Paul Torday

Morality plays began in the Middle Ages. They were intended to explain Christian precepts and encourage a mostly illiterate audience to lead a Godly life. Typically, they describe the progress of an Everyman who falls into temptation and then is redeemed. In modern times it’s our newspapers who stage our morality plays. The press coverage of the expenses scandal in 2009 and 2010 was certainly strong on MPs falling into temptation. There wasn’t much about redemption, though. I recently wrote a novella about the subject of guilt, and its corrosive effects on memory and personality, and I decided to use the expenses scandal as the locus for these ideas.

Veteran SF writer and devout Luddite Ray Bradbury has finally bowed to the inevitable and allowed Farenheit 451 to be reproduced in a digital format. Bradbury's hand was forced by contractual reality: his publishers refused to re-sign him without digital rights. Surely print must now be damned if even Bradbury has to consort with his Devil? To mark the occasion, we have commissioned two posts about the brave new world of the eBook. Here, Paul Torday, author of the award-winning novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, tells of his latest digital foray. Where will this end up?   This December,Breakfast at the Hotel Déjà Vu, a novella I have written, will become available only as an eBook.