The title of this post is a little misleading – when I say dysfunctional, I mean trauma has left these characters emotionally unavailable despite their love for one another, and searching for answers. When I was eleven, my grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer on Thanksgiving and passed away in early February. In those eight weeks, my family unraveled. Relationships changed. Others disappeared. It was my first real loss. It was final and far-reaching. I believe this is why I write adult fiction in young voices about trauma. Emotional family journeys of love, loss, healing, forging ahead in unimaginable circumstances, are powerful reminders of why “survival is insufficient” and the brilliance of the human spirit.
Peggy is eight years old when her survivalist father takes her from her London home and moves her into a remote cabin in the woods and tells her the outside world has been destroyed. They can’t go back.
If you know anything about my novels, it’s that I absolutely love writing adult fiction from the perspective of young adults. People often ask me why I don’t write YA if I enjoy that age for narrators: it’s because I love coming-of-age stories and the emotional spectrum of children learning to understand the nuances of adult life.
This book nailed it for me: Mental illness, nature, and relationships to the natural world, a young narrator. I’ve read it twice and it broke my heart both times.
'Fuller handles the tension masterfully in this grown-up thriller of a fairytale, full of clues, questions and intrigue.' - The Times
'Extraordinary...From the opening sentence it is gripping' - Sunday Times
1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.
Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote…
One of the absolute joys of writing (and super annoying quirk to non-writer friends) is being able to see the writing or the narrative arc when you’re watching TV or a movie or reading a book. Everything eventually becomes a study of craft.
But every once in a while, an author sets an arc that was (a) completely plausible and (b) that I didn’t see coming, and that’s magic.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves did exactly that. I highly recommend not even reading the description, just start reading.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse…
Though they come from very different walks of life, Mariam and Laila are thrust together because they share a husband in Afghanistan. Mariam and Laila did not choose each other, but they become a family, making this one of the most haunting and unforgettable books I’ve ever experienced.
This was the first audiobook I ever listened to. It was on CDs at the time that I swapped out while I was driving. There is one unbelievable scene that made me ugly cry so badly, I had to pull over. On the side of the road, I replayed that scene again and again.
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.
The secret is out on this one, but for a little while, I felt it was my life’s purpose to tell other people about this book.
It’d been on my list for a while, but I finally picked it up in April of 2020 when my life had effectively stopped. Was I looking for answers? Maybe. But this book spoke to my soul. In my own writing and life, I love the theme of “the families we create” and the lengths we will go to to protect them.
“Survival is insufficient” became my mantra during the early days of the pandemic when I needed to break the fog of uncertainty and find a way to use my time. It is still something I remind myself of…
'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Now an HBO Max original TV series
The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in…
In 2017, an electrical fire destroyed our home. For ten months during repairs, we stayed in 24 different places. There were days I went to work with a suitcase because we had to check into a different place that night.
Two days after the fire, my (now) agent offered to represent me. She wanted revisions, which I did from our temporary homes, and suggested I read Defending Jacob for inspiration.
This thriller is a story of an unraveling family. I will always be grateful for the direction this novel gave my work, but also for the intense focus it gave me during such a disorienting time.
If your son was on trial for murder, what would you do?
Andy Barber's job is to put killers behind bars. And when a boy from his son Jacob's school is found stabbed to death, Andy is doubly determined to find and prosecute the perpetrator.
Until a crucial piece of evidence turns up linking Jacob to the murder. And suddenly Andy and his wife find their son accused of being a cold-blooded killer.
In the face of every parent's worst nightmare, they will do anything to defend their child. Because, deep down, they know him better than anyone.
It’s 1965, and thirteen-year-old Gia, along with her older brother and cousins, are desperate to escape their sleepy, tree-lined neighborhood where nothing ever happens. The only thing Gia would miss is the surrounding marsh, where she feels at home among sea birds and salt water.
But when one of Gia’s cousins brings drugs into their neighborhood, it sets off a chain of events that quickly turn dangerous. Everyone will be caught in the ripples, and some may be swept away entirely. Gia is determined to keep herself and her family afloat while the world is turned upside down around her. Can she find a way to hold on to the life she was so eager to leave behind, or will she have to watch it all disappear beneath the marsh forever?
About myself: As a novelist I’m crazy for detail. I believe it’s the odd and unexpected aspects of life that bring both characters and story worlds to life. This means that I try to be an observer at all times, keeping alert and using all five – and maybe six – senses. My perfect writing morning begins with a dog walk in the woods or on a beach, say, while keeping my senses sharp to the world around me and listening out for the first whisper of what the day’s writing will bring.
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people – gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number of losses, and the dangerous and peculiar circumstances people find themselves in, sexual mores have become shaken and stirred.
But what happened after the war, in the time of healing and settling down? This novel examines the emotional, romantic, and sexual lives of three characters searching for a way to proceed.
Love never dies in this novel by “a writer of addictive emotional thrillers” (The Independent).
Told from three perspectives A Particular Man is about love, truth and the unpredictable consequences of loss.
When Edgar dies in a Far East prisoner-of-war camp it breaks the heart of fellow prisoner Starling. In Edgar’s final moments, Starling makes him a promise. When, after the war, he visits Edgar’s family, to fulfil this promise, Edgar's mother Clementine mistakes him for another man.
Her mistake allows him access to Edgar’s home and to those who loved him, stirring powerful and disorientating emotions, and embroiling him…
