I loved Amanda Craig’s last novel, The Three Graces, so I was looking forward to hearing her talk about her latest book, High and Low. Last Thursday about twenty -five of us met for drinks on the beautiful terrace of the National Liberal Club, overlooking the river and Hungerford Bridge. Then we assembled in the Victorian dining room for a convivial lunch.
After coffee, the literary journalist Suzi Feay interviewed Amanda who spoke eloquently about her long career as a novelist. When she was twenty-five, she read Balzac’s series of novels about 19th century Paris, La Comédie humaine, and decided she wanted to write a cycle of self-contained novels set in contemporary London with recurring characters. For instance, in High and Low, her ninth novel, there are two characters who appeared as babies in an earlier novel. Amanda told us that she has become very fond of her large cast of characters and feels that they are “almost family.”
“What I really want to do is make people laugh and enjoy themselves. I’m not didactic,” she said. She loves Trollope’s novels, feels that since the advent of Modernism about a century ago, many English novelists have become snooty about “telling a story.” Because of this, she said, fiction has lost much of its power and interest. Amanda thinks that there’s a false divide between literary fiction, which focuses on style and characters’ inner lives, and plot driven genre fiction. She believes it’s possible to have both.
High and Low, which I haven’t yet read, was partly inspired by a 1976 film, Assault on Precinct 13, about an undefended American police station that is attacked by a ruthless criminal gang. In Amanda’s new novel, a group of writers who regularly work in a Literary Café in Camden find themselves besieged by a violent gang who are hunting a 12- year-old boy. The novel is based on “what I see happening around me” where she lives in Camden, an area that is partly gentrified and partly very rough. Agar Road, for example, is known as “Murder Mile.” The novel happens in real time, over a few hours.
Migration is a subject that has interested Amanda for many years, both as a journalist and as a novelist. She feels it is the most important issue of our times. In High and Low a local hotel that accommodates asylum seekers is also under siege by protesting groups. This actually did happen outside a similar hotel near Old Street in August 2025, when groups of anti-racists clashed violently with people protesting about the presence of the migrants. Amanda said, “I write things and then they happen;” she tries to show the human face of both migrants and the people who object to them and doesn’t claim to have a solution.
When Suzi asked her what she thought about the future of the novel, Amanda was pessimistic. She feels that a combination of factors have made it almost impossible for British novelists to earn a living: people don’t review, buy or read novels as much as they used to and many public libraries have closed down. However, despite finding writing exhausting and under rewarded, Amanda is at work on a new novel which I look forward to reading.
Miranda Miller