My recent novels explore the impact of crime on ordinary people. They are not experts, not professionals, not detectives or forensic scientists, career criminals or lawyers or investigative journalists but people like you and me who are suddenly caught up in some horrific tragedy. They are victims and survivors. Their stories are about situations that frighten me and disturb me, the sort of thing that could happen to any one of us but that you never think will happen to you. In The Silence Between Breaths that tragedy is a terrorist attack. The current threat level in the UK is severe, meaning a terrorist attack is highly likely, and in recent weeks we’ve seen the attack at Westminster while others have been thwarted. The book follows nine characters to look at a range of responses to the threat of danger and the experience of trauma. Among those perspectives is that of a member of the terrorist’s family – a viewpoint I’ve heard little about in news and analysis. There are questions to be answered in the writing: how would each character cope, what they would do under such pressure? Questions I’m also asking of myself. When reading about real-life incidents I’ve been struck at how in the most harrowing of circumstances we have such great capacity for humanity and that’s something I’ve tried to capture in the story.

Most of these books I heard about through reviews in the press or from recommendations on Twitter. A few I found while browsing the shelves in my local library. One of the pleasures of reading is entering new worlds and finding new voices. All these novels gave me that buzz. Happy reading.

Life! Death! Prizes! by Stephen May

The Dark Circle by Linda Grant

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough

The Ship by Antonia Honeywell

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek

The Tidal Zone by Sarah Moss

Good Me Bad Me by Ali Land

Calling Major Tom by David Barnett

The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan

Barkskins by Annie Proulx

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

It’s World Book Day today so a good time to spread the word about some books I’ve enjoyed (not that I need an excuse). Enjoy!

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Quieter Than Killing by Sarah Hilary

Redemption Road by John Hart

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay Behind by Elena Ferrante

A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Believe No One by A.D. Garrett

The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

Under The Harrow by Flynn Berry

The first question people ask me when they hear about this book is not what the story is, or how it’s selling, or if it’s a crime novel but whether the title is a quote from something. It isn’t, to the best of my knowledge, but it does have that sort of ring. You can imagine it in a Shakespearean speech or a classic poem. It took months to find it. While writing the novel I’d used a working title that was way too cheesy (nope, not saying). Then I spent weeks exchanging emails with my publishers, even during my holiday on Kefalonia, chewing over possibilities. Long lists were compiled and considered. The book tells the story of a group of strangers on a train from Manchester to London who are caught up in a devastating event. Some proposed titles reflected the randomness of such tragedy: A Day Like Any Other, Out Of A Clear Blue Sky; others aimed to capture the characters’ response to sudden violence: You Can’t Kill The Spirit, The Kindness of Strangers; but nothing had the emotional resonance we were after. The Silence Between Breaths appears on the last list I submitted, along with other suggestions none of which had half the impact. I love how it echoes moments of the story, mirrors both the tension and the rupture that tears lives apart but also the contemplation that comes with such an experience. It’s an intriguing phrase and calls up a physical response in the reader. It’s perfect. And how I dreamt it up remains a mystery.

 

 

 

New year and some new book suggestions for you. I read these over the last few weeks of 2016 and they all gave me immense pleasure. Hope you find something you’ll enjoy too.

The Trespasser by Tana French

Our Souls At Night by Kent Haruf

This Must Be The Place by Maggie O’Farrell

Streets of Darkness by AA Dhand

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

To The Island by Megan Delahunt

Dodgers by Bill Beverly

Here are some more titles that I’ve really enjoyed for your delectation…

Ruby by Cynthia Bond

The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante

Sirens by Joseph Knox

The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong

The Museum of You by Carys Bray

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

The Wolf Road by Beth Lewis

Date With Death by Julia Chapman

While My Eyes Were Closed by Linda Green

The nights are drawing in. Time to curl up with a good book (well, when isn’t it?) Here are some I’ve really enjoyed, hope you find something you like.

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

In Her Wake by Amanda Jennings

Fourth of July Creek by Smith Henderson

The Woman Who Ran by Sam Baker

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

Nightblind by Ragnar Jonasson

Cities of the Plain by Cormac McCarthy

Black-Eyed Susans by Julia Heaberlin

King Crow by Michael Stewart

Black Water by Louise Doughty

A group of strangers take seats in the same carriage on a train journey from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston not knowing that their day will turn out to be a day unlike any other. A day of terror and the fight for survival, of horror and humanity. When I was developing the story, I knew I wanted to tell it from several different and increasingly connected viewpoints. As the journey progresses the characters become familiar with their fellow passengers, form opinions about them, strike up conversations and this lays the ground for the traumatic events that follow. I had used several narrators in some of my previous novels – usually three or four – but this time it was going to be nine. Yes, nine. That’s a lot of different voices to convey and it would be a challenge to make it work so the reader didn’t lose track and muddle them up, or want to skip over some of the sections.  Before starting writing, I spent several weeks working solely on the characters. I aimed for a diverse range of people, different ages and ethnicities, with varying roles and responsibilities, but they had to be more than stereotypes or ciphers, they needed to have some depth, to have quirks and flaws, foibles and secret dreams. It was up to me to know what they looked like on the outside (that meant browsing lots of images online to ‘cast’ the parts and printing off photographs) and what was going on inside their heads. Building, or uncovering, character is a process with all my writing but I suppose in this case there were a lot more people to create. Once that was done as thoroughly as possible, I could start writing and planning how the different stories would interweave though at that stage I didn’t know the fate of all the characters – that became clearer as the novel progressed, growing out of the writing. The nature of the story meant that not everyone would survive and choosing who did and didn’t was not easy but made sense within the logic of the story.

Or any time at all, really. Here are some titles I’ve enjoyed this year and you might too:

Case Book by Monica Simpson

The American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Red Dust by Gillian Slovo

A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth

Rapture by Liz Jensen

The Past by Tessa Hadley

I Am China by Xiaolu Guo

Café Assassin by Michael Stewart

Charcoal Joe by Walter Mosley

 

 

 

Half The World Away

‘a fascinating glimpse into modern China’ The Sunday Mirror

‘detection merges with high emotion’ The Times

This book, my twenty-second, is the first to venture outside Manchester. It tells the story of Jo and Tom Maddox, an estranged couple, who reunite in a desperate search for their daughter, Lori, who has gone missing in China. I chose China partly because my son lives there, and it would make the job of research a little easier, but mainly because China is such a fascinating country and so very different from here. A place in the throes of huge development and change and somewhere that my characters would feel completely at sea, unable to understand the language, unfamiliar with the culture and customs. I’d never been to China – or anywhere in Asia – so I’d little idea of what to expect when I visited. Once there, as I gathered background material for the book, I knew it was important to capture the particular feel of the city, Chengdu. Not just with visual descriptions but by conveying the sounds and smells, the tactile sensations of the air and dust, the taste of the spicy food, the atmosphere. Here are some of the pictures I took, and some of these locations appear in the book.

 

Half The World Away comes out in paperback on July 14th.