With five books in the Sunday Times Top 100, the author of Notes from a Small Island talks about being an adopted Brit, how his wife made his career and why we should all cheer up a bit. Eighteen months ago, in these pages, Bill Bryson gave his last interview. He had been tempted, briefly, out of retirement to write a (short) Audible script about Christmas, but that was it.
As soon as the recorder stopped, he was off to garden, potter and play on the floor with his 12 grandchildren while he still had the knees to get up again afterwards. After a lifetime of wandering, he had settled at last in a home with a big garden in Hampshire. So what you’re reading now is something of an apparition.
Bryson, 72, has granted us another last interview, but in special circumstances. For a large part of the 1990s Bryson was top of the Sunday Times bestseller list. Of the five Bryson books to feature in the top 100 bestsellers of the past five decades, it is Notes from a Small Island , his 1995 love letter to and gentle mickey-take of Great Britain, that takes top billing.
It was a bestseller for longer than any other book published in the 1990s — and this last-last interview is a celebration of it. Where, then, to meet? Bryson lives with Cynthia, a retired nurse and his wife of 49 years, in Hampshire, so a pint in the shires seemed like the obvious option. But no, we meet in London.
“If the weather is good, we can go for a walk in the park,” he’d suggested. Of course, the weather isn’t good and we settle instead at the London Library. This is where authors come to research and retired authors come to take an afternoon nap “under a copy of The Spectator ”, but Bryson has spent the day in the basement stacks, researching Homo floresiensis .
“Why?” is my first question..
