An experiment in history
Set in 1830s British North America, my debut novel, The Voyageur, is about an orphan named Alex who falls in love with a rum-guzzling fur trader and follows the older man into the hallucinogenic wilderness of the Great Lakes, only to be shot in the stomach when a trading-post robbery goes off the rails. Present...
And they lived happily ever after…?
Few of us can resist the appeal of a happy ending – especially if it involves two great characters heading off into the sunset together and living happily ever after. As a writer what could be more satisfying after years of toil than capping your fountain pen knowing that everyone is coupled up and all...
A lady falls
She let out a sigh as she fell, an exhalation so sweet and soft that not a soul heard it, not even the cop who’d passed by the building not two seconds before; it was the smashing of china and the subsequent thud of her body landing hard against the stone steps three storeys down...
Elsa Drucaroff, Rodolfo Walsh and Argentina
The years of the military Junta cast a very long shadow in Argentina, and it’s thoroughly poignant that Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case appears in English just as the country has taken a swerve in a desperate new direction. I had never heard of Rodolfo Walsh. That was put right by Slava Faybysh when he brought...
A kind of truce
It’s the middle of the night on a residential street. Rodolfo Walsh leaves his house and heads to a nearby bar located at the last stop of one of the city bus lines. At this hour, it’s full of regulars: cabbies and bus drivers. Since the payphone is all the way in back – right...
Connecting with lost souls
My third novel Hazardous Spirits is set in Edinburgh in 1923. The story follows Evelyn Hazard, whose husband Robert wakes up one day and announces that he can speak to the spirits of the dead. Like many strange tales, the idea for this novel originated during an unusual blind date. I arrived late to the...
Trials, trauma and women’s tales
In winter 2017, I visited a sandstone cathedral in Orkney called St Magnus. I’d published two novels in as many years, with the next about to be released, and I was exhausted. This trip was meant to be a break from creating – I’d even left my laptop at home in Australia. I wandered the...
Catastrophe on the shore
The boat had seemed large at the dock, but now that they’re rumbling away from Big Island, it seems flimsy and ludicrously small. Luda tries to think of the last time she’d been on a boat before coming to the islands. Years ago. Someone’s thirtieth birthday on the thick, marshy water of the Hopeturn River...
The water-god and the feathered snake
Another man is standing guard with the usual man who is standing guard. I have not seen this man before. He is slight, narrow-faced, with a shaven upper lip. All is well? I ask. I am not in the mood for talk but the question is a courtesy. All is well, says the usual man....
Gay love stories in historical fiction
What was it like to be a gay man in Paris in 1870? While researching my novel The Beasts of Paris, I couldn’t find much in 19th-century writing about homosexual love, and even later there are strangely few literary, queer, period-set love stories (shout outs to Sarah Waters and Mary Renault), so I’m pushing the...
Spirited gatherings and random stacks
Lucy Barker’s debut novel The Other Side of Mrs Wood has been hotly anticipated since the manuscript-in-progess finished as runner-up in the inaugural Curtis Brown First Novel Prize back in 2019 – since gathering praise from literary luminaries including Marian Keyes, Sophie Irwin, Frances Quinn and Katie Fforde. The book whisks readers to the competitive...
A shower of stardust
It was long after nightfall, and a soft breeze played over Guillaume’s face. He had positioned his telescope to the portside and aft, to observe the constellations of Centaurus, Circinus, Volans and the Southern Cross. With a yellow glass disc placed over the end of the telescope, the image was more sharply focused. He was...
