What can you tell us about your new novel Beyond Summerland?
It’s a story of a community, trying to come to terms with the end of its Nazi Occupation of 1940-1945. Many writers, myself included, have written about the wartime years, but I realised that the period just after the war has rarely been covered. In this novel, the young women of two fictional families are trying to process the horror of what they’ve just lived through, and realising that the removal of the Germans soldiers is just the first step on a long road filled with bitterness and alarming discovery.
Where did the inspiration for Beyond Summerland come from?
A conversation with old friends in Jersey in 2019, discussing our parents and how affected they’d been by the war. Also, several members of my family were betrayed in 1944 for sheltering a Russian slave worker (the subject of my 2017 film Another Mother’s Son) but the two elderly women accused of informing on them never had any evidence brought against them. I wondered how often that had happened in the island in the years after the war, and how a scenario like that might play out.
As Beyond Summerland is inspired by true events, what was involved in your research for writing this novel?
The people who lived through this period as adults have largely passed now. But I have a shelf full of Jersey history books, the internet, and I’m lucky enough to have direct access to expert historians such as Dr Gilly Carr of Cambridge University who knows the islands’ wartime history inside out. I also have my own personal memories of many locations – I visit regularly to see friends and family. It’s important to start with the facts, then build the fiction from that raw material.
Beyond Summerland is set in the aftermath of WWII – what intrigued you about this period in particular?
Most of the island population was traumatised in 1945. All had been starved and persecuted, some were bereaved, and many were filled with fury at the way they’d been treated for the last five years. In many cases that anger, robbed of its real target, turned against other islanders they felt had contributed to their misery.
What do you hope readers will get from your book?
I hope they will enjoy a page-turning story with strong female characters in an extraordinary situation, but also see that history constantly repeats itself and that the themes within these pages are everywhere in the world today.Who are some of your favourite authors – or favourite books?
Where do you start? I like a good story, but prefer books with something to say.
In the past I have devoured books by Anne Tyler and William Boyd… Recently I have loved the work of Anthony Doerr and Kit de Waal. I recently read Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain and was knocked out by it. But I always come back to George Orwell, whose principles of clarity are ones I try to write by.
Leave a Reply