Jeff Falzone

Jeff Falzone asked Tana French:

Is there a novel (of somebody else's) that that has your favorite opening sentences?

Tana French It's hard to beat Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy: 'When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.' Right there, you know a big handful of important things about the narrator, you're swept into the rhythms of the prose, you know this book isn't going to be rainbows and lollipops, and you're hooked.

I have to go. I have a nasty feeling I managed to delete a few answered questions along the way, but I'm hoping they're just not showing up in my dashboard any more... There are literally hundreds of interesting questions left, and I'll try to come back tomorrow and answer some more, but I might not be able to. Either way, a huge thank-you to all of you who took the time to send in questions - I'm sorry I couldn't answer every one - and to all of you who took the time to read the book. Cheers.

More Answered Questions

Greg

Greg asked Tana French:

So many authors develop a character and then write a long string of books, from 3 to 30, based around the one character. But reading your books, each one is individual, with its own set of characters and a rather loose connection to the others. In many ways, this is very refreshing. Why do you prefer to write completely new story lines rather than revisiting established characters?

A Goodreads user

A Goodreads user asked Tana French:

This is the second book that is centered around a group of friends who have turned each other into their family; who will do anything for each other. Does this inspiration for these close groups come from personal experience or is your draw to them more like how it is for Stephen (in the way that he envies it)?

Cristina Ferrandez

Cristina Ferrandez asked Tana French:

Tana, I found the idea of the 'animal' in Broken Harbour extremely chilling and a superb metaphor for mental illness and/or depression, but also loved the ambiguity of it (we can never be quite sure that the animal didn't exist - what about the skeletons in the attic?). Could you please tell us how you came up with the idea of the animal, and whether this ambiguity was intentional? Thanks!

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