The Tapestry of Love

I'm always astounded by how weird it is to have friends who are published authors. I often get a jolt when I walk in to Waterstones and see a friends book on the shelf or better yet when I have them sat on my own shelves to read as I wish. It also means that I have access to a whole bunch of authors who I can tap up for various publications like MUSE, my newsletter and this blog. Last week saw David Bridger guest blogging on To Stalk a Publisher and this week I have really hit the ball out of the park. Rosy Thornton is my guest today and I am absolutely delighted to have her take part. So delighted in fact that I've popped her on The House of Burning Bras as well!

It all began on wednesday when a package came through my door, you'll recall that I wrote a brief blog about it just to whet your appetite. Well it was a book (I love receiving literature through my letterbox) and not just any book but a review copy of Rosy's latest novel, The Tapestry of Love.

I started it on wednesday night and by the early hours of Thursday I'd finished. It really is one of those books that just flows through you and urges you to keep going until the end. I love books like that, it feels like the author has done you a favour in some way.

So what's it about? Well first off I thought ToL (as I now think of it) was a romance, I expected romance to be the dominating theme, how wrong I was. This book is much, much more than a romance it's a journey of finding oneself, at a point in life where you imagine to already have done so.

The book starts with our heronie Catherine, a divorcee with grown up children on her way to her new home in rural France, the Cevennes mountains in fact. She's starting over, beginning a new life, a different life. I always enjoy reading about new starts, they speak, I think to somethng inside each of us that yearns to run off to the mountains or the beach or the jungle and begin again. Catherine is doing just that and from the very opening chapter Rosy sets the scene splendidly. Chapter two keeps you exactly where you want to be, her first interaction with a native is wonderfully written and this is the bar (a high one) that the rest of the book follows. There's one part in the last but one chapter that I'm desperate to copy here for you because it is so beautifully written and it's one of those bits that you'd imagine working perfectly in film. Alas I can't, it would spoil the story for you, I'll ask instead that readers tell me if they can spot it once they've read the book and drop me a comment letting me know what you think it is.

Again in the intrests of not spoiling the story I'm not going to tell you the plot - I'll say only that it deals with family ties, the pangs of absence and the wonderfully tentative beginnings of new love - because I'm imagining that after reading this and Rosy's interview below that you are going to click here and go buy it.

It's a perfect book to take with you on holiday, forget the trashy romances that'll be forgotten the next day. Rosy's book, Catherine's story will stay with you long after the holiday has finished. Also as a side note the cover is lush and the book will look cracking on your shelf.

So Rosy is here to answer a few of my questions... here goes...

Hi Rosy, thanks fo joining us today let's start the ball rolling by asking how long have you been writing for and what got you started?
I only began writing fiction six years ago. It came completely out of the blue, after watching a television programme! I loved the BBC’s adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘North and South’ in 2004; I went online to discuss the serial, discovered Gaskell fanfic, and thought I’d have a go at writing some. Three months later, I found I’d written a full-length pastiche sequel to ‘North and South’! It was utter drivel, of course – but by then I’d been bitten by the writing bug, and I carried straight on to write my own first ‘proper’ novel, ‘More Than Love Letters’ – which, Gaskell geeks will spot, contains more than a few nods to ‘North and South’.


How tough was the journey for publication for you?
It took just over a year, in all. I did find an agent to represent my Gaskell pastiche, but it didn’t attract a publisher, and that agent didn’t like ‘More Than Love Letters’ at all and gave me leave to try to find another agent for it. That was a slog. I think I approached every fiction agent in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, and was rejected by all of them! Then, by mistake, I wrote to an agent (Robert Dudley) who, at the time, was listed only as representing non-fiction. By pure luck, he happened to be looking to move into fiction, and liked the manuscript, so he and I set out as fiction virgins together. I worked through two major edits under his guidance (he is a fabulous editor!) and then he sent out the book – which was eventually taken, a few months later, by Headline.


Tapestry of Love is book number four for you, how does it feel to have those four books sat on your shelf and know that they're all yours?
It’s very unreal, to be honest. Mainly, I think, because I reached my forties without ever thinking of writing fiction. For my day job I am a legal academic, and have published a lot of extremely dull things about law. Lawyers are such pedantic analytical thinkers, famed for lacking imagination or creativity. I could define and classify things, make distinctions, split hairs – but I had no idea at all that I might be able to invent a story. I still have no idea where it came from.


An unusual question but... do you have all the covers blown up and adorn your walls with them (I'd be strongly tempted to and the cover of ToL is lovely).
LOL! No – I must admit I hadn’t thought of this! Though I did have a mug made for a friend of mine with her book cover on it when her first novel came out. You’re right, though – the cover visual for ‘The Tapestry of Love’ is utterly gorgeous. (Even if it is clearly a doorway in Provence and not in the Cévennes.)


You've picked quite an unusual setting for the book, how did that come about?
I had a fortnight’s family holiday in the Cévennes twenty years ago and have never been back, but for some reason the region just found its way under my skin. Maybe because it is the most beautiful place on earth!


Catherine comes across very much as a woman opening a new chapter to her life and setting in to the unknown, have you drawn on your own experiences for this, if not how did you convey the trepidation and the alieness of the situation?
I suppose on one level we all know what it’s like to take a step into the unfamiliar and be an outsider: every time we move house, begin a new job. But for the specifics of moving to France I had good examples to draw on, because my family have all made the same journey. My brother married a Frenchwoman and lives in the Rhône-Alpes; he runs his own small business and I pumped him for information about the nightmares of French bureaucracy. My parents moved to Loire Atlantique when they retired, to a crumbling old stone house, so I have also stolen some of their experiences, mainly in the realms of plumbing and electrics.


At first I took this book for a romance but it is much more than that, how central was the romance aspect to you - the writer - in the story?
I suppose the inclusion of a romance gives a story shape. I am a confirmed ‘pantser’ – that is, I don’t plan my novels, I just write them by the seat of my pants – and knowing that there is a love story to develop does give me a sense of at least one direction in which the book will move. But for me – as for Catherine – the romance did not become the central preoccupation of her new, emerging life. The book is as much about isolation and loneliness, but also about family and friendship, belonging and community and how we out down roots in a place, and about the relationship of man to landscape, as it is about romantic love.

You convey a real sense of emotion, the book really makes the reader feel the situation, it's a skill few writers posses. Has that developed over time with each book?
I think perhaps, with increased confidence, I’ve become less afraid to have a go at conveying emotion. My earlier books were funnier, I’ve noticed – as if somehow I had to be at least partly sending myself up all the time. ‘The Tapestry of Love’ has some elements of humour but they are now far lower in the mix. Maybe I’ve become less afraid to take myself seriously now and then.


The family ties, the absence and the worry it produces in Catherine, again was that drawn from personal experience?
None of the specifics of Catherine’s situation are drawn from my own life. But I’m a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend. Anxiety for loved ones, the pain of absence, bereavement and loss - these are things familiar to all of us.


What's next in the pipeline?
I don’t want to say too much for fear of jinxing things, but I have one completed manuscript currently with my agent (rather more sad and serious than any I’ve tried before), and am half way through a new novel, which has gone back in the other direction: lighter and funnier, a retro ‘rom com’ set in 1980.


I'm giving you that link again lovely blog readers just in case you missed it, click here to buy and if after you've read ToL you fancy reading a bit more of Rosy then I would suggest Crossed Wires.

Oh, how could I forget! Rosy also featured in issue one of MUSE, so skip over here to read more about her or better yet visit her website.