Great Uncle Fred? I think `Huckleberry Finn` is absolutely brilliant. I think it is the best book ever written. I do not see how any book could be better than `Huckleberry Finn`. Please tell me, what would you say is the best novel ever written? (Helena, Summer 2008)

It was called `Stones`. Marion White wrote it in 1967. It was unutterably brilliant, combining the joy and life of `Huckleberry Finn` with the depth and compassion of `Middlemarch`. It was funny and beautiful and moving and real. Marion White wrote it in the early mornings before work in the shipping office, Newcastle-on-Tyne. She had always known she had it in her. She thought `Stones` was very good but she suspected her judgement: she would not know it was good unless someone else told her that it was. She typed it up herself, after her day’s work, and sent it to the only literary agent whose address she could find. Twelve weeks later, by which time Marion had almost forgotten about `Stones`, the bulky packet came back, with a letter from someone whose name might have been Judith (the signature was smudged): “Thank you ...interesting ... some lively passages ... unusual ... perhaps too unusual ... not suitable ... regional preoccupations ... unknown authors very difficult ... better luck with placing your manuscript ... ” There was a standard format for these letters, with spaces left for adjectives. The Judith person had looked through the manuscript, but she had had a lot of late nights that week, and also the landlord was on the war-path: she kept turning up late for work, it was really hard to concentrate. But it was very very unlikely that this manuscript - from Newcastle - was any better than the hundreds of pieces of rubbish that came streaming into the office every week. There was no reason to believe that not reading the manuscript properly would matter in the slightest. Marion finished reading the letter, let slip one small tear, placed the manuscript on the dying coals of her fire and shovelled more coal on top of it. Soon it was blazing away nicely. In 1972 Marion White was in a coach on a trip to the sea at Seahouses, from where they were going to get a boat to the Farne Islands, when the coach-driver mistook the size of a country road going round a bend. The coach tumbled from the road down a bank, turned over once and came to rest by the side of a field full of sheep. An old lady had suffered a heart attack, and soon after died. Marion White, an unmarried only child both of whose parents were dead, who had troubled no one while living an exemplary life, sustained a fatal fracture to the skull.

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