Ask the Author: Francesca Haig
Answered Questions (15)
Francesca Haig
Hi Fiona - and thanks for reading The Cookbook of Common Prayer. I chose Buckinghamshire partly because it doesn't contain any real cave systems - for ethical and legal reasons I didn't want the death in the book to be too close to any of the real caving accidents that sadly have occurred in England. From a plot point of view, I needed somewhere relatively close to London, where a day-excursion from a London school was plausible, and in a region where Gill and Gabe would be able to visit the coroner easily from London. So my priorities were narrative, rather than geological, I'm afraid! If I drew on an existing cave system I would have been limited by the realities of that cave system's layout - inventing one gave me the freedom to create precisely the sequence of events that suited my story. (A related tidbit: the name of my fictional 'Smith-Jackson' cave system is a nod to Dodie Smith and Shirley Jackson, as they are two writers whose control of distinctive narrative voice [in 'I Capture the Castle' and 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' was an inspiration when I was trying to capture the different voices of each of the narrators). Thanks again for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the novel, despite its geological vagaries!
Francesca Haig
Hi Patricia, and thank you so much for your lovely message. I'm so delighted that you enjoyed the trilogy - and hooray for your local library (and all libraries) too!
Francesca Haig
Hi Michelle. The film rights to The Fire Sermon were optioned by DreamWorks film studio, but Hollywood moves in mysterious ways, so we don't know whether the series will ever actually be made into a film - these things are out of my hands. It was thrilling to have the book optioned, but for now I'm just concentrating on the writing side of things (since that's the only part I can control!).
Francesca Haig
Hi Toni,
Thanks for your lovely message - I'm thrilled that you enjoyed the novels. I'm working hard on the third book, I promise!
Thanks for your lovely message - I'm thrilled that you enjoyed the novels. I'm working hard on the third book, I promise!
Francesca Haig
Hi Sara,
Many thanks for your lovely message - I'm delighted that you enjoyed it. The Map of Bones will be translated into Czech too, so I hope you enjoy that as well!
Many thanks for your lovely message - I'm delighted that you enjoyed it. The Map of Bones will be translated into Czech too, so I hope you enjoy that as well!
Francesca Haig
Hi again Stacy,
I've answered your audiobook question separately, but thanks for your very kind words about The Fire Sermon - am so glad that you enjoyed it!
I've answered your audiobook question separately, but thanks for your very kind words about The Fire Sermon - am so glad that you enjoyed it!
Francesca Haig
Hi Stacy,
Yup - the UK audiobook version came out in April, and the US version is currently in production and will be out soon (I don't have a specific date, sorry!).
Yup - the UK audiobook version came out in April, and the US version is currently in production and will be out soon (I don't have a specific date, sorry!).
Francesca Haig
That's lovely to hear - thank you! I hope you enjoy it. I just sent off the proofread pages to my American editor last night...
Francesca Haig
I agree with you about the power of the stripped-back prose in The Road - it's an astounding novel. I think my writing style tends to skew much more lyrical than McCarthy's, which is perhaps why he's been such a useful influence in showing the power of restraint. While I wouldn't say I intentionally tried to write like him (if such a thing were even possible!), I was certainly aware of his influence while writing, and I know that it informed my work (but so,too, did the work of lots of other authors I admire...)
Francesca Haig
Thanks for your kind words, James - delighted that you enjoyed The Fire Sermon, and particularly glad that you enjoyed the imagery. As for the question of what prompted me to write a post-apocalyptic novel: there's no straightforward answer. People have been drawn to post-apocalyptic scenarios since stories began (it goes back to Noah, and even earlier). I suspect that part of the appeal is that we get to ask ourselves the juicy big questions about how society works, and how we might behave if we landed in the world that we created. And the sad truth is that the environmental disaster that we're racing towards makes apocalyptic scenarios seem ever more relevant. On a more personal level, I think that I was also influenced by my research as an academic: I specialised in Holocaust literature, so perhaps it's inevitable that when I wrote my first novel it would turn out to be very dystopian. I also think that Cormac McCarthy's The Road (one of my all-time favourite novels) was a big influence.
Francesca Haig
Thanks Cheryl - lovely to hear that you enjoyed The Fire Sermon so much!
I definitely think there are parallels to be drawn between the injustice and oppression in the novel and the many examples of these things in our contemporary world - but when I wrote the novel, I wasn't thinking about any particular group. I'd be reluctant to impose a specific allegorical interpretation onto the novel, because I find that this can end up limiting the possibilities that people might otherwise discover within the book. I'd prefer to leave it open - but if my novel is prompting people to think about real-world injustices then I'm delighted.
I definitely think there are parallels to be drawn between the injustice and oppression in the novel and the many examples of these things in our contemporary world - but when I wrote the novel, I wasn't thinking about any particular group. I'd be reluctant to impose a specific allegorical interpretation onto the novel, because I find that this can end up limiting the possibilities that people might otherwise discover within the book. I'd prefer to leave it open - but if my novel is prompting people to think about real-world injustices then I'm delighted.
Francesca Haig
Thanks for taking the time to let me know you loved the book - it's so lovely to hear that readers are enjoying it! As for the tanks, you're right that their main purpose is to preserve the Omegas for the sake of protecting the Alphas - but without giving too much away, I can tell you that Book 2 goes a lot further into whether or not there might be a way to break the link between twins...
Francesca Haig
Thanks so much, Julie - delighted that you enjoyed The Fire Sermon! As for the title: I first came across the phrase in T.S. Eliot's immortal poem 'The Waste Land.' From the minute I ecountered the phrase, it really stuck in my mind. It turned out that Eliot had taken the phrase from an important Buddhist teaching about about detachment from earthly things and emotions. This seemed to fit with some of the ideas of my novel - but if I'm honest, I was hooked on the phrase before I'd even googled it to learn more about it. I found those three words alone so powerfully evocative. There's a couple of lines in the first page or so where I try to give some context for the title, within the world of the novel ('Before the blast, they say there’d been sermons about fire, about the end of the world. The fire itself gave the last sermon; after that there were no more.').
Francesca Haig
The second in the trilogy is due to be published in Jan 2016 in the UK - and I think publication date in the US & Canada is usually a few weeks after that. I'm hard at work on the edits for Book 2 at the moment (and Book 3 is also underway...). So glad to hear that you loved The Fire Sermon - thank you!
Francesca Haig
Hi Cynthia. Unfortunately my first collection is long out of print, although that might not be a bad thing - I have a few dusty copies on my bookshelf and while some of the poems stand the test of time, some make me cringe now! Quite a few of my more recent poems are floating around in literary journals, anthologies, etc., but I'm not sure how you could get hold of back-issues of those. For the last year or two I've had to concentrate on the novels, so the poems have had to take a back seat. But I'm still writing poetry - it's my first love, as a writer - and hope to get a second collection out some time in the next few years, when deadlines for The Fire Sermon sequels permit.
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