Behind The Spine

“That experience of going under the ground and feeling how alienating it feels down there. That feeds very nicely into the sort of gothic ideas that we're talking about here, that sense of the past is oppressive.” – Rosie Andrews Somewhere on the border between Wales and England, Miss Catherine Symonds arrives at the shadowy Locksley Abbey to take on the role of governess. She’s traveling in disgu...

“Yes, there is oppression and hardship, but there’s also culture and joy and beauty and love and friendship. I think sometimes even we forget that there is life, and life always finds a way, even under occupation.” – Sarah Agha What gives you a sense of identity and makes you feel connected to your community, your people? The narratives we build through art are at the heart of these identities. As...

“I've certainly met men like Cole and you are fooled by them because they're fooling themselves. They're so dangerous and insidious for that reason, because you are actually sucked in a bit” - Araminta Hall Are you “one of the good guys”, supportive of women’s rights and equality and opposed to gender injustice? This episode will make you think twice. Cole has escaped to the coast after his marria...

“This senior copper said to me, Well, you have to remember we're dealing with criminals who know no restraints at all, who are just absolutely hard bastards with no emotion and no compassion. We have to have a few of them in our ranks to balance it out.” - Alan Johnson Alan Johnson is a well-known name in British politics, having held a range of cabinet positions in both Blair and Brown government...

“I didn't get to see my family or Georgia for 17 years. So when I did go back, I found it really strange, really surreal. That was very emotional for me. So I started writing it really trying to make sense of it in my own head.” -Leo Vardiashvili Inspired by his own estrangement from his homeland, Leo Vardiashvili tells the story of a family torn apart as they wrestle with the events of the past....

“I am probably the consumer from hell when it comes to this stuff, and I do like to believe that I’m fighting on behalf of other people. Some sort of consumer rights, compliance vigilante.” -Christian Hunt If you’ve ever spotted a road sign that makes no sense at all, or been sent round in circles trying to cancel a TV subscription, you’re not alone. Society relies on us complying with rules on a...

“There are many, many ways to be a deaf person, but the important thing is to think about the ways in which you embrace it” -Sarah Marsh The word ‘deaf’ encompasses so many different lived experiences. And by its very nature it’s hard to communicate what it means - what it feels like - to be deaf. But through writing, anything is possible. Sarah Marsh is the author of A Sign of Her Own: The vivid...

“What we want is people in extreme situations. We enjoy watching people pushed to their emotional limits.” - L.D. Smithson Have you ever watched a reality TV show and thought ‘I could do that’? It’s one thing watching the events unfold on-screen. It’s another thing entirely being in the thick of it, watching the essence of your personality unravel under the pressure. Now imagine the stakes were mu...

“She felt she had a duty to protect all these people. And the Villa very much became, for Iris, a refuge for everybody” - Fiona Valpy In the past, a wartime heroine shelters people from the ravages of war. In the modern era, the villa once used for refuge is up for demolition, and its extraordinary past may be the only thing that can save it. The Cypress Maze is the latest novel from prolific writ...

“They’re kind of flags mounted in occupied territory. That's the idea of a tattoo on the female form. Because the female form is a political space. It's a space of contention and conflict.” - Joelle Taylor A tattoo can tell the most profound story. Many have deep meanings to the people who wear them, and all of them serve as time capsules, allowing a person to revisit a moment in time again and ag...

“What a great idea if, through this grieving process both of them could heal - could come to understand the other through the vehicle of poetry” - Diana Janney Poetry and philosophy bring together two fractured souls, 12 year old Rufus Ellerton whose parents have died, and his grandfather Horatio who’s now tasked with raising him. Diana Janney’s latest novel is a beautiful, musical piece of writin...

“No one wakes up a horrible person. It's something that takes hold over time. It's about worldview, formative experiences, and what you were told growing up as a kid. And I try very hard to think about that stuff because… you can feel it.” - Tom Hindle In the idyllic setting of Italy’s largest lake, Lake Garda, the illustrious Heywood family gather for a wedding when horror strikes. Someone has be...

“Height of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis had happened just a year before. The last thing you want is to show the world’s superpower to be so incompetent that they shot their own president. And you can understand why they would cover that up and try to hide it.”  In memory of US President John F Kennedy, and to mark the 60th anniversary of his assassination, we peer beyond the conspiracy t...

“How many weddings have you gone to where you don't really know very many other people at the wedding? And it's trying to make those connections of who is who. It was something I wanted to recreate for the reader.” Between deciding the guest-list and actually getting everyone together under one roof, wedding days can be… chaotic, to say the least. Beneath the jubilance often lies a web of unresolv...

“Loving a country is also never ceasing to be demanding. Through that book I asked my city to do something else, to change the system. I have a bittersweet relationship with the city. I love it. And at the same time, I have a little bit of anger.” Casablanca, the largest city in Morocco, is a city of great inequality - a patriarchal system run by a monarchy. And in ‘As Rich as the King’, we see ho...

“Her love is quite possessive, wanting to become the other person, owning the man, or becoming whole and finally complete. But the thing is, she's never going to complete herself because the wound is too deep.” Between 14 and 40. That’s how many men were killed by Belle Gunness. Yet despite the terrible atrocities of ‘America’s first female serial killer’, there’s a good chance you’ve never heard...

“I wanted to start with a very unstable, shaky foundation in order to create a world of voltage and heat and fire. Each book in the series is its own little storm.” The hardboiled genre has received a complete makeover. Holiday is a queer, chain-smoking, heavily tattooed nun, covered completely in her nun’s habit. And her amateur sleuthing skills are taking the literary world by storm. Scorched Gr...

“What you want from that gothic house is the sense of being overwhelmed by scale, while also having a sense of unease and claustrophobia as well. Those two things, twinned together.” The Regent Hotel in Birmingham may be grand, but beneath its opulence, cocktail parties and fine dining, lies a gothic nightmare of murder, deception and mystery. Hokey Pokey, the new book from Kate Mascarenhas, follo...

“One person told me he got to a point where he didn't actually care whether he lived or died. He felt so ill that he had hallucinations. So it's a risk. It's a risk.” For the people who’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, making it to the summit is more than a battle of fitness or of money. It’s a challenging test of one’s mental fortitude unlike no other. Throw into the mix a little deception, trickery...

“I don't think anyone could have looked at the Patterson family and said, “oh, what a conventionally successful party”. But I did want to honour them. And I realised I was actually and am proud of them because they did it. They loved, they were good, they were decent, they were kind, they were courageous.” Though Christina Patterson’s family may not be “conventionally successful”, they are extraor...

“Kala is the Sinatra of the book. You have all these different perspectives on her. My hope was that having these panoramic perspectives would create spaces for the reader to create their own relationship to Kala.” A town with a series of dark secrets, upended by the reopening of a decades old-wound. When the horrors of the past have scarred and warped their victims over time, how does despair man...

“It's so welcoming. The people are wonderful. It's beautiful. It was really where I thought I could see myself living and building a life. And then when I found out about that murder, it did raise the hairs on the back of my neck.” How does a place you love transform into a place of fear? Can the beauty of an island paradise ever outshine the darkness that lies beneath the surface? The Dive is the...

“Having that realisation of looking back on a memory that they really prized and valued, and realising that it was something a little bit darker and that they were perhaps taken advantage of. It is something that's really troubling for people.” Is there a moment in your life that you look back on with nothing but fondness? A golden moment where life was perfect? How closely do you think that memor...

“Her story in my mind is sort of a two steps forward, one step back kind of journey. It's not that we face one major challenge in our life and suddenly we are these wise and capable people.” In life, there isn’t one straight road out of adversity and grief. And so, when charting your characters’ journeys through hardship, authenticity means lingering in the messiness. Shelley Read’s new book ‘Go A...

“It’s that question ‘What if?’ ‘What if I had done this differently?’ And it's something I'm really obsessed with in my own life.” The death of a main character is often a controversial and difficult moment in any work of literature - but what if it happens in the first few pages? Stirred by her own experiences of losing a close friend far too soon, Becky Hunter’s debut novel One Moment sees death...