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy, Hamlet and some Keats - and it was the book that made me wake up to the sheer beauty and potential of literature. Here was a book that seemed to have everything: grand themes, personal struggle, emotion and humour. All beautifully written and memorable to the point of being haunting.
In the early 1990s Farrell's work was not always easy to come by, although the advent of online bookstores and reprints in about 1995 helped, although his profile is not as high as his work deserves despite consideration of Krishnapur for the Best of Booker in 2008.
So what a delight to find out that Weidenfeld and Nicolson, as part of its 60th anniversary, have included The Siege of Krishnapur in a collection of nine special edition classics.
Moreover these are quite beautifully presented books, the covers apparently designed by the advertising agency Fallon. Hopefully this will help a new generation of readers find Farrell.