I mean that both literally and metaphorically. None of us had expected that it would happen so painlessly. Everything went according to plan, just as it had been run through for us beforehand, on the lines explained in the brochures we received with our enrolment forms. I have been installed in one of the rooms on the top floor here in the hotel. As Salena Godden later said in her celebration of Termush, this hypnotic novella immediately felt like ‘someone from the future screaming to us in the past.’ That quality was obvious from the very first page: The joy of being a classics editor is opening a book lost for decades and instantly feeling the electricity of an utterly contemporary voice. What was this odd creature? I sat down at the ancient archive table and devoured it in one sitting. On taking it off the shelf, I was intrigued by the hazy scarlet cover depicting an atomic mushroom cloud. Suddenly, a slim spine with the mysterious word ‘Termush’ emblazoned across it caught my eye. One day, I was browsing Faber’s dusty stacks – filled with all our titles published over the last 90 years – on the hunt for overlooked classics. It was the kind of moment I dream of in my role as an archive mole. Ella Griffiths, Faber’s ‘archive mole’ (that is, classics editor), introduces the latest in the superb Faber Editions series, Sven Holm’s Termush, a Danish novella of nuclear apocalypse that had her hooked from the very first page.
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