Gillian Tindall's latest, and final book, is due to be published later this month. I am eagerly awaiting it as I have enjoyed her very varied books for many years.
It was only when reading the description of Tindall's new book that I realised she had died, aged 87, in October 2025. Sadly, I had missed the Guardian's obituary: "the writer Gillian Tindall... has died aged 87...her final completed book unexpectedly brings her work full circle with a return to fiction; Journal of a Man Unknown, the imagined diary of a 17th-century Huguenot ancestor, will be published next month by Spitalfields Life Books".
I first read Gillian Tindall at university in the 1980s. I loved her first novel No Name in the Street (1959), the first of more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, leading to the Somerset Maugham award in 1972 for Fly Away Home. Tindall's mother was the novelist Ursula Orange who died when she was young.
I remember how delighted I was when one of my favourite university tutors included Gillian Tindall in a group of women writers he invited to speak at a weekend literary conference. Tindall was in illustrious company, which included Susan Hill, Angela Carter and Margaret Drabble. An amazing line up of stellar writers. I remember the weekend so clearly. It was amazing listening to these women debating their craft and the inspiration which drove them to write. That I was among a small number of students invited to an intimate supper was, quite simply, the cherry on the cake. There were only twelve people round the table, including the authors, and we all chatted in a very informal way. I think I was a bit starstruck!
I went on to read all of Tindall's works and was interested that she moved from fiction to non-fiction. She carved a niche in social history, close studies of a house or location. The Guardian's obituary continues that she "wrote books that bridged the boundaries between fiction, memoir and history. Over more than six decades, she explored with a novelist’s intuition and historian’s precision how the hidden past shapes places and the people who inhabit them".
Tindall was writing about the "sense of place" long before it became fashionable, in recent years, to consider authors as part of the place that inspired them. Her wonderful book Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers is an excellent work and one which I have long enjoyed.
I have to admit that I have always enjoyed Gillian Tindall's novels more than her non-fiction. but I do apreciate her skill and precision. I'm looking forward to her final book, but then I will read some of her novels again. I'm just not sure which ones.