On Writing Magic and John Dee

So now it’s Easter in London and the evenings are growing long and light and everywhere you go you can hear, through open windows, the sounds of children playing late because it’s still the holidays and they are refusing to go to bed.

And I am also going through a transformation because it seems only yesterday that I was in my favourite library, daydreaming my book into existence. But that was yesterday and today is different because now the book is finished and is going to be published and so I am entering that other mode in which writers live, in which you talk for England about your writing and try to make the world love your book as much as you do. The daydream-y part of the process is over; the practical stuff is beginning.

(And since you ask, my book is called ‘The Years of the Wizard’ and it’s being published by the Duckworth imprint, September, on 9th October, 2025.)

So what is this newsletter about?

This newsletter is of course in part about my book but it’s about other things as well. It’s about how to write and how to get published (which is ridiculously difficult but not impossible) and it’s also about where books come from (I mean which part of the brain) and how to find the right shape for a book, and how to write a hybrid book, part fact, part fiction, and dozens of other fascinating questions. It’s also about my part of London which is full of small streets and little restaurants, and men outside mending their cars and small children shouting gleefully as they run home from nursery. We have lived here for a while and I feel very much at home.

But first, an intro to my book - which is not easy when you have written a book in a daydream-y trance. Easier perhaps to say how it happened - how one day I pulled down from my book shelves a book I’d bought and forgotten to read, about the Elizabethan magician John Dee.

Dee lived in a time when most people believed in magic, not a rabbit-out-of-a-hat magic, but the belief that the entire world, from top to toe, and everything inside it is infused with magic. Magic was the power that connected all the parts of the universe together and a magician was a man who could control that power. John Dee had a huge ambition - he wanted to understand the meaning of life and who made the world, and he thought that if he understood magic he would understand it all.

John Dee is where I began this book but soon it became about much more than that. It became about the many men who have believed themselves to be magicians, as well as the stories of their wives and children. And it is also about the women who wanted to be alchemists, and about a library (John Dee’s) that was so full of books on magic that it was itself was considered magical. And from there my book spread out to talk about what is magic, and where has it vanished to, and why do we yearn for it, and how come it is so, well, magical?

Dee’s is an astonishing story that we know largely because his diaries have survived, from which we can guess what it was like to be his wife or his children or his servants. It was this pairing of his enormous ambition and his domestic home life that sparked something inside me. When John Dee was in his fifties he got it into his head to take his wife and children to Prague, which was then the occult capital of Europe. In those days it was a hugely ambitious undertaking, to travel right across Europe, mostly by carriage and horses. I thought of every daughter whose life had been dominated by a wayward and obsessive father . . . And so the book was born.

I am by nature a rather sceptical, twenty-first century kind of person. All this magical talk and my new-found love for Renaissance magic took me totally by surprise.

I will be posting weekly. For the time being this substack is free.

In the next post I will be talking about how you know which book you want to write next - which is not as obvious as you might think.

Meanwhile as I write this it is Easter Sunday morning and outside is a cool, soft, grey London day.

See you next week.

(My book is called ‘The Years of the Wizard’ and it’s being published by the Duckworth imprint, September, on 9th October, 2025.)