Sarah Vaughan's Blog, page 4

The birth of a book

One chilly midwinter's night nine years ago my youngest was born: a squashed mewling mass of dark hair and skinny limbs who gazed at me with the deep blue eyes of a newborn and reminded me of Christmas as a time of birth and renewal.

That Christmas baby is now the tallest boy in his class. A delicious combination of that infant, still, but with ever stronger flashes of the beautiful young man I can imagine him growing into. Adolescence is a good few years off but so are those precious baby years.

If Christmas makes me contemplate change then that cycle is played out in my writing. The day my children broke up for school two years ago, I delivered the manuscript of The Farm at the Edge of the World, my second novel, with a feeling of intense relief. Four or five drafts, and many, many revisions later, it's been published in hardback and this week a box of paperbacks arrived ready to be sent out into the world on January 12 - a hopeful start to the new year.

I'm very proud of this novel - about love, loss and atonement played out on a desolate stretch of north Cornish coast. "Told with an intensity that echoes du Maurier" said the Costa winner and reviewer Kate Saunders - and, as someone who has tried to capture the essence of this intensely beautiful but sometimes desolate county, I can't help but be pleased with that. 

And yet, just as the mother of a newborn feels she can never give her other children enough attention, so I'm going to have to let The Farm loose in the world to find its own way as I focus on the next novel. Because, the day my box of books arrived, I was finishing the copy edit for Anatomy of a Scandal, which will be published in a year's time - in January 2018.

It would be tempting to focus solely on this book baby in the New Year. And yet there's a new sibling of a novel, still very much in the gestation process, which is due to be delivered in February 2018.

The writerly cycle of birth and renewal is set to continue just as my not-so-baby boy and his big sister will grow and, hopefully, flourish. And, at the end of a universally bleak 2016, that fills me with tentative hope and an immense sense of gratitude.

Thank you for reading and supporting. And a very Merry Christmas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new two-book book deal

Most of the blogs I've put on this site have been short snippets of news or have been about my writing process. There's little that, as a former news reporter, I'd deem properly newsworthy in any way.

All that changed last week when my next novel, Anatomy of a Scandal, was sold to Simon & Schuster, together with a second, in an auction on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair.  I even featured as a page lead on the first Bookseller Daily -  complete with a more serious - some have said scary - black and white profile pic:

I'm obviously completely delighted - and am thrilled that the novel I wrote out of contract, but with a strong conviction that this was a story I had to tell, has resonated not only in the UK but with publishers elsewhere. Before I'd even had a UK preempt, Anatomy had been preempted in Italy and France. It's also been preempted in Spain; been sold in a Norwegian auction; and I have offers from Germany, Turkey, Russia and Lithuania. As I write, the novel is out on submission in the US.

If this all sounds terribly cocky, then no one has been more surprised than me by the speed and certainty of these offers. Writing can be a lonely, doubt-filled process and it's only when I start editing and rereading ahead of submission that I begin to think: "Perhaps this isn't too bad." And then: "Actually, I can do this" 

Or perhaps that's slightly disingenuous. Anatomy of a Scandal is a novel I wanted to write for three years; something that I feel passionate about; and that - if everything is copy, as Nora Ephron famously said - contains an awful lot of me. It's darker and more emotional in tone than my two previous novels: a novel that explores questions that I think are being asked at the moment across many cultures as the breadth of countries offering to publish suggests.

I'm a perfectionist but even I knew, as I finished this, that this was a novel I'd really want to read.

I'm so incredibly grateful to my agent, Lizzy Kremer; the rights team at David Higham Associates, and my new editors, notably Jo Dickinson at S&S.

Because, thanks to them, the suspicion that this is a novel worth reading has become a certainty. And, thanks to them, it won't just be by me.

Summer at the edge of the world

I am writing for the first time in four weeks. Just looking at that sentence makes my stomach crease with panic and yet taking the first month of the summer holidays off - something unprecedented since writing full-time; and unknown when I worked as a journalist  - has been a creative thing to do. With builders knocking my house apart, I fled to the most southernly tip of Britain - the Lizard peninsula - keen to escape everything: social media; the relentless organisation of life as a parent of two young children; the unfounded anxiety that no one would buy my current book or that my agent would be disappointed by the one I'd just sent to her; the very busy-ness that stuffs my head around publication and can threaten to overwhelm.

Although The Farm at the Edge of the World is set on the north Cornwall coast, I wasn't particular about which part of the Cornish coast we visited. I was interested in extremity. A spot at the edge of Britain where the sea stretched in front of me and I could envisage utter, perfect isolation - though, this being Cornwall in the first week of the summer holidays and me holidaying with my husband and two children, that was rather a tough call. Most of all I craved somewhere where phones wouldn't work and where my children wouldn't mention the iPad we'd decided not to take. A place in which to detox technologically, and to wind down until my main consideration was when to plunge into the icy sea for a swim and whether I could bear to do so when the skies were molten and my skin was pimpled with goose bumps. A place where my eleven and eight-year-olds would race to be the first in the sea; and bound ahead of us along the cliff path like the springer spaniels they fell in love with. A spot where the first view in the morning would be the sea; and the air would be thick with the smell of sea salt and lush, dew-soaked grass.

We found all this camping at Coverack, watching the sun set over the limpid water beyond the harbour; and as we plunged into the coldest sea I have ever swum in: the churning waves that swallowed up my youngest and spat him out again at Kynance cove.

I found this sense of serenity, too on a trip to Penzance - truly the edge of the world - where I floated in the art deco salt-water Lido and watched the clouds scud across a royal blue sky, conscious that my mind was being emptied of all preoccupations and worries and refilled with new snippets of ideas for stories; and that all I need do, in this safe, contained place which fired my creativity, was to let the water buoy me up, keep me afloat.

It's a truism that such moments of intense relaxation are the stuff that holidays are made of. Each year I experience them and each year I vow to hold onto them. Inevitably, I fail. But this year, I'm going to cling on to the emotions felt on those Cornish cliffs and in the sea and evoked, I hope, by my Cornish novel. That sense that many of the things I worry about are mere clutter: superfluous compared to my priorities. And, as I begin plotting my next novel, I'm going to use these memories and these images to try to replicate those rare moments of calmness; moments that let me drift to the edge of my imaginative world.

Publication Day for The Farm at the Edge of the World

The Farm at the Edge of the World, my novel about love, loss and forgiveness played out on the desolate north Cornish coast, is published today. I'm not having a hardback launch but I will be doing this event with two fellow Hachette authors on the Hodder roof terrace on July 19 and would love to see some friendly faces there:

I've also been busy publicising the novel, with an audible interview here and a series of blog pieces, many collated on my previous blog page; the others to be listed here when published.

The novel is also out as an audiobook, expertly narrated by Claire Corbett. I find it difficult listening to my words being read by someone else - a common writerly problem I think - but from this little clip, I know she'll do it justice. If you click here you'll get a flavour. Hope you enjoy! 

Three weeks to publication - and a box of books arrives:

The Farm at the Edge of the World will be published in less three weeks - and as in the run-up to finals, or the birth of a baby, I've found myself immersed in a sudden frenzy of activity.  

I've attempted a mini book-tour, whisking to the very western tip of Cornwall and the fortuitously named Edge of the World bookshop, in Penzance, as well as Waterstone's Truro and St Ives bookseller to try to drum up support:

I've helped create a Pinterest page of photos that helped inspired the novel - see it here - and, having been picked as the Hodder, Quercus and Headline women's fiction website's choice of the month, have blogged on the books on my bedside table, here:

I've also written about the inspiration behind the novel for the Prime Writers website, here:

My great grandfather, Matthew Jelbert, who farmed just outside St Austell. Part of the inspiration for the book.

Childhood holidays in north Cornwall - and the emotional significance of a certain place - sparked the initial idea. Here my sister and I are walking on Tregirls Beach, aged 11 and 9, 1984.

 

and have been interviewed for audible.com and written features and blogs - all links to follow.

With a Hodder rooftop reading planned, I'm not holding a party until the paperback's released in January - not least because I'm determined to finish the first draft of my third novel by June 30, my publication day. It won't be a day of languid self-congratulation: one child has a piano exam and athletics tournament; another swimming; while my evening will be spent preparing for a school leavers' breakfast and attending a secondary school meeting.

But amid the busy-ness of everyday life, I'll make time to sit and stroke a finished copy, relieved that my archetypal tricky second novel has emerged as a beautifully-jacketed, tangible, thing. The book I once agonised over, and doubted I could ever wrest into a tightly-structured story, is being read, and - finger's crossed, so far - enjoyed. And that's reason enough for a celebration, however quiet a kind.

The Farm at the Edge of the World: giveaway!

My new novel, The Farm at the Edge of the World, will be published next month (June 30) and to celebrate Hodder have organised a goodreads giveaway. Simply sign up to win one of twenty copies: http://fal.cn/2x7i 

Here's the story behind the novel which focuses on love, loss, regret and atonement - all played out on a stretch of the north Cornish coast : http://bit.ly/1Tjgvo1

And here's what some early readers have already said: 

A beautifully evocative story of love, loss and forgiveness. You can taste, feel, see and hear Cornwall on every page as the characters pull you into their lives. Loved it. (Liz Fenwick)

Absolutely loved it. Very rare I sit and devour 220 pages in one afternoon. (Nina Pottell)

An evocative and page-turning story of love and heartbreak, written in beautiful and poignant prose that captivated me from first word to final page (Katie Marsh)

A wonderful book about love and loss through the eyes of three generations of Cornish women. Lovable, flawed, and so very human, each character had me rooting for them right until the very end. But it was the setting on the north Cornwall coast that makes me love this book: the weather, the seasons, the landscape, the house are all written so vividly that I could step into that place and instantly know my way around. (Claire Fuller)

Sarah Vaughan not only writes beautifully but her stories and characters have a way of climbing into your heart and staying there long after you've turned the last page . . . Highly recommended! (Fleur Smithwick)

 

Cover reveal: The Farm at the Edge of the World

When I was a girl, we holidayed in a pilot's cottage on the edge of a cove in north Cornwall, where the water pooled petrol-blue and deep then slithered over the sand all day. Behind us the cliffs were high: a headland where you were buffeted by the wind and the sky stretched from Land's End, to the west, and all the way up to Devon. Infront of us, the estuary shifted: silvered puddles of water then ribbons of sea, and then a mass of charcoal ocean through which fishing trawlers chugged, drawing seagulls and wheeling guillemots in their wake.

Beyond the sea, there were fields and a farm: a low-slung stretch of granite seen on the horizon. Our stay would often coincide with the harvest and I would watch the combine as it trundled through the fields of barley all week. The air was thick with the smell of crushed camomile, dog rose and gorse, and the shoreline casually offered its gems: jewel-like anemones; blennies and crabs; a shoal of mackerel, spiralling through the water; a pair of seals, spied from the cliffs as they basked on the salt-lashed rocks beneath.

 

Years later, I took my then-boyfriend to this place. "Why didn't you tell me this existed?" he asked me. Later still, we began to stay, first in the cottage, then on the farm with our kids. And as the lane opened up to offer a view of the estuary, and I spied the cottage where I holidayed as a child, I would always have the same response. "Oh no," one child would say. "Don't tell me," my husband would look incredulous. "Oh yes," the other would add. "She's crying again."

My over-emotional, some might think excessive, response is not just due to the beauty of this spot - though, on a cloudless day, it takes my breath away - but to the fact that this place is packed tight with memories. A world over-invested with positive emotions: the place I remember feeling happiest as a child. And so, when I decided to write about an isolated farm on a stretch of the north Cornwall coast - a farm packed tight with more complex memories; darkness as well as light - it was inevitable that my recollections would feed into it.

The Farm at the Edge of the World, to be published by Hodder on June 30, is the result.

 

Here's the blurb:

The farm sits with its back towards the Atlantic; a long stretch of granite, hunkering down. For over 300 years it has stood here, steeped in the history and secrets of one family. A farm at the very edge of the world.

1939, and Will and Alice are evacuated to a granite farm in north Cornwall, perched on a windswept cliff. There they meet the farmer's daughter, Maggie, and against fields of shimmering barley and a sky that stretches forever, enjoy a childhood largely protected from the ravages of war.

But in the sweltering summer of 1943 something happens that will have tragic consequences. A small lie escalates. Over 70 years on Alice is determined to atone for her behaviour - but has she left it too late?

2014, and Maggie's granddaughter Lucy flees to the childhood home she couldn't wait to leave thirteen years earlier, marriage over; career apparently ended thanks to one terrible mistake. Can she rebuild herself and the family farm? And can she help her grandmother, plagued by a secret, to find some lasting peace?

This is a novel about identity and belonging; guilt, regret and atonement; the unrealistic expectations placed on children and the pain of coming of age. It's about small lies and dark secrets. But above all it's about a beautiful, desolate, complex place.

If  you want to read any more about its inspiration, I blogged about my Cornish farming ancestors in the June section of my blog . (You will need to scroll a little down.)

And if you want to read about a research trip to Cornwall - and the importance of a sense of place in my writing, with some very attractive pictures of moorland cattle - you can do so in the May section. (See archive to the right.)

Paris - and a reason for reading.

Even blanketed with grey cloud Paris was glorious this weekend, when I raced there for a whistlestop book signing. There was champagne and exquisite patisserie, a saxophonist rendering Purcell and Britten afresh, and of course The Eiffel Tower - glimpsed here from the seventh floor of le BHV Marais, in whose vast book department I was interviewed about La Meillure d'Entre Nous or The Art of Baking Blind.

I was there with the award-winning literary novelist Kerry Hudson to celebrate the Best of British culture in an event organised by the British Embassy, but in the run-up to going I wasn't sure if I should be there. I confirmed my tickets the day before the terrorist attacks - and I doubted anyone would want it to go ahead. Why would Parisiens want to visit a department store to hear a novelist discuss her book about why we bake - at first glance, a frivolous subject - when they had so many more pressing issues on their minds?

And then I talked to a Parisian friend who had read my book and she banished my self doubt.  Your book is about women going on a process of self-discovery, she said, and becoming stronger. About one woman, in particular, who finally rejects the domineering man in her life when she realises she can be much happier alone. It's about abandoning rigid expectations, including our own pressure to be perfect, and about our need for love - or, at the very least, for understanding. It celebrates kindness and empathy - two of the things the terrorists attacked.

Of course, reading itself, is one way to increase that empathy: to open ourselves up to new experiences and emotions, glimpsed through the pages of a book, within the safety of our own homes. In schoolgirl French, I tried to explain that "nous devons celebrer la cuisine, celebrer less femmes et leur fragilites, celebrer l'impossibiltie de la perfection et l'importance d'être aime. Et lisons plus et toujours plus de livres."

And then I finished Kerry Hudson's disquieting, poignant Thirst - about a sex-trafficked Ukrainian girl who finds love with an emotionally-damaged security guard, two characters the likes of whom I am unlikely to come across in real life. And it confirmed something every reader knows: that, at the risk of sounding sanctimonious, books, far from being frivolous, are the passports to our trying to live a more compassionate, empathetic life.

Happy Czech publication day to The Art of Baking Blind.

The Art of Baking Blind is published in its Czech edition today - the sixth of its foreign translations - and I'm delighted to share Mlada Fronta's cover. The title's been changed to Love with the Taste of Macarons and the strapline reads ‘One baking competition, five fates...’ But what I find really interesting is that my name has been stretched and made far more interesting. Vaughan, my married surname, is monosyllabic and not particularly noteworthy but Vaughanová makes me sound like a diva.

With those extra two syllables - and an acute accent - I've become the sort of author who might spend her days eating lavender macarons and reclining on a chaise longue instead of googling recipes for traditional Czech pastries - and trying to plot her third novel. My new name makes me think of Anna Karenina: of furs, and illicit love affairs, and tragedy - not of the school run, and stomping back through the leaves with my kids to oversee spellings and music practice, to sort the washing and cook dinner. Sarah Vaughanová. I doubt I'll manage to be diva-ish for long.

 

 

Our love of a good story: or why we watch The Great British Bake Off

The Great British Bake Off final screens tonight and at least 12 million of us are expected to cluster around our televisions to discover if Nadiya, Tamal or Ian will win.

Countless thousands of words have been written about the continued allure of this programme. I've argued that Bake Off appeals because it conjures up a rural way of life about which we are deeply nostalgic: the world of the village fete, of an England of "long shadows on cricket lawns", as John Major once put it; or Orwell's "old maids bicycling to Holy Communion'. Of warm ginger beer and Downton; fresh scones and buttered crumpets; the promise of "honey still for tea"; the sound of leather on willow.

It's also a world of kindness: bakers are givers, and work in a "spirit of generosity", according to the BBC's Martha Kearney. If a Charlotte Russe starts to fall apart, or the biscuit panels of a chocolate showstopper shift, the bakers will spring into action to help one another - even if Ian's set jaw hints at a  determination to win.

Crucially, as I've blogged here, the appeal of the GBBO also lies in teasing out the psychology of the bakers: puzzling why a junior hospital doctor might want to spend his spare time fashioning a cardamom, blackberry and raspberry Charlotte Russe. Or why a photographer to the Dalai Lama is so perfectionist he forges Heath Robinson style gadgets to ensure his bakes are sufficiently precise. Or a mother-of-three, who never usually feels proud of herself but whose inner conviction grows as we watch her, decides to enter the competition in the first place.

But I've also realised that the GBBO fulfils our need for a good story. Plotting my third novel, I've been reading John Yorke's excellent Into the Woods: how Stories Work and How We Tell Them, and thinking about the narrative journey, the conflict and jeopardy a protagonist must go through. Yorke's analysis covers films and TV programmes such as Thelma and Louise, Spooks, and Pulp Fiction - a far cry from the gentle, apparently plot-free world of Bake Off - and yet the idea of a hero facing several feats as s/he battles to fulfil his/her quest of becoming the winner; of him overcoming adversity and undergoing a process of self-realisation applies just as neatly here.

At the risk of over-analysing a programme about bakers in a tent, I believe we love the GBBO because we want to see that hero evolve: we believe the winner should be the contestant who endures the greatest set backs in their journey and who develops the most throughout the ten weeks. The worthy hero is the baker who has undergone the greatest process of self-realisation: having battled their own self-doubt, and undergone their own baking disasters - a wrongly-judged flavour or, better still, a collapsing structure or a timing crisis; something that puts their existence in the competition in real jeopardy - while whipping up exquisite cheesecakes and patisserie.

The rightful winner - according to our need for a good story - and the favourite to win is, of course, Nadiya. Her back story alone marks her out as a worthy hero: the young girl who grew up in a Bangladeshi family where they cooked, but never made desserts. Taught to bake by her school home economics teach, she didn't make star baker until week five and initially struggled with the technicals - failing to complete her vol au vents. But with her creative inventiveness, she has battled through to become star baker three times; while her expressive facial expressions and emotional honesty mean she lets us, the viewers, in on the journey she is experiencing. Ian is just too emotionally cool; Tamal, despite his Eeyorish fear that he would never be star baker, perhaps a little reserved for that.

Of course, on a wider level, the hijab-wearing Nadiya deserves to win, according to the rules of a good story, because she was perhaps the most unexpected contestant. As she told The Radio Times: "Originally, I was a bit nervous that perhaps people would look at me, a Muslim in a headscarf, and wonder if I could bake." 

When the first programme aired there was snarling in the Daily Mail about the line-up being "more right-on and politically correct than a Benetton ad", and yet with her humour and, crucially, her skill she has silenced such critics. This weekend, the Telegraph championed her for doing so much to remove prejudices against women wearing the hijab. As Nadiya herself has said: "I hope that week by week people have realised that I can bake - and just because I'm not a stereotypical British person, it doesn't mean that I am not into bunting, cake and tea."

Of course, our need for a good story doesn't mean she will win. Never underestimate a baker, such as Ian, who makes their own gadgets: after all, Nancy, who turned up with a jaffa cake guillotine in week one, triumphed last year. And Mary Berry has done much eye-twinkling and winking at both Ian and the series' beauty, the equally impressive Tamal. 

But, worthy winners though they may be, there will be a collective groan at 8.58 tonight if Nadiya doesn't claim the Bake Off crown. Her inventiveness means she deserves it -  but this isn't about the bakes; it's about her undergoing a quest and experiencing a hero's journey. 

It's the ending that the story of this year's Bake Off deserves.