Special Guests: Women's Fiction
The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman
‘This is the story of right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same’
It's 1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. Then one April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant – and the path of the couple’s lives hits an unthinkable crossroads.
Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they make that day – as the baby’s real story unfolds…
The Light Between Oceans is the stunning debut novel from M.L Stedman which was acquired by Transworld in a nine-way publisher bid. I was lucky enough to meet the author, Margot, at her launch at the London Book Fair and asked her how the fascinating concept for the story developed.
Vanessa Gebbie on A Cowards Tale & Writing
Award-winning short story writer Vanessa Gebbie – perhaps best known for her 2008 collection Words from a Glass Bubble and 2010’s Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict – has just published the paperback of her 2011 début novel, The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury UK and USA), set in her homeland of Wales. The tale of a mining disaster in the depths of a pit is a remarkable and tragic portrayal, inspired by real-life events.
Gebbie always had a passion for storytelling, even from a young age. “I [once created] a newspaper, written in blue crayon. It only had one issue, mostly about a long car journey. At junior and senior school, I wrote a lot. The poems carried on at university. Then I stopped writing completely, for a long time.”
It wasn’t until later life, when she’d picked up a “fabulous, rule-breaking” copy of Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, that she turned back to the literary world. “The love of making things up flooded back. I think it sort of crept up on me as a career. To begin with, I just wrote bit and pieces, and sent them off, as you do. Hoping. Gradually, I got a few publications. Then I was asked to run writing sessions at a drugs rehab centre, followed by workshops with the homeless and asylum-seekers for a while too. I co-edited a small literary journal for a few years. Eventually, I was doing little else. Everything added up to ‘something to do with writing’. It still does.”
Gebbie hopes her Welsh background seeps into her short stories. She believes that her family ties in the south of the country and her schooling in the north, the rhythms of the language, the accents and the people are “all inspirational” to her. What fascinates her so much about short stories, she says, is “the way they plunge you into a complete world very quickly and how they leave you feeling when you come to the end: enriched, somehow.” She remarks that each story has a subtle effect on one’s being. “You are shown something about life that changes the way you are, maybe in a tiny way, but a [small] shift every time adds up. As a writer, I love the challenge – they are difficult to get right; I love the sense that a short story is bigger than it seems.”
Me Before You: Jojo Moyes
Jojo Moyes is the bestselling author of no less than nine novels, with her latest work Me Before You riding high in the Sunday Times bestseller list and receiving rave reviews from the press. Me Before You is also one of eight books selected for the Spring 2012 Richard and Judy Bookclub. Acknowledging the phenomenal success of the book, Jojo says, ‘My previous eight books have barely snapped at the heels of the bestsellers' lists, so the last few weeks have been overwhelming. Actually, it has felt a little like Christmas every day.’
Describing Me Before You, Jojo explains that this is a departure from her previous novels. ‘It is truly different to what I’ve written previously. It’s a love story about a woman who falls in love with a man who has decided he wants to die, and what happens when she tries to change his mind. It’s a very controversial subject and is a real weepie – possibly even more than my previous books – but it also has a lot of humour in it, which is a new thing for me. Every now and then you write a book which just writes itself, and this was one of those books for me.’
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