Oyinkan Braithwaite: ‘It was a way out of my writer’s block. I wanted to do something for myself’
My Sister, the Serial Killer (Atlantic, January)
Six months before Oyinkan Braithwaite turned 30, she began to panic. It wasn’t the prospect of getting older that alarmed her, but that she had still not written a novel and sent it to an agent, as she had been promising herself. It was now or never, she thought, and she got to work.
“I was writing in a frenzy,” says Braithwaite, speaking from her home in Lagos, Nigeria. “I asked myself: ‘Are you really going to turn 30 never having sent out a novel to an agent? You say you want to achieve this dream but you haven’t even tried!’”
She didn’t expect the draft to sell. She had not written for a while and conceived the story of My Sister, the Serial Killer – a combination of deadly sexual attraction, psychosis, murder and sibling loyalty – as a way of flexing her writing muscles. “The book was a way back out of my writer’s block. I wanted to do something fun for myself.”
A month later, in September 2017, she had completed the first draft for what would become her sensational debut; the book sold both at home, in Nigeria, and in Britain and the US, well before she hit her milestone birthday in March last year. By last month, it had been translated into nine languages and the film rights sold to Working Title.
The book is a thriller whose plot revolves around two sisters, the younger and more beautiful of whom keeps killing her boyfriends. Its sparky black comedy makes it something of a satire-meets-slasher, but its broader, more serious themes include timely explorations of violence against women and psychotic female rage.
Was the story inspired by the flood of testimonies that emerged out of the #MeToo movement? No, says Braithwaite, “the idea first came when I read about the black widow spider [who eats the male of the species after mating with them]”.
Born in Nigeria, Braithwaite shuttled between London and Lagos as she was growing up (her parents are Nigerian-born British citizens) and she now considers both cities to be home in different ways. She fell in love with poetry in her UK primary school, returning to Lagos to go to secondary school, then back to London to sit her A-levels and do a law and creative writing degree at the Kingston University. She took a job for a while as an editor in the Lagos publishing house Kachifo, but left to work on her own writing.
For a time, poetry took precedence – she was among the top 10 finalists in Lagos’s Eko Poetry Slam in 2014 – but then she realised she wanted to focus on prose. In 2016, she was shortlisted for the Commonwealth short story prize for The Driver, which featured a relationship between a young woman from a wealthy Nigerian family and a chauffeur, and dealt with issues of class, wealth and exploitative love.
This debut is not her first attempt at writing a full-length novel: she had already completed two novels before she began this one, but they have not been sent to an agent. The first is a romance with a tragic ending, and the second a fantasy epic which also plays with the black widow idea: “It has this tribe of Amazonian women, like the black widow spiders, who spend a lot of time going from village to village, slaughtering men.”
Even though she feels that the second manuscript is too messy for publication, she hopes to return to the genre. “I’d like to try writing fantasy because it has everything – you can have crime and romance and the magic of it is that it allows you to stay connected to your childhood self.”
But for now, she is satisfied at having met her own deadline: “When I began writing this novel, the idea of having it rejected [by a publisher] was better than knowing that I had dreamed of doing it but that I hadn’t tried at all. Arifa Akbar
Alex Michaelides: ‘Agatha Christie made me a reader and a writer’
The Silent Patient (Orion, February)
When Alex Michaelides was growing up in Cyprus, there were long, hot summers which he and his sister would spend at the beach. The summer he turned 13, he borrowed his sister’s collection of Agatha Christie novels and read one every couple of days. “They were the first adult books I read, the first time that I’d ever disappeared into someone else’s world. Christie made me a reader and a writer.”
Almost three decades later, Michaelides, 41, has written a debut novel with a narrative to rival that of his boyhood literary heroine. The Silent Patient is a taut, meticulously plotted and compelling novel that has earned advance praise from the likes of Lee Child, Stephen Fry and David Baldacci. It was the subject of a seven-way publisher auction and has so far sold in 40 foreign territories, a record for a UK debut thriller.
The Silent Patient is narrated by Theo Faber, a psychotherapist determined to discover why Alicia Berenson, a famous artist accused of murdering her husband, has refused to speak since her husband’s death. The therapeutic setting was inspired by Michaelides’s own experience. “Therapy is very important to me and has been a major part of my life,” he says. “I was in individual therapy twice a week for about 10 years and then I was in group therapy for quite a while. All the raw emotional stuff is my own. I put a lot of myself into the book.”
Running through the novel is the Greek myth of Alcestis, and Euripides’s play of the same name. Michaelides says he has been “haunted” by the play since reading it at school as a teenager: “It’s something about feeling unlovable and unworthy that I related to. And a sense of being damaged, I guess. At that point in my life I felt quite damaged That’s probably why it haunted me.”
The Alcestis theme is perhaps one of the reasons that The Silent Patient is finding such traction both among early readers and the tranche of movie executives who fought to option it. With its story of female sacrifice and the silencing of a woman post-trauma, it feels highly relevant in a post #MeToo world. “It’s about silence as a weapon,” Michaelides says. “And it was very clear in my head when I was writing the book that Alicia was surrounded by these men who were imprisoning her. Like Alcestis, Alicia is trapped and she’s denied a voice. It’s a lifetime of being made to think that she wasn’t worthy, she wasn’t good enough, and maybe that’s something that a lot of women [readers] have been responding to.”
The novel has already been optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, with Michaelides due to write the screenplay, a fitting circularity for a novelist who has spent the past 15 years working as a screenwriter.
After an English degree at Cambridge University, he took a screenwriting course at the American Film Institute and embarked on a career in a film industry he found “soul destroying”. He was on the brink of giving up writing when he decided to have one last throw of the dice: “I thought, ‘Before I give up writing, I’m going to try and write the one thing I always wanted to write’, which was an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery with a deeper psychological complexity.”
Novel writing, he discovered, was his natural medium: “Being able to move into someone’s head – it’s totally liberated me. In a film, you have to keep moving. In a book, you can go down rabbit holes, go into internal monologues. The opportunity to really slow down was a revelation.”
In spite of the hype surrounding the novel, Michaelides is circumspect about his pre-publication success: “Even now I’m so ridiculously happy when someone says they like it.” It is a novel, he says, that asks the question: can you get over your childhood?
And what’s the answer?
“That if you hold yourself in awareness, then you can. Otherwise you’re destined to re-enact it.” Hannah Beckerman
Elizabeth Macneal: ‘It’s all about what it means to be stifled and how to achieve freedom’
The Doll Factory (Picador, May)
When Elizabeth Macneal was a teenager she began to collect literary classics – not in handy paperbacks like most bookworms her age, but in antique editions, which she would track down in charity shops or antiquarian bookstores. “All of my friends spent their money on alcohol and drugs and I would say, ‘Sorry, I can’t go out tonight because I’ve just bought 14 volumes of Shakespeare’.”
Neatly stacked by author, they dominate the living room of her small east London house. “They are the epitome of ornament versus function. I read one of the Hardys but spilt tea on it and cracked the spine,” she says -, so her reading is now confined to humbler copies.
The obsessiveness of collectors powers one strand of her debut novel, The Doll Factory, while the other centres on the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the group of precocious young painters and poets who faced down the Victorian art establishment. Though initially she assumed these two subjects belonged to different novels, gradually she realised that they dovetailed neatly in the story of a talented working-class girl who is adopted as a model by an up-and-coming artist while being stalked by a creepy taxidermist.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais lounge in the background as the story of Iris unfolds: she is a shadow version of Lizzie Siddal, the model for Millais’s drowned Ophelia, who was also an artist in her own right. Released from the drudgery of painting the faces on children’s dolls after negotiating art lessons in exchange for modelling, Iris finds herself posing for hours on end as the mythological Queen in a grand painting which is to be entered for the Great Exhibition in 1851.
Her new independence is exhilarating, dizzying, terrifying – and constantly endangered by the men she encounters along the way. “I guess for me the whole book is an exploration of freedom and imprisonment; what it means to be stifled and how it feels to achieve creative and literal freedom,” says Macneal. “It’s also about what it means to be held back by both an individual and a society that don’t seem to have room for a woman to transcend her class and gender.”
Jacketed in luminous blue, and clearly targeted at fans of Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring and Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist, the novel has a vivid energy of its own – bringing a painterly eye to the tricks of the pre-Raphaelite trade: a dash of emerald to emphasise lips; a lush resinous gloss “to make the Queen’s fur-trimmed dress shine like stained glass”.
It’s no surprise to find that the 30-year-old author is also an artist. She has a fully equipped pottery in her garden shed, though she came late to the artisanal life. Born and brought up in Edinburgh, the eldest of three children, she graduated from Oxford University (where her passion for Victorian clutter found its first expression in “actually a rather bad” thesis) to a job with a management consultancy.
Though safe and lucrative, the job was her own version of Iris’s doll emporium, so she decided to strike out by signing up for pottery classes. “I loved the peace of it and – particularly working as part of a big company where I couldn’t even explain what I did – the satisfaction of turning this lump of earth into something useful and beautiful.”
Her pots began to sell, enabling her to leave her job and pursue her other interest: writing. By the time she enrolled on a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia she had already had two novels rejected. “I thought I’d go on the course and write some short stories,” she says, but her tutors pushed her towards another novel. She entered a Scottish prize for unpublished writers with half a manuscript, racing through the last 50,000 words after it was accepted. That early draft of The Doll Factory not only won her the Caledonia award but secured her an agent and had publishers beating at her door: 14 of them fought to win it, and television rights were snapped up.
As the build-up to publication begins, she has retreated to her pottery shed, where 250 tiny saucers are cooling in a kiln – each decorated in delicate gold leaf with a wombat. Rossetti famously kept one as a pet, and a female wombat called Guinevere wreaks merry havoc in The Doll Factory, before expiring – much like Rossetti’s – after a feast of cigars and chocolate. Except the chocolate was Macneal’s own elaboration, on the advice of a vet friend, who pointed out that cigars alone would probably not have been fatal. The devil of all good historical fiction is in the detail. Claire Armitstead
Sara Collins: ‘Raising five children wasn’t as hard as writing this novel’
The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Viking, April)
Even though they didn’t return her affection, Sara Collins fell in love with the Victorian gothic romances she read while growing up: there wasn’t much in the likes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre for someone born in Jamaica and raised in the Cayman Islands to identify with. All the same, when she began writing The Confessions of Frannie Langton – the story of a former slave from a Jamaican plantation accused of the murder of her master and mistress, in whose London home she is employed as a maid – Collins had the “vague idea” of doing something gothic.
Around the same time, she read the biography of Francis Barber, the former slave given to Samuel Johnson, which sent her down a deep rabbit hole of stories about West Indians in England long before the Windrush generation.
“I wanted a Jamaican woman in Jane Austen territory,” she says. “I wanted to see what would happen to someone like Frannie making her presence felt in these sophisticated Georgian drawing rooms.”
Today, 46-year-old Collins splits her time between the Caribbean and London, “parallel lives” she’s lived since coming to boarding school in England at the age of 11. Despite her love affair with novels, she studied law at the London School of Economics and then worked in trust litigation for 17 years, a career she describes as “professionally but not personally fulfilling”.
She also brought up five children: “It’s a bit Brady Bunch,” she laughs, as she had two kids and then married a widowed father of three; so despite always knowing that she wanted to write, she couldn’t find the time.
About 10 years ago she gave up law to concentrate on being a stay-at-home mother. “Having it all is a mantra the modern woman is sold, supposedly to make us feel better, but it can make you feel like a failure when you don’t have that balance, when you’re feeling burnt out and short-changed.”
It was only when her youngest started secondary school that she felt able to finally start writing.
“The way I look at it now is that you can have it all, but only if you do one thing at a time.”
She enrolled in a creative writing MA. Her work in progress was shortlisted for the 2016 Lucy Cavendish prize, and she found an agent before she’d finished the course. On the evening before the novel was planned to go to a nine-way auction, Viking made an offer too good to refuse. The book’s also been optioned for TV – Collins is currently working on the adaptation. Not that the writing process was easy: “Nothing I have ever done, including raising five children, was harder than writing this novel.”
From Charlotte Brontë through Sarah Waters (at the novel’s heart is a love story between Frannie and her white mistress), Alias Grace and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, The Confessions of Frannie Langton draws on a wealth of literary influences, although Collins admits that she’s always found Rhys’s novel “problematic because it privileges the white Creole experience at the expense of women like Frannie”.
As a black woman she feels pressure to “write about race in an emotionally honest way”, which is why she wanted Frannie to “challenge the idea of pure victimhood”. What is her response to those who question the authenticity of such bold historical revisionism?
“Because of the dominance of stuffy male academics, we’re not used to hearing these voices, so when they’re fictionalised it comes as a shock and we might think of it as anachronistic,” she says. “But I think all we’re doing with historical fiction is imagining what people might have said if they’d been able to speak for themselves.” Lucy Scholes
Bev Thomas: ‘The reality is that therapists have crumbling lives like everybody else’
A Good Enough Mother (Faber, April)
Bev Thomas never expected to set her first novel in the world of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Having worked for many years as a clinical psychologist in the NHS, her first attempts at writing included forays into historical fiction. But eventually she found herself writing a novel set in her professional domain. “I’ve always been interested in what people do and why they do things,” Thomas says. “That’s why I trained as a clinical psychologist. When I began writing it was fundamental for me to think that the characters made psychological sense. It’s a psychological drama rather than a thriller.”
A Good Enough Mother is about grief, motherhood and the complexities of the therapist-patient relationship. The novel’s narrator is Dr Ruth Hartland, a highly respected psychotherapist and director of a trauma unit whose private life is unravelling: her teenage son has gone missing, her marriage has fallen apart and her relationship with her daughter is strained. When a patient resembling her missing son arrives at the unit, the boundaries between Ruth’s professional judgment and her personal trauma begin to blur, with devastating consequences.
Part of Thomas’s motivation was, she says, to humanise therapists: “The reality is that therapists have crumbling lives like everybody else: marriages that don’t work, children they can’t manage very well… They are not perfect people but that doesn’t stop them being fantastic therapists.”
The novel is immersed in the world of therapy: there are discussions about transference and counter-transference, and references to Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, who first introduced the idea of “the good-enough mother”.
“You’re opening a door on to an intimate world,” Thomas says. “My aim is that people who are not necessarily ever going to have therapy might find the concepts useful outside the therapy room: that it might change the way they work with a colleague, or how they understand what their child might be feeling.”
Alongside an exploration of therapy, the novel examines the aspirations and limitations of motherhood. “[The novel] enables you to grapple with all sorts of dilemmas,” Thomas says. “What does it mean to get it right? What do you do if your child is struggling? How much do you bear letting them find their way? I think it’s a real challenge. And I think there’s such a lot of pressure at the moment to get it right.”
Integral to Ruth’s narrative is the experience of loss, which, as Thomas observes, is universal. “It’s something that finds its way into the therapy room in all sorts of guises. I don’t just mean bereavement, but loss of identity or loss of a family member through drugs or alcohol or mental health issues. Loss is such a human condition.”
These universal themes led to A Good Enough Mother being the subject of a five-way publisher auction. But Thomas’s route to publication has involved “18 years of hard graft”. She has, she says, become “an Arvon junkie”, attending multiple creative writing courses. She likes the collective work done in creative writing groups. “Getting that feedback has definitely altered things I’ve written. If you feel supported and contained then I think you can do your best work.” Writing groups mirror her current role as an organisational consultant, helping mental health teams collaborate and communicate more effectively. “I do love groups. I think it’s fascinating how group processes get played out in organisations.”
Thomas now plans to combine writing with her clinical work. “For me, the leap from therapy to writing wasn’t quite such a leap as it might seem,” she says. “Part of what therapists do is help people tell their life stories. And you write in order to engage and have some kind of connection. So to now have this opportunity to connect with readers through a psychological book is fantastic.” Hannah Beckerman
Isabella Hammad: ‘Listening to my father, I thought: this would make a great novel’
The Parisian (Jonathan Cape, April)
Isabella Hammad, 27, was a teenager when she first felt a “real impulse” to be a writer. “It was Virginia Woolf that made me feel the need to express myself in that way,” she says, but she also had a tale she was itching to tell. ‘‘It was a particular story that I wanted to get out, about my great grandfather Midhat in Palestine. I had heard all these stories about him and I remember the exact moment – in the back of the car, listening to my father talking about him – when I thought ‘This would make a great novel.’”
The Parisian is a hugely accomplished historical sweep of a book describing the life and times of young Palestinian dreamer, Midhat Kamal. It encompasses his childhood in Nablus, Palestine, student days in Montpellier, the turbulent years of the first world war and the Palestinian struggle for independence.
Hammad is careful to say that while the central character has the same name as her great-grandfather, the book is heavily fictionalised, that she has “joined the dots imaginatively”. The result is a novel of immense skill and confidence, garnering praise from Zadie Smith, who taught her for a while, and who calls it “a sublime reading experience… surpassingly intelligent”.
Hammad studied at Oxford University then Harvard, and last year won the Paris Review’s Plimpton prize for fiction with a short story called Mr Can’aan. She grew up in west London with her parents and brother and navigates her heritage with care, commenting that she finds talking about her father “tricky” when I ask about him and their relationship with his homeland.
Her grandmother, she says, was a big matriarch in the Palestinian community in London when she was growing up, “so [Palestine] was very present. But we didn’t go there as kids… I went for the first time when I was researching this book, to Nablus to visit my family, and to Ramallah as well.”
Her father spent his childhood in Lebanon. “He was there during the war, when it was very dangerous to be a Palestinian in Lebanon, and so people became shape shifters a little bit. The relationship those of his generation have [with Palestine] can be complicated. In the Palestinian diaspora, people either really commit to the Palestinian cause and talk about it a lot, or they want to assimilate.”
A theme in the book, she says, is the pressure Palestinians feel to somehow speak for their whole country. “This is a struggle many Palestinians face: they don’t want to be defined in this way, to have to be representative. There is no single Palestinian experience. The life of a Palestinian living in Nablus is very different from a Palestinian living in Gaza or Jerusalem. Different from living in Jaffa, Syria or Lebanon. I mean, I’m obviously a mix, but I’m more complex than that, and I don’t think I can be representative in any way.”
Before writing the book Hammad spent about a year in the Middle East, researching – which, she says, was its own adventure. “I interviewed about 80 members of my family, but also I spent a lot of time with historians, geographers and refugees.”
Does she feel a little responsibility, having written a book based on the life of a relative who has the same name as the central character? (Her father has read and enjoyed the book.) “Yes, in a way,” she says. “But the act of writing often feels irresponsible because you’re in imagination, a dream zone.”
Her home is now in Brooklyn, New York, where she has begun work on her next novel, also set in Palestine – “but contemporary and shorter!” – which she has just visited again to do more research. “For the time being it’s my obsession.”
Given the praise The Parisian is already receiving, does she feel the weight of expectation?
“I’m not really thinking about it,” she says. “I think it really helps to have started writing something new. It means that’s where my lifeblood is now. I did the work, I did the book. What happens happens.” Ursula Kenny
Rosie Price: ‘It wasn’t until I started writing about sexual assault that the work took off’
What Red Was (Harvill Secker, May)
Rosie Price had set her sights on being a writer several years before she started work on What Red Was. “But it wasn’t until I started writing about sexual assault that the work took off. It felt so urgent – there was so much I needed to say, and that gave me the momentum to keep going.”
Price, 26, was herself the victim of rape, when she was “too young to understand properly”. Through writing the book, she began to make sense of her own experiences, exploring how the assault had “changed my view of the world”.
The novel is an intriguing blend: part comedy of manners, part hard-hitting drama. Price was influenced, she says, by Edward St Aubyn’s blackly comic Patrick Melrose novels, and the idea that “the more levity and joyful moments you have, the darker you are able to go”.
It follows a young woman, Kate Quaile, as she leaves her modest upbringing in rural Gloucestershire for university. There she meets Max Rippon, a charismatic young man from a privileged background. Kate is drawn into Max’s world, and becomes close to his mother, Zara, a successful film director. She becomes increasingly reliant on the Rippons, both emotionally and financially, so when she is assaulted by one of their inner circle, she finds herself trapped.
When Price started writing the novel she was working in a literary agency – a job she had held since graduating three years earlier. She initially worked on the book in the evenings and at weekends, but then quickly realised that she needed to “make the leap and commit”. She left her job for a more flexible tutoring role, which allowed her to write in the mornings. The gamble paid off: there was a five-way auction among publishers for What Red Was, and film rights have now been bought by the BBC.
Of course the book feels timely in the light of the #MeToo movement – but the project was already well under way when the first Weinstein allegations surfaced in October 2017. Some of the echoes in Price’s narrative seem almost uncanny. “When it all emerged, I already had a character who was a female film director, who had been assaulted,” she says.
Although she praises #MeToo as “an incredible movement”, she describes that period as a difficult one for people who have been victims of rape and assault. “It is really hard to be reminded of it every time you turn on the news. And in some ways it felt as though those experiences were being normalised.”
What Red Was has allowed Price not only to explore her own legacy of trauma, but also to find a way of speaking out – the pros and cons of which are explored in the book.
“Nobody can tell a rape survivor how to behave – there are a plethora of reasons why speaking out may not be the right thing to do,” she says. “The one thing you have afterwards is control over how you tell your story. For me, the process of writing has been very empowering.” Alice O’Keeffe
Beth O’Leary: ‘I started to notice how many coffee mugs there were by the sink’
The Flatshare (Quercus, April)
It was moving house that gave Beth O’Leary, 26, the idea for her first novel. She had been living in London for a couple of years after graduating from Oxford University, working in children’s publishing, but never felt “quite right” in the city. “It’s so loud and nonstop and just not me,” she says. So she moved back to Winchester, her home town, to share a flat with her boyfriend, Sam, a junior doctor.
Ironically, she found she saw even less of him than when she had been living 60 miles away. “He was working nights and I was commuting to work, so we could go a whole week when there was always one of us asleep in the bed but never [both] at the same time. It was such a weird way to live, being in the same space as him but not actually seeing each other.”
She found ways of telling how Sam’s day had been. “I would start to notice how many coffee mugs were by the sink. If his trainers were out, that meant he’d had time to go for a run before he went to bed. And it just got me thinking, ‘What an interesting thing that is, how close you can feel to someone when you’re in the same physical space but not at the same time. Could two people who don’t know each other become very close living like this?’”
That is the big question driving O’Leary’s story about two hard-pressed strangers who decide to save money by sharing a one-bedroom flat. Leon works nights as a nurse, so he occupies the flat during the day, while Tiffy is out at work as a publicist. She has the place to herself the rest of the time. The book, which O’Leary wrote on her laptop during her daily commute, explores Leon and Tiffy’s relationship and their lives as they communicate through Post-It notes, introducing us to an eclectic cast of minor characters, from Leon’s brother, who is in prison, to Tiffy’s controlling ex-partner.
Having rented a flat in London herself, where a sewage pipe from the flat above used to leak through her bedroom wall, O’Leary says: “It didn’t seem at all implausible to me that two people would agree to that kind of arrangement, because so many people I knew were so desperate to find somewhere to live in London, however awful.”
Within weeks of her sending the book to an agent it had sold in a pre-emptive deal for six figures, with foreign rights snapped up in 30 countries.
O’Leary has always wanted to be a writer. Growing up as one of six children in a noisy household, she spent every spare moment reading books and writing stories. “I just never thought it was really a feasible career path,” she says. Now she has given up her job in publishing to write fulltime. “It is a total dream,” she says. Lisa O’Kelly
Yara Rodrigues Fowler: ‘I’d love it if the book made Latin Americans in the UK more visible’
Stubborn Archivist (Fleet, February)
Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s debut is unlike any other book you’ve read. A blend of prose and poetry, it’s a collection of short pieces that gradually cohere into a larger narrative. But while it’s formally experimental, it never feels like a chore. Holding the disparate elements together is a strong sense of identity and voice – the development of which is, in fact, partly what Stubborn Archivist is about.
Rodrigues Fowler, 26, is a south Londoner, the child of an English father and a Brazilian mother. The book draws on her experience of growing up between those cultures. “I would love it if the book helped to make the Latin American population of the UK more visible,” she says. “It’s such a heterogeneous community – racially and in terms of class.”
The Latin American diaspora forms one of the UK’s fastest-growing communities, but is not well represented in British literature – unlike in the US, where there is a strong canon of Latin American authors writing in English (Junot Díaz, Daniel Alarcón, Edwidge Danticat). On this side of the Atlantic, the multicultural experience has been explored mainly by writers with family links to former British colonies.
“I grew up reading Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie, so they were big influences,” says Rodrigues Fowler, but she also cites Danticat, Alice Walker, and the Brazilian oral storytelling tradition. “I grew up listening to musicians like Elis Regina and Caetano Veloso, and I wanted to give the book an oral poetic texture.”
Another important thread in Stubborn Archivist is that of sexual violence, and how that can be fed by racial prejudice. The protagonist, who is never named, has a British boyfriend with a taste for Brazilian porn. He asks her to grow her hair so she looks more like Penélope Cruz, and talk in Portuguese in bed. Although the violence is never made explicit, it is clear that these fantasies are the beginning of a process of dehumanisation that leads them to a dark place.
“I wanted to look at how her Brazilian identity is part and parcel of her experience of sexual assault,” says Rodrigues Fowler, who is the trustee of a refuge for Latin American women. She hopes that people who have experienced sexual violence will read the book and identify with “how you exist in the world after that happens. And recognise that you can be in love with the person who is violent towards you.”
Flitting nimbly through generations, between Brazil and south London, between dating and dictatorship, this is a novel that is personal and political – and its unusual form is integral to its power. Rodrigues Fowler says she wanted to “use blank space as a way of expressing trauma – both the trauma of dictatorship and sexual violence”. Alice O’Keeffe
Others 2019 debuts to watch out for
You Will Be Safe Here
Damian Barr
Bloomsbury, April
The award-winning author of the memoir Maggie and Me explores legacies of abuse and redemption in his searing first novel, set in South Africa.
The First Time Lauren Pailing Died
Alyson Rudd
Harper Collins, July
Stylish time-slip story à la Sliding Doors from respected Times newspaper sports journalist.
Blood Orange
Harriet Tyce
Wildfire, February
Disturbing domestic noir featuring a secretly alcoholic lawyer defending a woman who has stabbed her husband.
Saltwater
Jessica Andrews
Sceptre, May
Coming-of-age tale from 25-year-old who sparked a publishers’ bidding war.
A Perfect Explanation
Eleanor Anstruther
Salt, March
Fictionalised story of the duke’s granddaughter who sold her son to her sister for £500.
Golden Child
Claire Adam
Faber, January
Family saga set in Trinidad, acquired by Sarah Jessica Parker for her imprint SJP for Hogarth in the US.
The Most Difficult Thing
Charlotte Philby
Borough Press, July
The granddaughter of Kim Philby blends a classic spy mystery with modern domestic drama.
Last Ones Left Alive
Sarah Davis-Goff
Tinder Press, March
Dystopian, post-apocalyptic drama set in Ireland from the founder of Dublin publisher Tramp Press.
The Familiars
Stacey Halls
Bonnier Zaffre, February
Gripping tale of witchcraft set around the Pendle witch trials of 1612.
When All Is Said
Anne Griffin
Sceptre, January
A man in a hotel bar nearing the end of his life toasts and remembers those he has loved.
The Girl Before You
Nicola Rayner
Harper Collins, out as an e-book in May (e-book), July (paperback)
Described as the new Girl on the Train, this thriller about a woman obsessed by her husband’s exes is “so addictive, it should come with a health warning”, according to Alex Preston in these pages.
