Welcome to Gary Raymond's JellyBread
A novel about love, music, and murder.
JellyBread is the new serialised novel from Gary Raymond, released from September 2nd, 2022.
The headlines:
· Welsh novelist draws on Dickens for an experimental new novel about his hometown.
· Gary Raymond’s latest novel to be serialised over a year via the Substack platform.
· Subscribers receive regular instalments of the epic new novel, JellyBread, via email in a move that sees Raymond follow writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk in experimenting with the Substack format.
· JellyBread is described (by the author) as “A sprawling Dickensian dark comedy about a town and a great love and a dead body all set to music and the sound of heels on wooden floors.”
The details:
Novelist, broadcaster, and critic, Gary Raymond has finally written his Newport novel. JellyBread is a sprawling Dickensian epic that tells the story of a whole town over one weekend, but will tell it as a serial over a year.
Raymond said, “I have put off writing a novel about my hometown for many reasons, but the main one was I had always struggled with how to do it. But when I was introduced to the potential for experimentation in the way stories can be told via the serialised form, I began to realise how it could be done. Telling a story in serial form changes the relationship you have with the reader, and it alters expectations and plays with ideas of linear storytelling – what you can put down, when, and why. It’s an enormously exciting experiment in storytelling.”
The serial:
JellyBread tells the story of Moses and Vardaman, two twenty-something DJs, who get caught up in the mysterious death of bouncer Aaron Bailey. But the story takes in a carnival of richly drawn characters that brings the vibrant soul of this fictionalised version of the city Newport to life.
The experimental digital format will also allow for embedded multimedia aspects to the novel, as well as augmenting it with supplementary content, including discussions on the art of storytelling with some leading writers.
The author
Gary Raymond is a novelist, critic, editor and broadcaster. His third novel, Angels of Cairo, was published in the UK in June 2021. He is the presenter of The Review Show for BBC Radio Wales and is editor of Wales Arts Review. He is the author of three novels, The Golden Orphans (2018) For Those Who Come After (2015), and Angels of Cairo. He has also written one non-fiction title, How Love Actually Ruined Christmas (2020). He has edited a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books, from short story anthologies to political memoir. In 2019, he edited Renegade Wales: 13 Short Stories from New Voices in Welsh Fiction for Bee Books of Kolkata, India. As a critic, he has been seen in the pages of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, and can be heard regularly on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Radio 3’s Sunday Morning Show. In the last ten years he has written about film, music, theatre, dance, literature and politics. He is also writer and presenter of BBC radio documentaries Lockdown Unlocked Me (2022), How Great Was How Green Was My Valley (2021), and How Tom Jones Conquered America (2020). He is currently working on a (sort of) history of Welsh literature for University of Wales Press imprint Calon Books, due for publication in 2024.
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