I am not entirely sure what has happened to the last few weeks. I’ve had this blog post on my list of things to do for … quite a while, and now suddenly it’s three weeks since a Very Exciting Announcement was made on the Luna Press website: the news that I have A SECOND BOOK coming out! *Cue pom-poms* It is called The Way The Light Bends, and you can read the Luna blogpost here, then read on for some more behind the scenes details…
As I say on the Luna blog, The Way The Light Bends is a very different creature to This Is Our Undoing. If Undoing started from despairing at the brokenness of the world, then Light started from marvelling at how many broken edges people can carry and yet still appear whole. It’s a quieter novel in some ways – it’s not a dystopian, there’s no spy-thriller-murder-politics edge to it. What there is instead is the dark side of Scottish folklore, a disappearance, two very different journeys through grief and the way that family can both hold us together and tear us apart.
Drops of blood and silver, the haar, the sea, moonlight and hope. The bones of a bird, and a very beautiful, dangerous man.
Sound interesting? I hope so. It was a hard book to write because grief is not comfortable or neat, but I love the shifting, evanescent mood of the story, and I really loved writing about two sisters, Tamsin and Freya, trying to find their own ways home. Fortunately (!) my relationship with my sister is not remotely like theirs, but there are elements of the family dynamics that come from my own experiences, which was profoundly weird to put onto paper. Not sure how anyone writes a memoir – that stuff’s tricksy!
Weirdly, I wrote this book before I wrote Undoing. It very nearly got published TWICE would you believe, and when it fell through the second time (I won’t go into that, so don’t ask), I completely lost faith in it and set it aside to focus on Undoing. And I’m so glad I did.
If I had stuck with The Way The Light Bends at that (frankly quite low) point, I’d have just continued to bash my head against my own failing self-confidence. Where-as by turning to Undoing, I rediscovered some belief in my writing, and found Luna Press, who are the absolute bestest.
The journey that this book (and my confidence) has been on makes this step all the more precious. I am honestly so delighted to be able to continue working with Luna Press, and am convinced those other near-misses were meant to be, because I couldn’t ask for a better home for this book full of dark water, lost sisters and the power of hope.
Have a look at the photos below – I feel like they catch something of the book’s mood.
Next stop, cover design. *silent cheering* I love this stage…
Shadows on Water 