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The Inspiration behind The Opposite of Lonely by Doug Johnstone

The inspiration behind the latest book in the Skelfs series – The Opposite of Lonely – comes from a whole host of places, as it always does with these crazy, diverse, complex books. If you don’t know, the books are about three generations of women from the Skelf family who have to take over the running of both a funeral-director firm and private-investigator business when the patriarch of the family dies.

This is a great set-up that allows me to investigate pretty much anything I want, and that’s just as true of this book as its predecessors. The novel opens with a potential disaster at a funeral on Cramond Island off the coast of Edinburgh. Cramond is a tidal island, and let’s just say someone doesn’t read the tide timetable very well.

This opening kicks off a storyline that concerns a group of itinerant people who have parked their caravans and campers on the shore next to Cramond Village, drawing criticism from the locals and authorities. These people aren’t ethnic Travellers, more just people who prefer the travelling lifestyle, and I’ve long been fascinated by that idea.

This was crystallised when a similar group arrived in my local community and were met with extreme online and in-person reactions. I found that really depressing, that local folk just disregarded and abused them. What happened to the idea of live and let live? I wondered if that anger was partly a result of jealousy – these were people who seemed more free than the rest of us. They were also vulnerable, so an easy target.

In The Opposite of Lonely two of the travellers are victims of an arson attack, and Dorothy, the head of the Skelfs, investigates. What she finds is more dangerous and poisonous than even she could’ve expected.

Without giving anything away, that storyline is to do with abuse of power. This ties into one of the other plot lines in the book, where Dorothy’s granddaughter Hannah investigates a former astronaut being abused by conspiracy theorists. The ex-astronaut, Kirsty, is a hero of Hannah’s, and she is drawn into her orbit despite her better judgement, with dangerous consequences.

This story partly stems from my interest in something called the overview effect, where astronauts return to earth having had a profound, almost religious, experience in space. The psychological effects of going to space haven’t really been investigated, and I found it fascinating to dig into what that might do to a normal person. Needless to say, it’s a crime novel, so it doesn’t end up with a happy-ever-after.

There’s so much else that inspired this book, same as all of the books in the series. But the overall themes have remained the same throughout – looking at issues of power, forgiveness, empathy and, above all, human connection. I hope this book lives up to its predecessors, but I’ll let the readers be the judge of that.

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How I came to write The Murmurs … by Michael J. Malone

The idea for this book came to me in a dream. Sort of.

Let me explain.

It was one of those mornings when you wake up and you need just another five minutes in bed, you know? So, on waking, I simply turned on to my side, snuggled in under my quilt, and closed my eyes…

And in that second, in my mind’s eye I saw a group of people sitting around a dinner table – and somehow I knew everything about them.

There is a married couple, with their twins, Annie and Lewis, aged twelve years old. And a woman who the twins have never ever seen. She is their mother’s sister, and her name is Sheila. The twins are understandably curious. Who is this woman? And if she’s their aunt, why have they never met her?

Somehow I know this happens in a remote town in the far north-west of Scotland. And somehow I know this is a place steeped in religion. A location where terrible things have happened in the past … Vikings … the Reformation … witch hunts … I see a little round, white church – built that way so there is nowhere for the devil to hide – with a patch of bare earth outside where nothing ever grows…

Then, in my dream state I watch as Annie experiences something terrifying. Her aunt’s face almost judders – as if being viewed through a faulty television screen – and Annie can somehow see through her skin to the bones beneath – and she knows, she KNOWS, that her aunt is dying of cancer. And to add more shock to the situation, her aunt isn’t even remotely surprised when Annie blurts out her diagnosis – indeed, her expression betrays the fact that she almost expected it.

I jumped out of bed – got to my desk – and started to tease out the story a bit more.

Who exactly was this aunt?

Why was she estranged from her sister’s family?

What happened to Annie – some kind of premonition? Will it happen again?

Why isn’t Sheila surprised?

Why was this happening to Annie – and why now?

Sssh – are you listening?

The Murmurs.

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Five fun facts about Gunnar Staalesen

Did you know that Gunnar Staalesen…

…has run ten marathons and fifty half-marathons during his running life. He still goes running at last once a week.

…learnt to play piano as a kid, but with no significant success. He also plays the harmonica – many young boys of his age from Bergen learnt it on the street, mostly for private use…

…preferred to listen to Frank Sinatra, musicals and jazz while his friends were enjoying rock ‘n’ roll. The Beatles did eventually turn him towards rock, but he has maintained a lifelong love for good old jazz music, in the style of Ben Webster and others, with a special love for saxophone players…

…has a small herb garden at his summer cabin north of Bergen, where he grows thyme, oregano, rosemary and other herbs to use in his summer salads…

…read his first Sherlock Holmes story when he was thirteen and has been a crime fan ever since…

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Five fun facts about Awais Khan

Awais Khan is author of the exquisitely written Someone Like Her, out now in paperback.

Read five fascinating facts about Awais, one of Pakistan’s most revered authors.

I’m not a one-book-at-a-time person and have several on the go at once. In my thirties, I find that I am drawn towards a variety of genres whereas in my teens, I would exclusively read classics or YA. These days, I am reading Homecoming by Kate Morton, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton and The Fascination by Essie Fox. Maybe it’s the technologically advanced era we live in, but I love to multi-task and I’ve incorporated that same formula when it comes to reading books. Historical fiction has been a revelation for me. I had no idea it was so very enjoyable.

Despite it being my home city, Lahore is not my favourite. That honour goes to London. It is hard for me to define London in a word or even a sentence. London is a feeling. The moment I step out of Heathrow, I feel my spirits lifting. Maybe it’s the fact that London is the hub of publishing and I absolutely love everything about the industry, or that a lot of my friends are based there, but something about the city is just therapeutic. After the pollution and dullness of Lahore, London is like a breath of fresh air. This feeling is what inspired me to include London in my latest novel Someone Like Her. I wanted to help people see London the way I saw it.

My favourite food is Chicken Biryani, and every bite is pure heaven. It’s a unique blend of ethnic spices that is not always easy to get right, and you have to make sure that you add just the right amount of water to the rice and just the right amount of oil too. In Pakistan, we eat basmati rice, and it’s so slender and fragile that overcooking can ruin it completely and undercooking it … well, nobody like undercooked rice. More than that, biryani is also a symbol of the diversity of flavours of our region and is the kind of food that can bring together the people of South Asia.

I love wearing funky socks. My wardrobe is generally very boring and I don’t like experimenting with too many colours, but wearing colourful socks is my one indulgence. I even stopped wearing plain socks to work. The people who know me will always ask to see the kind of socks I am wearing – it’s kind of become part of my identity. My crazy socks help to lift my spirits and living in a country like Pakistan, we often need that.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t write much in the privacy of my study, and prefer noisy cafés. For some reason, the noise helps me focus. I wrote Someone Like Her in a very busy café in Lahore called Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. In 2022 I visited it so frequently that the management had a place reserved for me for the hours I spent there, drinking my favourite white chocolate mocha and typing away. The fact that I can focus better in noisy environments was something I discovered while I was in London. Struggling to write in the room I was renting, I went to a busy Starbucks near Russell Square station one day and it was as if a fog had lifted from my mind. Before I knew it, the words flowed.

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Five fun facts about Johana Gustawsson

Johana Gustawsson is author of the dazzlingly dark, bewitching gothic thriller, The Bleeding, translated by David Warriner – out now in paperback with red-sprayed edges and the first chapters of her upcoming thriller, Yule Island, included. 

1. My family’s history served as a major source of inspiration for my first and third books, Block 46 and Blood Song, both of which are part of the Roy and Castells Series

Block 46 was inspired by my paternal grandfather. He was a woodcarver before integrating the French Resistance. He was then sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, and he was one of the courageous men who organised its liberation.

Blood Song was inspired by my two grandfathers. My paternal grandpa, who, just before integrating the French Resistance, fought for the Republicans in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War in 1936; and my maternal grandfather, who was a young Spanish boy at the time, living in Barcelona.

2. I am addicted to three things.

I’ll start by the healthy one: Exercise. Every day, I wake up at five to exercise for around 45 minutes. This aids in calming my thoughts as I begin my day and then murder people in my books!

Cheese and bread are my other two addictions. I know it sounds like a caricature of French people, but that’s me: happiness is a slice of blue cheese on a slice of homemade bread.

3. I wasn’t a keen reader as a kid. My mother, a teacher, became incredibly desperate and was so disappointed that she had failed to instill in me the love of reading. Then, one day, when I was seven, she suggested I should read Agatha Christie’s A Mysterious Affair at Styles, which I completely fell in love with. This book changed my life. And that changed my vision of words and reading. It led me to the path I am now on as an author.

4. Until my mid-twenties, I dreamt of becoming an actress! I attended the Cours Florent, a famous Parisian acting school, but I soon realised that I didn’t like either castings or learning my lines, which is a bit of a problem if you want to become an actor! What I really liked, however, were the stories and the words themselves – and actually writing those things – more than interpreting them for the stage or screen!

5. Two years ago, I moved to Sweden, my husband’s home country, And my relocation inspired my most recent book, Yule Island, which will be published in the UK in December 2023. The inspiration came from a very small pedestrian island, located next to the island where I live, where there is a manor rumoured to be haunted. When a murder takes place, the subsequent investigation suggests that those rumours might be true…  

Buy your copy of The Bleeding HERE

You can connect with Johana on: TWITTER, FACEBOOK or INSTAGRAM

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Five Facts about real life influencing my fiction – Essie Fox

1. In my novel, The Fascination, one character – Tilly – doesn’t grow a single inch after a violent accident in her childhood. Only after writing this did I suddenly recall something from my own past that may have influenced the story.

At the age of eleven I was in a private swimming pool when the ceiling lights proved faulty. I’d been on a rubber float, but as I paddled through the water my fingers started stinging; the strangest prickling sensation. At the time I’d assumed it was the chlorine in the water. I should get out straightaway. However, when I touched the sides of the pool I had a shock and was thrown back in again. My sight was gone. All I could see was black and white zig zag lines, and it felt as if my body was vibrating up and down. My brother (who was younger) tried to help me escape by picking up a pole by which to drag me from the water. But the pole was made of metal. He also had a jolting shock, and then ran off into the night.

Obviously, I survived. Someone came and switched the lights off. But I was ill for some quite time … and never grew another inch. My six siblings are all well above the average in height, making me the ‘little one.’

2. Another book-related matter connects to a house called Hampton Court in Herefordshire. When I was a little girl, I always begged for whoever was driving to slow down as we passed the ancient house, so I see more easily the castellated gothic structure that stood some way beyond the road. Some years later, when I’d gone to university but was home for the summer, I was offered a job as a cleaner at the house. And what an experience that was. Passages lined with suits of armour. Heads of deer on panelled walls, and many other animals. There was also a room I really hated going into because it had such a cold and malign atmosphere. Many years afterwards that experience informed my descriptions of a haunted country house in my first novel. More recently, it’s influenced scenes in The Fascination, with my imagined Dorney Hall having a room with panelled walls, with the stuffed heads of animals … and other curiosities of a more sinister persuasion.

3. I’d never have the confidence to perform on a stage, but I have always been entranced by the glamour of the theatre. I’m sure this stems back to the place I’ve always thought of as ‘my grandmother’s ballroom’.

My grandfather ran an agricultural supply business with shopfront, offices and stores based in a grand old building originally built as a Victorian coaching inn in the rural town of Leominster. They lived in rooms on upper floors, with endless corridors and rooms running off throughout the building. One of these was a ballroom, though it was never used as such since the coaching inn closed down. I recall it as a room filled up with iron beds and tables, and sacks of grains and other foodstuff. Rats skulked in the shadows. Cobwebs hung from plaster mouldings of the ceiling like lace. The air was filled with swirling dust that shone with diamond motes of light. The memory is magical and it haunts me to this day, and now the dereliction of a majestic old building with a room that has a stage used as a theatre at one end is reborn in Linden House – a house in Chiswick, featured in The Fascination.

(Today, the Lion Ballroom has been sold and the room is beautifully restored. It can be visited for private and public events. I must confess I’ve never been. I prefer to remember the ballroom from my childhood. www.lionballroomleominster.co.uk)

4. My first job in London was as an assistant to the editor of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine. It was the oddest job, with very little actual work. But there was lots of fun, with free tickets to the theatre, and once even being asked to model for a feature depicting Christmas through the ages. Here I am as a maid in Linley Sambourne House in London’s Kensington. I often think of that location when I’m writing and describing Victorian interiors.

5. Dressing up as a Victorian is not something I go for on a regular basis, but there was also the time when some friends surprised me with a birthday outing, to be photographed with them as if in the Wild West. Afterwards I put the picture on a website I curate called The Virtual Victorian, claiming it showed a distant relative of mine, Zylphia Fox, who’d offered succour to the soldiers of the Confederate army during the Civil War. I’m amazed to say some people actually believed the story and the pictures genuine. I didn’t have the heart to say it was an April’s Fool. Perhaps one day those images will inspire yet another Victorian-themed novel … but one based in America.

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Orenda Books signs Ronnie Turner’s startlingly original, hypnotic modern gothic thriller in a two-book deal

Karen Sullivan, publisher of Orenda Books, is delighted to announce the acquisition of World English Language rights for Ronnie Turner’s So Pretty and a second (untitled) sequel, in a two-book deal negotiated with Emily Glenister at DHH Literary Agency.

Teddy Colne arrives in the small town of Rye, hoping to settle down and leave his past behind him. But fear blisters through the streets, and the locals warn him to avoid a shop known only as Berry & Vincent, where people have been known to come to a bad end. Teddy, however, is desperate to discover why everyone fears the proprietor of this establishment, and takes a job behind its dusty, creepy windows. Ada moved to Rye with her young son to escape a damaged childhood and years of never fitting in, but she’s lonely, and ostracised by the community. Ada is ripe for affection and friendship, and everyone knows it.  As old secrets bleed out into this town, so too will a mystery about a family who vanished fifty years earlier, and a community living on a knife-edge. Teddy looks for answers, thinking he is safe, but some truths are better left undisturbed, and his past will find him here, just as it has always found him before. And before long, it will find Ada too.

Karen says, ‘I am beyond excited to share this disturbing, idiosyncratic and wonderfully lyrical novel with readers worldwide. As they say, I have “history” with Ronnie. I met her when she was just sixteen, at the Penzance Literary Festival and, even then, saw the huge potential in her writing. When So Pretty was sent in on submission, I read it instantly and remain awed and fully mesmerised by Ronnie’s extraordinary writing and blown away by this original, elegant, quirky and gloriously visceral novel. There is a pervasive, brooding tension that is both unsettling and deeply compelling, and its complex themes continue to provoke thought long after the final page is turned. Ronnie is an Orenda author if ever I saw one, and I am truly thrilled to publish her sublime work. Still in her early twenties and now a Waterstones bookseller, Ronnie is an exciting and original talent, and I have no doubt that readers will be as entranced as we are.’

Ronnie says, ‘I am super excited to join the Orenda Family and work with the mighty Karen Sullivan. She is an utter powerhouse, and I have been in awe of her and all of Orenda for many years. I feel very lucky to have her championing my work, and to have found the perfect home for So Pretty, a novel which looks at identity, obsession and the perilous bonds of family. I know Karen, West Camel, Emily and I will make a great team and I’m so looking forward to this journey together, and to seeing So Pretty in the hands of readers very soon.’

Emily says ‘I have been dying to work with Karen Sullivan for a long time and when Ronnie sent me So Pretty, it had Orenda’s name all over it, so it made perfect sense that Karen loves it as much as I do. Ronnie is a fiercely talented writer, whose star is well and truly on the rise. She excels at the weird, wonderful, and downright unsettling. Watch this space, publishing!’

So Pretty will be published in January 2023 by Orenda Books. For more information, please contact Karen@orendabooks.co.uk.

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Disability Pride Month: Awareness and Change

Karen Sullivan, Publisher of Orenda Books

For anyone with optimum ability – physical, mental and otherwise – it’s difficult to imagine what it might be like when things we’ve always taken for granted are no longer there, to countenance a life without ease. 

That was certainly the case for me. I  – and then my children – rarely experienced anything other than mild illness, but then two things changed that. 

When he was approaching two years old, my middle son experienced a serious brain infection as a rare side effect of the MMR vaccine. He was left profoundly deaf in his left ear, and that put us both on a steep learning curve. I was a young mother, completely out of my depth, and pretty much unable to grasp the implications let alone the mitigations that needed to be put in place – sitting at the front of the class with his ‘hearing ear’ facing the teacher; a red-flag alert when he swam competitively, because he couldn’t hear the whistle; a grudging acceptance that he wasn’t ignoring me when I spoke to him. He genuinely couldn’t hear me. Even still, there was so much we didn’t consider. When he was preparing for his first year at the University of Edinburgh, he had to ‘tick the disabled box’, something he was reluctant to do, something he had literally never done, and the services and products on offer filled me with guilt. They could, for example, provide a vibrating pillow that worked as an alarm. It honestly never once occurred to me that he wouldn’t be able to hear an alarm. Rightly or wrongly, we operated as usual and most of his friends – even close ones – were unaware that he was deaf. 

But it got me thinking, which got us talking. Where’s the shame in admitting that you’re different? That your needs are different? As someone who has always encouraged my sons to be themselves, to be unafraid of being different, I was surprised and a little saddened that this particular difference was somehow embarrassing for him to admit. When he was applying for his first jobs as a trainee lawyer, he outright refused to ‘tick the disabled box’, and I didn’t really know what to think about that. He got a job; I doubt they know that one ear doesn’t work. 

That’s an invisible disability, I guess. Like chronic illness or pain or emotional illnesses or anything else that makes us less or un able. And that’s where the second thing comes in. It’s no secret that I became seriously ill when I caught Covid in March of 2020, and it changed my life completely. I suffered not just from Long Covid, with overwhelming, crippling fatigue, brain fog and memory loss (to the extent that I had to surround myself with notebooks and write down everything, when previous to this, my entire business and home life was held there), arthritis in my fingers, and staggering digestive pain and headaches that would appear for no reason. I also cried a lot. And slept. My abilities were disabled, so that, in itself, becomes disability, right? With every subsequent case of Covid (and I’ve had alarmingly many) and even vaccine, I was flattened completely. Disabled. Unable.

In publishing, we talk about diversity all the time, and getting recognition for groups of people who are not represented the way they should be, but that focus has been far too heavily weighted in favour of class and ethnicity. True diversity means representation in books, in marketing, in everything, for all groups of people, including those who are disabled – visibly or invisibly, obviously or hidden – and we, as an industry, definitely fall short on that front. 

A number of our Orenda team have disabilities, including chronic illness, and we are, as a result, collectively compassionate, and eager to ensure that our events, for example, are accessible, that our working practices are fair and inclusive, that our books are representative. But it wasn’t until Covid stopped me in my tracks that I realised the immense importance of including characters and situations that might fall outside the ‘able norm’ in our books. 

When people see themselves represented in books, they feel seen and reading becomes more relevant and immersive. When we read about people whose lives are different from ours, who face challenges that we cannot even begin to imagine, we learn. We understand more deeply; we can take a literary walk in another person’s shoes. And only then can there be the change we need to see in our society. It took a personal experience of being unable for me to understand the importance of this; the importance of awareness, of compassion, of inclusion, of representation … of the need to include accurate portrayals of disability and the disabled in our books, and to keep this in mind in everything we do. I would, personally, devour a book that encompassed my experience; my son and I would both be riveted to a book about ‘invisible deafness’, and we would urge others to read it too.

We’re actively seeking change, within the parameters of our determination to publish bold, original, thought-provoking fiction, and we urge other publishers to do the same. Indies are well placed to forge a path, and that is exactly what we’ll do here at Orenda Books … an accessible path, of course.

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Disability Pride Month: Louise Beech on disability in her novels

I’ve taken some big risks with my novels, not only in that I write in almost a different genre every time, but because of the topics I’ve chosen to explore. I don’t like to make things easy for myself when I create fiction – I enjoy being challenged, pushed, and learning something new. This is why I’ve often written outside my own limited experience. Yes, most of my novels have a little of me in them, I admit, a little of the emotional aspects of my life, but who doesn’t feature in their own work? It’s impossible to hide fully in our prose.

Writing outside of what I know – so to speak, if we throw the ‘write what you know’ advice on its head – has meant exploring a variety of disabilities in some way. I didn’t randomly choose these conditions; they were often visited upon me. When I created Sebastian, a readers’ favourite from This Is How We Are Human, and perhaps my proudest character – I based him on a dear friend of mine. Sean is a real-life young man who is autistic, and he’s very vocal about this, very proud, and very annoyed when people get him wrong. Who wouldn’t be? So when I put him on the page, albeit as a fictional creature, I knew I had to get it JUST right. Sean made sure I did. He acted out certain scenes with me before I wrote them, which I then recorded and listened back to, to make sure the way he spoke was accurate. He also read the finished thing and gave further advice. 

I worried that taking on the whole spectrum of autism, especially when I haven’t lived it, might be met with criticism. And I would have understood that. We need to hear the ‘own voices’ of those living different lives to ours, those in the minority, those on the fringes of society, those often misunderstood, those without a voice. That’s the priority. But Sean assured me that he was being heard via my pen, so to speak; he didn’t know how to write but I knew what he wanted to be said, and I can.

One condition that I’ve explored twice now is Type 1 Diabetes, which my daughter was diagnosed with aged just seven, after almost going into a coma. It felt absolutely natural to explore this complex illness that involves numerous daily blood test and injections, and that can render the sufferer unconscious during the dreaded hypo. In How to be Brave nine-year-old Rose is based on my daughter and what she went through after diagnosis, and in The Lion Tamer Who Lost Andrew, one half of my tragic gay relationship, has been diabetic since he was a child. Was it easier to write what I knew? Of course it was. There wasn’t any research, and I wasn’t afraid of judgement, having experienced this. But it almost felt lazy, which is ridiculous because it was very emotional to look back on a painful time in my life and paint a person going through the same. 

In my current novel, Nothing Else, a main character realises that she is beginning to lose her hearing. This is doubly difficult for her, because she loves music, and is a beautiful pianist. Some of my research involved chatting to my sister who can communicate via BSL (British Sign Language) and she explained to me how that works and who uses it. I also have a friend who uses a hearing aid and she described exactly what everyday world sounds are like for her. But really, the main requirement for writing the unknown, aside from research, is having an open mind and some empathy. We’ve probably all lost something we loved or been forced to give up something we didn’t want to, and these experiences can shade our story with the necessary layers.

Watch out for a future character who is a wheelchair user and is on the receiving end of pity he neither wants nor deserves. My own mother has used a wheelchair for the last three years and it’s really opened by eyes to how unseen these people are, not only physically, because we have to look down to speak with them and because we can miss them in a crowd, but due to a lack of access, a lack of consideration, and through pure ignorance, often speaking to a carer rather than the person sitting before us. I realised how many simple things I’m able to do – get on a train without assistance, go into a shop that has a step leading to it, go into a bar that’s underground, fit through every door. This gave me a great deal of compassion for my character.

Are there any topics or people I wouldn’t write about? I’d like to think not. But I’d only do it if I felt I could do it sensitively, with respect, with a great deal of research, and with my heart in the right place.