When I was on book tour for The Lake House (Das Seehaus), I was very glad to spend a few days in Berlin — one of my favourite cities — where I sat down with Viktor Buettner of 60Minuten.net to talk about writing, publishing, love of place, and life generally.
It’s been a long time since my last post and a lot has happened. Most notably, the wheel has turned, the old year has spun away, and here we are in 2016. Just like that. I’m writing from a small desk in a small room in London. The view outside the window is of chimney pots and stained old bricks and black metal downpipes. The sky is milky and the branches are bare. We really are in the deep midwinter. It’s been a strange year, though. Most of winter has been oddly mild, so although we watch the weather forecast and wonder about the chance of snow, there are daffodils sprouting on roadside verges and cherry blossoms pink against the white sky. It seems spring is coming, ready or not.
I have an exciting and busy few months ahead with the publication of The Lake House in a number of European countries. First up, Das Seehaus in Germany, on the propitious date of February 29th, followed by France in March and Italy in late April. I’ll be visiting each country for the book’s launch and hope to see you there.
Dates for the German tour are now locked in and I’m pleased to be able to share them with you here.
I’ll update this journal and the events page with the details of other launches and tours when I have them.
In the meantime, I’d like to share with you a photograph I took during the week. My eldest son was performing in his school music concert and the event was held in a local church hall. My youngest son didn’t quite grasp the importance of the occasion, nor was he willing to submit himself to the usual protocol expected of an Audience Member. Consequently, I spent rather a lot of time in the foyer with one eye on the concert and the other on an excitable toddler, high on the late night and the change in his routine.
I’m a compulsive reader – my eye is always drawn to text no matter where I find it – which is how I came to be perusing the old bible set out on the entrance table. Inside was a handwritten dedication from a father and mother to their daughter. Copied out carefully was one of the Proverbs.
Perhaps it was the uncertain strains of beginner musicians drifting from the hall, perhaps it was the thumping applause and small proud faces I could glimpse through the glass, perhaps it was the thought of a long-ago parent, long gone now, seeking to instruct their child on the way to live a good life, on how to be a good person. Whatever the case, I was moved by what I read on the frontispiece of that bible. It was clear and simple and it struck me that no matter your faith, the advice given to Phyllis Glynne Evans by her Father and Mother on September 15th 1908 was excellent: ‘Let not mercy and truth forsake thee; bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart.’
So, here we are in October. From where I sit, typing this post, I can see through the window to where the leaves are turning yellow, ready to fall and scatter. I love the turn of the seasons: there’s something thrilling and wonderful about the year in transition. It gives me a frisson of excitement and makes me want to be writing. To write is usually my first urge when faced with feelings of gladness. I suppose that’s called inspiration, but if so it’s the sort driven by a general elevation in mood rather than by the arrival of a Specific Idea.
The only problem is, I’m a monogamous writer and don’t seem able to work wholeheartedly on a new story whilst still seeing the former into the world. And so, until December, when the first wave of book tour events are ended, I’m happily wedded to The Lake House. The characters and setting and story of the next book won’t disappear, but will remain as glimpsed figments, just out of reach on the edge of my peripheral vision – like a dream I look forward to revisiting.
In the meantime, I’m pleased to tell you that there have been some very nice early reviews* of The Lake House. Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review:
People Magazine named it one of The Best Books of the Fall:
iBooks has selected it as one of the 25 Best Books of October, and The Lake House has been named as one of The November 2015 Indie Next List picks. Carol Schneck Varner from Schuler Books & Music in Okemos, MI, gave it the following lovely write-up:
“The Lake House explores an unsolved kidnapping that occurred between the World Wars at an isolated country house in England. Morton here continues to do all the things she does so well: weaving together a multi-generational family story from numerous perspectives; showcasing different facets of the same events; and bringing a wonderfully complex plot together in a kaleidoscopic web of uncovered secrets, past and present. With delightful characters, fascinating settings, and a captivating mystery, Morton draws us into a world we’re sorry to leave. Highly recommended!”
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If you’d like to hear more about The Lake House, writing, reading, my thoughts on any of the above and more, I’ll be touring in the northern hemisphere throughout October, November and December. The Spanish language edition will be published in November, the Dutch in October, and the German in February 2016. I’ll keep you posted with all other release dates as soon as I have them. So far, the 2015 tour schedule looks like this.
UK:
Canada/US:
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* I was asked in a recent interview whether I read reviews and how I feel about them. The truth is, sometimes I do, other times I don’t. I don’t seek them out in newspapers, mainly because I don’t know they’re there until after the fact. But I don’t avoid them either. I like it when they’re positive, but I’m quite comfortable with differing opinions on my books: that’s one of the wonderful things about life, we’re all allowed to like different things.
The only reviews that make me feel a bit exasperated (no matter whose book they’re about) are those that don’t play fair: namely, critics who reveal too much of the plot or give away the mystery (!); and those who hold a book up to a set of expectations it never sought to meet. It’s a little like criticising a meal at a French bistro because it didn’t look or taste like Italian food. Pointless and nonsensical and, worst of all, of no help to readers.
While I was in Cornwall over the summer, I took some time out from skylarking along coastal paths and eating copious amounts of clotted cream on scones, to spend a few days with Pan Macmillan shooting an episode for their YouTube channel, Book Break. It was a lot of fun, not least because the show is hosted by Leena Norms who is as perspicacious and delightful in person as she appears on screen. We talked about the magic of Cornwall, the writing process, structuring a novel, lost children, Taylor Swift, and even The Lake House itself. We also explored some of the most beautiful places in the south west.
I’ve been thinking about the sublime lately.
It’s being here, in north Cornwall, where the coastlines are rugged, the cliffs drop suddenly away, and the blue ocean seems to stretch forever.
The landscape is breathtaking. It’s dramatic and beautiful and craggy and flower-covered and enormous. And I feel small—happily, contentedly so.
For a long time, Cornwall was harder to get to from London than Europe. It wasn’t until the 1850s, when the railway opened up the countryside, that city dwellers were able to journey—cheaply and comparatively easily—to such locations.
How far away it must have seemed to travellers then, and how baffling. If I—a creature of the twenty-first century, whose life has prepared her with countless films, photos, books and the internet—still find the sight extraordinary, then what must it have felt like for people in the nineteenth century?
What a literal expansion of horizons is must have been. How stunning and majestic: the very edge of the world.
No wonder so many poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly those with a fondness for travelling far and walking long, felt nature’s pull so strong on their imaginations. Truth and beauty—there is each aplenty in these landscapes, but it’s not difficult to imagine such places invoking feelings of awe and terror either.
* The title of this post is from Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’.
I had the opportunity recently to speak with Barbara Hoffert from Library Journal about books, in particular The Lake House. I love libraries, and could talk about writing all day, so it was a real pleasure. The interview has just been published, and if you’re interested in my thoughts on structuring novels, narrative rightness, and living history, you can read them here.
The Lake House will be released on October 20th in the US and Canada, October 21st in Australia and NZ, and October 22nd in the UK. I’ll be publishing more information, including videos and tour dates, very soon.
In the meantime, here’s a glimpse of what you can expect…
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An abandoned house…
After a particularly troubling case, Sadie Sparrow is sent on an enforced break from her job with the Metropolitan Police. She retreats to her beloved grandfather’s cottage in Cornwall but soon finds herself at a loose end. Until one day, she stumbles upon an abandoned house surrounded by overgrown gardens and dense woods, and learns the story of a baby boy who disappeared without a trace.
A missing child…
June 1933, and the Edevane family’s country house, Loeanneth, is polished and gleaming, ready for the much-anticipated Midsummer Eve party. For Eleanor, the annual party has always been one of her treasured traditions, but her middle daughter, Alice, sixteen years old and with literary ambitions, is especially excited. Not only has Alice worked out the perfect twist for her novel, she’s also fallen helplessly in love with someone she shouldn’t. But by the time midnight strikes and fireworks light up the night skies, the Edevane family will have suffered a loss so great they leave Loeanneth and never return.
An unsolved mystery…
Seventy years later, in the attic writing room of her elegant Hampstead home, the formidable Alice Edevane leads a life as neatly plotted as the bestselling detective novels she writes. Until a young police detective starts asking questions about her family’s past and seeking to resurrect the complex tangle of secrets Alice has spent her life trying to escape…
There’s an article in this month’s Australian Country Style magazine, written by Claire MacTaggart, about my childhood on Tamborine Mountain. It was such a lovely piece to be involved with – the older I get and the more I write, the clearer it is to me how enormously my childhood experiences influence the way I see the world. Anyone who’s read The Secret Keeper will recognise the Tamborine Mountain of my memory in the chapter featuring Vivien as a girl: running down to the creek, hiding under the ferns, watching the summer storms roll in – these are my experiences, just as they belong to Vivien. But it is more than that, too. It seems to me now that the landscape of childhood – the experience of place when we are growing up – becomes an inextricable part of a person and the palette of their imagination. For my part, I know that even my novels that aren’t set on the mountain are informed by the things that I saw and felt and smelled and heard and thought about as a child, and are therefore very much related to the place that I called home.
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You can read the article HERE.
It was such a pleasure to chat with Sophia Whitfield from Culture Street about The Secret Keeper. I hope you enjoy the conversation. (And a small self-correction because the details always matter: Clive, my wonderful Blitz-time guide, was wearing a poppy in his lapel, not a carnation.)
Christmas in Australia doesn’t look much like a Nat King Cole song. Sandcastles rather than snowmen, surfing instead of sleigh-rides, and a lot of overdressed Santas handing melted chocolates out to kids. There are mangoes involved, lots of them, and a box of cherries that I have to hide or else I’ll eat myself ill.
It’s hot outside, the sort of hot that comes laden with moisture, searing heat by day and cracking thunderstorms on dusk; the sort of hot that makes you want to sit very, very still beneath the ceiling fan and maybe even doze. The birds are up by five each day, and you can’t walk the streets at night without passing through pockets of air swollen with the scent of sun-warmed gardenias.
For Christmas lunch we’ll eat turkey and baked ham, but we’ll eat them outside at a long table beneath the jacaranda tree. There’ll be citronella burning to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and when we’re finished the kids will demolish a watermelon and run back and forth beneath the sprinkler until they’re soaking wet. The crickets will start to chirrup in the underbrush as evening comes, and we’ll listen to Christmas songs about snow and sleds and little robin red breasts, as the pair of kookaburras who let us share their backyard eye hidden snakes from the bough of the silvery gum.
The heat can be oppressive here; it can seem inescapable; but I don’t mind. Inside my house there’s a doorway to another world. Not at the back of the wardrobe (I know because I’ve checked). My doorway sits atop my desk and the ritual to pass through it goes like this: I close the office door behind me—carefully, quietly, so that nobody knows I’ve gone and asks me to play Pacman again (not that I don’t love playing Pacman, only I’m the reigning champion and I don’t play soft and it isn’t kind to beat one’s children every time); I draw the curtains on my view of hot tin roofs and backyard swimming pools; I fire up my computer and I begin to read.
The doorway opens quickly. You’ll understand, I think, when I say the black and white print dissolves like magic and there’s colour and movement and noise, a whole other world, behind it.
This year my doorway takes me to London in 1940. It’s cooler there, and dangerous. The bombs have begun to fall and no one knows yet the fierce battle that lies ahead. In the small room of a boarding house in Notting Hill, a girl called Dolly is about to cross paths with a pair of strangers who will change her life. A terrible thing is going to happen and a shocking secret will be kept for decades.
Listen. The air raid siren has just sounded; the landlady is drumming on her saucepan, ordering everyone to the shelter; the drone of bombers comes closer and Dolly runs towards her fate . . .
You can go there, too, next year, but in the meantime I hope your own magic doorway takes you somewhere wonderful this Christmas.
