Hayling asked Suanne Laqueur:

I notice in your next book "Exaltation of Larks," both characters are Latin-American. Was this a conscious decision to write diverse characters, or was it something those characters revealed to you as you were writing? What kind of research does it involve?

Suanne Laqueur We live in a diverse world and I like my books to reflect that but it's not like I spin the wheel and say, "OK, next up, Latino!"

Nationality adds depth to a character, it's a good place to start when you're building a world. And I always like to write characters that are bilingual, just out of sheer jealousy. I can speak French the way some people can carry a tune but I'm awed and envious of people who are fluent in more than one language.

Javier Landes started out as Xavier, Xav for short, because I thought it sounded damn sexy. But after The Fish Tales, I wanted to get away from French-speaking characters. So he became Javier instead. Still sexy. I made him Dominican after watching Joanna Hausmann's video on different Latino accents. Apparently Dominicans speak Spanish the fastest out of all Latinos (although Puerto Ricans will vehemently and speedily deny any such thing). To contrast that, I first made Alex Penda Argentinian. His Spanish would be much slower and sing-song with a heavy Italian influence. It just made for some funny, nationalistic-pride competitive dialogue between them, with Jav speeding up and Alex slowing down on purpose.

Then of course, the thing happens where I'm scribbling ideas and different scenarios and the characters start to evolve. Jav is first-generation-NYC-born-and-bred and he was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. This is not a 9/11 novel, but it's a life event for him. Then I was reading a memoir by Isabel Allende about her life in Chile during Pinochet's regime. I didn't realize the coup occurred on September 11, 1973, and I was fascinated/horrified at how a host of Chilean ex-pats in America experienced TWO 9/11's. So I thought, what if Alex were from Chile, not Argentina? And he escaped the coup as a child but left his parents behind?

And THEN starts the research, both historical and cultural. The Allende era. The Pinochet era. The Disappeared Ones. The routes Chileans took out of the country. Ex-pat communities. Ethnic enclaves. Dominican immigration patterns. Dominican neighborhoods in NYC. Traditions, foods, phrases, expressions, slang, curses. I bug the hell out of my Spanish-speaking friends with "How do you say..." or "What would you say if..." because I need all that stuff in my head.

I'm really careful to keep it subtle and avoid clichés and stereotypes. Personally I don't like reading books where I'm hand-held through a character's identity or worse, their accent is written out phonetically. I shouldn't need "o dios mio" or "que pasa" every other sentence to show Jav and Alex are Latino. They should just be themselves.

I have a Jamaican-American character in Larks as well and with him I had to be extra-careful not to make him the quintessential, dreadlocked rasta mon. He's second-generation, he doesn't have an accent. He can do one if he's telling an anecdote and mimicking a relative, but it's not how he talks. He says "man," not "mon."

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