In my last post of my month’s residency, after thanking Steve Himmer for his hospitality, I want to look northward, backward, and forward.

Bradford is a town in northern England — correction: it’s in Yorkshire; England is irrelevant. A town whose wealth was made in the wool trade, but which added also to our cultural richness. It gave us the composer Frederick Delius, although Delius had to go to Florida to pursue his vocation, ostensibly as manager of an orange plantation. (I still remember vividly my first hearing of his ‘Appalachia’, a haunting musical first fruit of the plantation years, at the Proms in the Sixties.)

Prior to Delius, it gave us the Brontes — it was their birthplace and first home until their move to the better-known parsonage at Haworth. But more about them later.

And it is now home to the novelist Bill Broady, and should eventually have a plaque up to say so. Readers of Vault will have read his endorsement and surmised a friendship, but my admiration for his work was the cause of that friendship: when fiction editor for the short-lived Main Street Journal, having liked what of his work I had read, and having been tipped off by another editor about his first novel, Swimmer. I contacted him for possible submissions. He kindly sent me some; alas, too late, as we had folded by then. But the friendship grew, as did my admiration after reading the novel — a spare, ultimately sad novel about a girl finding herself in her talent as, eventually, an Olympic swimmer, in writing as graceful and taut as a dive.

There followed a story collection in 2001, In This Block There Lives A Slag… And Other Yorkshire Fables — a title self-explanatory if you know Yorkshire; then, six years later, another novel, Eternity Is Temporary — different again, in length, in setting — a north London care home in the scorching summer of 1976 — in style and approach. One of the funniest novels I have ever read.

Now will follow, dependent on the vagaries of British publishing, his greatest work to date, as well as his longest, and destined in my opinion to be the next big hit. I have read it in manuscript, all 165,000 words of it, and wouldn’t want to have missed one of them. I’m still quite numb with admiration, not to say envy.

How best describe it without entirely misrepresenting it? A fictionalized history of the Independent Labour Party in discrete episodes between 1893 and 1937? Based on the relationship between two real people — Fred Jowett and Philip Snowden — and their unlikely but enduring friendship through northern local politics and Westminster government? Walk-on but fleshed-out parts for Ramsay MacDonald, G.B. Shaw, Keir Hardie, Jacob Epstein, Trotsky? And it’s called what? Night Soil Men? You mean, the council workers paid (miserably) to empty the town cesspits nightly? Are you serious?

Yes, I am serious; the novel is serious, it’s also very, very funny, grittily observant about idealism and compromise in politics as well as life and friendship, it’s achingly sad in its love for these people, and it contains a third character, Victor Grayson, you wouldn’t believe — even though he’s real.

As to its tone, I can only resort again to synaeshetic comparisons: imagine a painting, a cross between L.S. Lowry and Stanley Spencer, converted into text.

This novel does for twentieth century politics what Hilary Mantel has done for that of the Tudors, and, with the current Labour Party desperate to re-invent itself, with more relevance.

It has this week been offered by Broady’s agent. I expect the bidding war to break out very shortly.

If this novel is not snapped up by a major publisher, you can consider the literary industry of Britain officially dead.

Back finally to the Brontes, and a publishing venture with more definite fulfillment.

Bradford, more specifically Thornton, was as I said the birthplace of the Brontes, although the house is not as well-known, nor established as a museum as Haworth is. In fact, the house has recently been sold, and is now in private hands.

There exists, however, a trust — the Bronte Birthplace Trust — which has as its aim the eventual purchase of the house and its preservation and equal museum-status. To this end, one particular fundraising effort is the publication of an anthology of Bronte stories — stories not by the Brontes but about them, by contemporary writers.

It’s being compiled under the editorship of … (no, you’re wrong this time) Andrea (A.J.) Ashworth, whose brainchild it was, and is due for publication in the autumn from Unthank Books, with a proportion of profits going to the trust.

There is already a substantial anthology building up, with some great material, I hear, from ‘names’ and lesser-known writers; the names will, all being well, include Bill Broady, as well as poet Simon Armitage.

This is an exciting project (‘worthy’ sounds so dull), not just in its aim but in its execution as a literary testament to the continuing influence of the Brontes on the international imagination — as is also the fact that the footpath signs on the Haworth moors are all in Japanese!

In summary, lots to look back on, lots to look forward to in the British literary world.

And for myself? Time now for a graceful retirement.