A wonderful new look for Erica James's stunning novels.

“In this fiction debut, Ganeshananthan uses lyrical vignettes to knit together generations of marriages, and to meditate on universal themes of family, love, duty, and honor. Ganeshananthan's rich and sparkling prose bring this distant foreign conflict to life and shows its ramifications in other times and places.” Mercury News

“No one does wartime London better than Laura Wilson with her extraordinary blend of historical empathy, social range and precise contemporary detail. Stratton's War makes us look afresh at the chaotic and eerily unfamiliar reality behind the myth. Add vivid characters, nail-biting dilemmas and murder to the mix, and the result is a crime novel with both guts and heart. Best of all, it's the first of a series. The sooner Ted Stratton returns, the better.” Andrew Taylor, author of The American Boy

“Ted Stratton is a good man in a bad world. Both are brilliantly evoked by Laura Wilson as she takes us on a thrilling ride through the mean streets and corridors of power of war-torn London. A tense, gripping tale of love, lust, deceit and murder.” Mark Mills, author of The Savage Garden

“[Homecoming], recently translated into English, [is a] sensitive and disturbing [novel] by Bernhard Schlink, author of the understatedly eloquent novel, The Reader… Michael Henry Heim’s translation faultlessly conveys the spell of Schlink’s art, in both its severe and gentle climates.” New York Times Book Review

“While writing Bang Crunch, I read voraciously: dozens and dozens of books of short stories. Some collections feature stories whose protagonists all seem interchangeable. I wanted variety. Young people, older people, women, men, straight, gay. Hell, why not a foot and a pair of gloves? Why not a talking curling stone?

For me, fiction writing is like Halloween: you slip into someone else’s costume. I’m not a lonely fifty-five-year-old widow with a drinking problem. I’m not a narcissistic actor who fears he’s a hack. I’m not a detached mother trying to squeeze out a little love for her newborn baby. But rooting around inside the heads of so many different people was a real pleasure. This is the reason I write.”

“To be a writer, I thought, you had to be extraordinary, and I knew I was ordinary. But desire is like an underground stream: if it can't surface where it wants, it will divert and surface somewhere else. My wish to write novels surfaced as a wish to teach and research literature. By the time I was in my thirties I understood things better: it is books that are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less extraordinary than anyone else.”

“I live in Cheshire in a small rural hamlet. Moreover, I actually live in a converted barn which I used as the setting for my novel A Sense of Belonging. It’s purely by coincidence that I’ve ended up living here, and it certainly felt a little surreal in the first few weeks of moving in – every time I opened my front door, I kept expecting to bump into my characters.”

“It’s not a crime novel in the traditional sense of the word. I would describe it more as a psychological thriller. I loved the idea of writing about evil women. I don’t think you read about them enough. The novel definitely attempts to look at the dark side of female psychology. Whenever I have anxiety nightmares, they are always about junior high school and always about these mean girls doing horrible things to me!

“I wanted to set it in a little town in the middle of America, similar to the one I was brought up in, that on the surface looks normal but when you start to peel away the layers, you see the evil hidden just underneath.”

Sharp Objects won the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the CWA New Blood Fiction Dagger at the Crime Writers' Association Awards 2007

“What I wanted to do with The Revenge of Captain Paine, even more so than with my first novel The Last Days of Newgate, was to take a twentieth or twenty-first century form – the hard-boiled detective novel – and transplant it back into a nineteenth-century setting; in other words, swapping Sam Spade for Pyke and San Fransisco in the 1930s for London in the 1830s.

I think we read hard-boiled detectives novels as much for their protagonists’ moral journey through the underworld as for their plots. As such, I wanted to both tell a gripping story – featuring headless corpses, industrial sabotage, sexual betrayal and political intrigue. But I also wanted to explore what happens when Pyke is forced to see his own complicity in the larger crime he is investigating. In setting the story against the rise of the railways and the consolidation of political agitation, I wanted to place Pyke right in the middle of a small, dirty war between industrialists and reformers.

One of the most significant things about Pyke in the first novel, and what I wanted to develop here, is the ever present struggle between his innate desire for self-advancement and his recognition of the moral claims of others. To this end, The Revenge of Captain Paine traces the brutal unravelling of this war in London’s blood-splattered taverns and respectable drawing rooms, but it also forces Pyke to choose between what he does for a living and what he believes to be right. What fascinates, I hope, is seeing the brutal, enigmatic Pyke come to terms with his changed status and place in the world, as banker, husband and father, and attempt to safeguard what he values most in the world – his family and his money – even as his righteousness is gradually eroded from within.”

“I suppose I wrote The Truth About These Strange Times largely because of its central character, Howard. Once he’d occurred to me I knew I wanted to spend time with him and explore his world and I’m now enormously glad that I did. He attracted to him the people and situations that threw him into strongest relief and that is essentially how the novel accumulated.

My inspiration for it was very various: things I’d read, people I’d met, jobs I’d had, TV and films that I’d liked. As far as literary models were concerned, I did think consciously of Cervantes and Dickens, Cervantes because of the central partnership of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza who are in some sense the great-great-grandfathers of Howard and Saul. I loved the comedy of those characters, their resilience and peculiar interdependence, and their endless going out to meet the world. Dickens was a model in that I wanted the book to be as entertaining and exhilarating as possible. I wanted every sentence, every paragraph to be interesting and the book to be both funny and moving. In short, I wanted to write the sort of book I wanted to read. No doubt I’ll now find out from people if they think I succeeded.”

“Claudia began as a straight biography. First, six years in the classics department at Stanford studying the 1st Century worlds of Rome and Judaea. Then, steeped in the history, art, philosophy, literature, architecture and mythology of the time, I visited the remains of Claudia's world in Rome, Turkey, Egypt and the Holy Land. But the woman herself eluded me. For the first time, conventional biography felt constraining. Soon Claudia and I were on our own.

“Nothing that takes twelve years writes itself! There was a kind of magic though, the thrill of discovering ancient shards that I could fit together into a grand mosaic of my own design – just like the ancient Romans did. As I slipped into another world, one by one the questions that were my reporter's stock and trade were answered. Slowly, almost shyly, Claudia revealed herself and allowed me to tell her story.”

“The Wind from the East is really three novels in one – Sara’s story, Juan’s story and the one that begins when they meet each other. It is a novel about characters who are morally good, yet capable of doing something terrible, and each one is burdened by a secret. There are no heroes or heroines, only people who are trying to do something good, even if they are quite sure exactly what.

In Spain, there was a bloody, ferocious, savage Civil War that killed over a million people, but it killed much more besides. The character of Sara is an example of the kind of Civil war victim we never talk about. She is a person who was born after the war who paid for the consequences of the war through her fate.

I spend every Summer on the Cadiz coast, and ever since I arrived I thought that one day I would write about the winds because they are especially strong there – it is the place where two seas meet, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. People there share a kind of fatalism because they organise their lives around the winds, to the point that they change their plans if the east wind is blowing. I thought that this would be the perfect setting for the characters I had created.”

“The story has been gestating in me for years. I was always fascinated by my mother’s early life, her emigrating to America aged 17, her experiences as a servant in Brooklyn, yet not living the American ‘dream’, but returning to Ireland and secretly missing the life she had been made to give up, because of intrigues.

But that alone would not constitute a novel. My mother had a profound and abiding effect on me, which in turn shaped my own complicated history, yet I did not wish to write a memoir. It had to be fiction – fiction allows for imagination, the gamut of experience, plight, loss, entanglements etc.

Nor do I think of The Light of Evening as being just a mother/daughter book. It is that on one level, but such a concept is too simplified. It diminishes the many twists and turns, the ramifications of existence. Mothers are also daughters and daughters embryo mothers, both needing to possess and yet escape one another.

The human canvas is vast, ambiguous, conflicting and ultimately mysterious – only fiction or drama can ever attempt to unravel it.”

Edna O’Brien

“I usually start with a central concept so ludicrous that I’ll be obliged to live inside it for several years, until I actually start to believe that the world of the novel is real. Among the satiric epics I wrote before The Last Witchfinder are Towing Jehovah, in which the Vatican hires a supertanker crew to bury the corpse of God, and its sequel, Blameless in Abaddon, in which God is placed on trial for crimes against humanity. Those are both truly terrible ideas for novels, but after years of labor I ended up with books that please me.”

“When writing a book, the character comes first, then their story unfolds with their friends and their secret lives. I like to write the book in one hit. Preferably somewhere quiet and warm. Living the story day and night until it's all out. I write by hand in notebooks. Then I can go back and transfer the notebooks to the computer and add or subtract and change things as I go along.”

“As a child, I always said that I would be a writer when I grew up. I wrote a novel when I was about twelve. Because I adored historical fiction, it was about a nineteenth-century aristocratic English girl brought up in Russia who lived through the most remarkable tragedies including the deaths of all her family, a kidnap, a ship wreck and dangerous illness, before she ended up inheriting an English estate, visiting Queen Victoria at Balmoral and finally marrying the Russian prince she'd feared lost forever. All that in 55,000 words. Then I grew up and began to read properly and studied literature, which brought me back to earth, as I realised how complex and difficult it is. So I became an editor instead and helped other people write, until eventually I decided it was time to venture out and give it a go.”

“My best ideas come from late-night chats with friends or random questions that occur to me when I’m day-dreaming on the bus. A new idea makes me so buzzy I could stay up all night, scribbling away. What if…you tried to live your adult life by childhood rules? What’s the fastest way to recover from a broken heart? What would your life be like if you were afraid of everything...or scared of nothing? The thrill of taking those big questions, and creating a story to bring those ideas to life, never wears off, it’s great fun. I usually work out in advance what the big dilemma is that my characters will have to face at the end of the book – but I don’t work out what decisions they’ll make until I’m well into the writing process – so it keeps me in suspense. And the most satisfying thing about writing fiction is that you can make sure the good guys and the bad guys all get exactly what they deserve.”