Sanjida Kay's Blog, page 6

One Year Later – Book Club Questions

 

 

Is anyone in a Book Club? I must admit, I don’t really have time, although I’d love to be! I have a Book Buddy instead, which is much more random and sporadic, but she inspires me to read books I’d never have chosen myself, and then we go for a walk or a drink when we can fit it in round kids and work and chat about the book, as well as everything else!

If you’d like to discuss One Year Later in your Book Club, here are some questions to get you started.

 

One Year Later – Book Club Questions

 

 

One Year Later – Nick Flowers

Here’s an extract from One Year Later, told from Nick Flowers’ perspective, the day his niece, Ruby-May, died.

 

If you prefer to read it, you can download a different extract told from Nick’s point of view here: One Year Later – Nick Flowers

 

One Year Later – The Prologue

Here’s the prologue to One Year Later. Let me know what you think!

 

If you prefer to read it, you can download it for free here: One Year Later – Prologue

 

One Year Later – Behind the Scenes

The inspiration behind One Year Later…

 

 

One Year Later

Here’s what One Year Later is all about.

 

Behind the scenes: One Year Later – The Cottage

When we bought a large plot of land and a house that we were planning on renovating in Somerset, I had the idea to set my next psychological thriller, One Year Later, partly in Somerset. 

In the garden of our house we found the ruins of an old cottage…and I started thinking, what if a child were playing amongst the ruins and it collapsed? It became the basis of a terrible scene in my novel… 

 

‘I was lucky, the doctor said later, that I hadn’t been buried alive. I was lucky, he added, that I hadn’t died. 

Since then, but only to myself, I’ve always rephrased his statement: I’m lucky my sister didn’t kill me.’

Nick. One Year Later

 

I told my husband what I was writing and he was so freaked out he got a stone mason to shore up our ruined cottage and make it safer. This is what it looks like now – a lot of the vegetation shrouding it has been cleared away, and one wall has been repointed. 

 

‘We walk through the garden, and the beam clips the outline of the ruined cottage. I pause alongside it, feeling the familiar surge of panic, the sickening sensation I still have in dreams, of falling, of being buried alive. It’s shrouded in ivy; a sycamore has grown through the bread oven, the roots like something out of The Blair Witch Project.‘ 

Nick. One Year Later

 

Behind the Scenes: One Year Later – Somerset

I wrote my psychological thriller, One Year Later, in Bristol, but at the time we were renovating a  house in Somerset. We spent the summer camping in the garden and dreaming about moving in one day. It inspired one of the settings for my forthcoming novel. The Flower family, who are somewhat dysfunctional, grew up in Somerset. 

 

‘The Pines is a rambling farmhouse that our parents, David and Eleanor, converted years ago, and although it no longer has the land it came with, it still has a huge garden. It sits on the lower slopes of the Mendips in Somerset, the woods behind, green fields gently falling away in front of it. On a good day – and 15 August, with its clear blue skies, was one of those days – you can see over the tops of the seaside towns of Clevedon and Weston-super-Mare and all the way across the Severn estuary to Wales. It’s where we grew up, Amy, Bethany and I.’

Nick. One Year Later

 

Out on 1 August!

 

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Behind the scenes: One Year Later – The Pond

In the garden of the house in Somerset that we’ve been renovating is a small pond. In my next psychological thriller, One Year Later, a toddler drowns in a large pond in the garden of a rambling farmhouse. One year later, the family meet on a remote island off the coast of Italy for her anniversary in an attempt to reconnect and heal, but will everyone make it home?

‘Ruby-May holds out a bunch of tiny purple flowers in her small fist. Her fingers smell of spearmint. She opens her mouth and green water pours out; skeins of pond weed are tangled in her baby teeth.’
Nick. One Year Later

 

Thankfully our pond is neither big nor deep – and I do love the water lilies and the dragon flies…

Behind the scenes: One Year Later

In the garden of the house in Somerset that we’ve been renovating is a small pond. In my next psychological thriller, One Year Later, a toddler drowns in a large pond in the garden of a rambling farmhouse. One year later, the family meet on a remote island off the coast of Italy for her anniversary in an attempt to reconnect and heal, but will everyone make it home?

‘Ruby-May holds out a bunch of tiny purple flowers in her small fist. Her fingers smell of spearmint. She opens her mouth and green water pours out; skeins of pond weed are tangled in her baby teeth.’
Nick. One Year Later

 

Thankfully our pond is neither big nor deep – and I do love the water lilies and the dragon flies…