Summer is coming (*averts eyes from the current weather*): lazy days in the garden, deckchairs, holidays - and books. And The Treasures, the new novel from the pen of
Harriet Evans
a.k.a. The Lady Novelist, is a dream summer book. It’s Harriet’s (counts on fingers) seventeenth novel, and - to my mind at least - the novel she was destined to write.
I’ll be chatting to Harriet about The Treasures on the evening of 19th June at Mr B’s Emporium in Bath - come and join us if you’re local!
The Treasures is the first in the Sevenstones trilogy. It’s about Alice, Tom, and a house steeped in the English countryside and time, Sevenstones. It’s a house of cosy corners, ramshackle windows and uneven walls, a stone doorway covered in lichen, creamy roses and daisies running wild, an orchard, and ravens circling overhead. A home.
Tom is sensitive, artistic (and hot - which is always helpful), and still the boy who was wrenched from his father and sent to live in in London in another house, one haunted by secrets and unhappiness. Miles away, on the banks of the Hudson in New York state is Alice, whose home and life have been cruelly upended, and who clings to the treasures of a happier time. A single phone call will cause their worlds to collide - and ultimately, bring them both to Sevenstones, the house around which the trilogy will revolve.
It sits within the best traditions of the family saga - a delicious, sumptuous, generous book, with the sweep of history brought into pin sharpness via its characters and Harriet’s exacting eye for detail. It’s big and bold, but tender - you peel back the layers of the story to find truth and heart. If you love the Cazalet Chronicles and Rosamunde Pilcher, this baby is one for you.
I’ve long thought that taste in books is an excellent metric by which to judge character. I have friendships formed by mutual affection for certain books, and I am developing a new theory that if I have truly loved a book and then happen to meet the author, I am very likely to fall for them, too. (As has happened several times of late, including last week, when I met Virginia Evans, whose book The Correspondent filled my heart - and so, it transpired, did she. More of her anon.).
I first ‘met’ Harriet via one of her books - The Beloved Girls - when a mutual friend insisted I would love both it and Harriet. Harriet and I became correspondents, and when she wrote The Stargazers, I pretty much dragged her to this incredible bookshop for an event, and insisted that glorious Clare Daverley (Talking At Night) joined us, And then Harriet wrote D is for Death under the pen name Harriet F. Townson. ‘It’s a book for people like you me and me, N’, she messaged. By which she people who like Harriet Vane in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey mysteries, peppermint creams, London omnibuses, the British Library, excellent jumpsuits, landladies who display unexpected skills with a lasso.
Now she has my heart and I’m thrilled to welcome her to Book(ish) - and can’t wait to hang out with her in Bath. Here’s a small taste of our capacity to chat. And please do subscribe if you fancy more bookish chats with me.
Harriet, I feel this is book is your destiny - that you were always meant to write a chunky, multi-layered family epic.
I have been thinking for a while that whilst I don’t want to write huge doorstoppers, I do want to tell really big stories. When I got my first book deal (Going Home) it was sold and pitched as ‘chick lit with a bit extra’, but even that had what had happened in the past. I’ve realise how I want to tell much more than one person’s life. We are the result of all the years of our life and the years before that, and I’ve always loved that idea that we are the result of where we’ve been and our ancestors.
You’re writing in the great tradition of the family saga - the Cazalets, The Camomile Lawn, Rosamunde Pilcher, I Capture the Castle. What did young Harriet read to lay her literary foundations?
I have a first edition of I Capture the Castle, but didn’t read it until I was 23. Quite a lot of those books - Penny Vincenzi, Sally Beauman, Judith Krantz, maybe even the Cazalets - I didn’t read until my 20s. When I was younger I read a lot of Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, 80s bonkbusters like Lace, Jilly Cooper - Georgette Heyer I grew up with from the age of 12. But I also really adored big old sagas like Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch because I was a real nerdy English girl: I used to spend my money on the green Penguin classics.
The older I get, the more I realise how much of an influence my parents had on my reading. My dad was a publisher at Coronet: he read a lot of Joseph Conrad, but he also read Raymond Chandler and Dick Francis. My mum also worked in publishing, and is the world’s biggest Agatha Christie and Georgette Heyer fan, but she’s also always got a Dickens on the go. I grew up being told there was no such thing as the ‘right’ book or the ‘wrong’ book. So when I went into publishing, it was a surprise to me that I was wrong - except I wasn’t.
Because books aren’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - they are just books.
Precisely! Yet in publishing, people would look at certain of my authors and say ‘Oh, it’s just so and so’ and I’d be like ‘It’s brilliant!’ I genuinely think The Cazalets are way better than anything Kingsley Amis ever wrote, and I think people are coming around to that, but when Amis and Howard were married, no way would anyone have thought that, let alone dared to say it.
Some people think The Shell Seekers is trashy. Err, have you read it? Do you know what it’s like to be a young person in the Second World War? Well, read The Shell Seekers because it’s the most brilliant evocation.
Look at Consider Yourself Kissed - that is such a genuinely joyful, interesting, great book about motherhood that is not wrapped up in ‘help I’m a yummy mummy!’ packaging. It’s a beautiful piece of publishing, and nobody is saying ‘is it literary or commercial?’ and that makes me happy because I just want to read and tell big, involving stories.
Which books taught you how to write?
I go back to The Cazalet Chronicles thinking ‘how does she do this?’ because they don’t seem epic, but when you look them they contain loads of detail about what it was like to be in that time. It’s really crisp, but there is so much back story and Elizabeth Jane Howard controls it extraordinarily well. I love it when the author is in total command of their material. That’s what’s remarkable about Eva Ibbotson. She gives this vast canvas - like the decaying Austrian aristocracy in Magic Flutes, told in a simple romance.
I love it when the author is adept at world-building, so I feel I could step into them.
Completely - and that is incredibly hard to do with economy. That’s why Lisa Jewell is so good - those little drop-in details she gives about her characters.
You are, I know, like me obsessed with houses in books. Which literary houses would you like to snoop around? Green Gables? Howards End? Baker Street?
Don’t let’s fall out, but I don’t love Anne of Green Gables.
[I reel with horror but rally.]
I’m sorry, but we’ve got to have something we don’t agree on. Maybe because I read it a bit too late?
I was obsessed with the Sadler’s Wells ballet books by Lorna Hill. They had such a strong sense of place and of every house. I remember loving the contrast between the grand Northumbrian house where Veronica lived with her cousins, where you can hear the wood pigeons cooing, and the townhouse in London somewhere on the Northern line.
I remember going to see Howard’s End at the cinema and thinking everything about this makes sense and the house is right. It’s not the biggest house in the whole world, but it’s very special, and people have that deep attachment to it. And I love it when that attachment is taken to an extreme, like in Wideacre, which is one of the most bonkers books ever, but it is literally unputdownable. It’s Philippa Gregory’s first book, about a woman who wants to inherit the family home and will stop at nothing to get it. It’s set in the eighteenth-century, it’s quite saucy and twisted, but if you like books about houses, it knocks them all into a cocked hat. Apart from Rebecca. Which is Wideacre with bells on.
Ordering it now. I’m all for stoking my obsession with houses.
Obsession is such an interesting things to write about - and that obsession with home is tied into people’s sense of identity - it’s why interior design shows are so huge. The great thing about writing about a house is that it’s like writing a murder mystery - where you have to catch a killer and that gives you the structure. When you write about a house, you are working with boundaries, and because my stories are broad in scope and length, the house gives it structure.
Is Sevenstones based on a real house?
Yes, and I tried to buy it - twice! It’s a fourteenth-century cottage in a little village just outside of Bath. It’s very small, but the owner was an architect and in the 1980s they added this insanely beautiful wood and glass wing, and it’s surrounded by these vast gardens. We missed it out, but it came on the market again, and my kids had just started at school [in Bath], and I thought, I am not destined to live in this house, I am destined to write about this house. The great thing to learn about longing is that it is really important part of life, but acknowledge it as a feeling rather than something which twists you and makes you a bitter person. Longing is important because it helps you dream, but you need to come back to reality.
Do you know how the trilogy is going to end?
I know some stuff… It’s been really interesting to write the murder mystery [D is for Death under the pen name Harriet F. Townson - worry not, further instalments are in the works. One is set in Bath! At Christmas!] because it has focused how I write. I write those in a different way to how I write Harriet Evans books: with the Dora books you are chasing a revelation in each chapter, but the main thing you have to have is the entire world has to be understood by me. By that I mean what they’re wearing, what’s in the news, the bus number, what the floorboards of the fashion boutique Alice is opening in book two look like. None of it will go into the book, but once I’m in that place, I can write.
How much time do you spend planning a book before writing - or does it happen concurrently?
Concurrently. Although I’ve realised okay to stop and do some homework because if the book is not coming right, it’s because I’m not walking freely in the world. I January, I didn’t write anything that’s in the word count, I literally walked around and asked myself questions about where Tom and Alice would be in book two. For three weeks, I read and read and about the early 1980s. I went to Canary Wharf, I looked up what a Filofax looked like.
But how fricking lucky I am that this is my job. If you are looking for a book and you hand is hovering over mine and you pick it up - you have made a pact with me. I take that very seriously, and that’s why I’ve catastrophized to the extent that I am still writing 20 years on
The Treasures is published on 12th June
If you enjoyed this - please give it a heart or share it - so more people can discover Harriet - and me! Thank you.
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