Mothers, daughters and make-believe
Whistle in the Dark, Emma Healey’s highly acclaimed follow-up to 2014’s Costa First Novel Award-winning Elizabeth is Missing, is now out in paperback. She fills us in on her daily routines and favourite reading, and explains why she is hesitant about meeting her literary heroes, preferring to confer with their creations. Where are you now?...
Have keyboard will travel
Any Means Necessary is the second book in Jenny Rogneby’s bestselling series of novels featuring rule-bending police detective Leona Lindberg. Keeping one foot on each side of the law, Leona mounts a special operation of colossal proportions that could reap high rewards personally as well as professionally. Here’s a glimpse into Jenny’s globetrotting writing routine....
Sensations and sensibilities
Imogen Hermes Gowar’s debut novel The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock is a spellbinding and widely acclaimed tale of curiosities, desires, seduction and obsession, centring around the docks, coffee shops, parlours and brothels of late 18th-century London. She offers a peek inside her southeast London home on a typical writing day. Where are you now? On...
Scandal, intrigue and everything in-between
John Boyne is the author of nine novels for adults, five for young readers and a collection of short stories. His most recent novels are The Heart’s Invisible Furies (February 2017 – a Richard and Judy Bookclub pick, now shortlisted for the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award) and A Ladder to the Sky (August 2018)....
Daydream believer
Salley Vickers’ latest novel The Librarian is the story of Sylvia Blackwell, a woman in her twenties in the 1950s who moves to the quaint Wiltshire market town of East Mole to work in a library. When she falls in love with an older man, her interactions with his precocious daughter and her neighbours’ son...
Living on the edge
In Natasha Carthew’s raw, uncompromising and intensely lyrical first adult novel All Rivers Run Free, we encounter a brittle young woman called Ia Pendilly, who lives with her brutal common-law husband in a caravan on the Cornish coast. When Ia finds an abandoned waif washed up on the shore, she makes a precarious break for...
Down to a T
Sally Rooney, whose debut novel Conversations with Friends is a frank and funny examination of intimacy, infidelity and what it means to be a young woman in the 21st century, has scooped the 2017 Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. She takes a break from editing her next book to answer our quickfire...
Summer at Sheep’s Head
Nick Laird’s latest novel Modern Gods is a provocative tale of two Northern Irish sisters who trying to negotiate unexpected challenges of faith, family, guilt and repentance – both at home and in the depths of a Papua New Guinea rainforest. He answers our quickfire Q&A on a recent London visit. Where are you now?...
Seeking the zing
Shanthi Sekaran’s second novel Lucky Boy is a moving and timely account of motherhood, immigration, infertility, adoption and minority life in contemporary America. It’s an eventful road trip from the Mexican border to Silicon Valley, told with verve and love. Her precious writing time is usually spent among trusted friends. Where are you now? I’m...
Keeping it pastoral
Tim Pears’ spellbinding new novel The Horseman tells the story of a touching, unexpected friendship between a carter’s son and a landowner’s daughter. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy that begins in a remote valley on the Devon–Somerset border in the early years of the twentieth century. He fills us in on his...
