The new cover of After I Left You

cover of After I Left You

After I Left You has a new look! This is the cover design for the paperback, which is due out at the end of July.

I hope you like it. I think it’s a beauty, and captures perfectly a certain kind of sunny afternoon, and the feeling of being free and happy in a golden place and time.

I have this song by George Ezra on the brain at the moment, and the lyrics seem at least partly apt: ‘Give me one good reason why I should never make a change…’

It’s interesting how cover designs can change over time. The initial cover for my first book, Stop the Clock, featured three pairs of legs, representing the three different characters; the career woman, the uber-mum, and the unassuming girl-next-door. This was good fun for me, as I got to help draw up the prop shopping list. In the end, though, it hit the shelves with a quite different look – the lady sipping coffee, reading her newspaper (probably checking out the column written by Tina, the career woman, which causes all sorts of problems when her friends think she is writing about them.)

Sometimes covers even feed into a book. There’s a scene in Julie Cohen’s excellent Dear Thing that involves a pair of baby shoes. Julie mentioned that she put the baby shoes into the book after she’d seen the cover design for the hardback, which featured someone holding a pair – it was too good a metaphor to miss!

BIG thank you to everyone who has said kind things about the cover of After I Left You – here are some of the comments – and thank you so much to everyone who has shared it. The response has been lovely and I’m really grateful.

 

The After I Left You tour of places in Oxford I love

Oxford's Bridge of Sighs
Oxford’s Bridge of Sighs, May morning, early 90s…

I was nervous about setting my new novel, After I Left You, in Oxford, but my editor talked me into it. It’s a challenge to write about a place you love without pretending that it’s somewhere else, especially if it’s very close to home.

In the end, I’m really glad Oxford’s in there. Books need to have avatars of things you feel strongly about in them. It’s as if the book digests your emotional attachments and translates them into something that is no longer personal, but is (hopefully) available to anybody who reads the story.

When I was a student: my 20th birthday
My 20th birthday in Oxford

I did fictionalise Oxford a little, and blurred some of its geography and landmarks. Here are ten things I love about Oxford and the surrounding countryside, and suggest you sample if you go there.

1. Pubs.

Alison Mercer at the Perch in Oxford
at the Perch in Oxford on a family day out

The Eagle and Child, The Turf and the Lamb and Flag are all lovely, the Perch and the Trout are vital stopping-off points on the Port Meadow walk (see 5), and I have fond memories of some of the Cowley pubs, including The Bullingdon Arms as was (last time I looked, it had turned into a nitespot with girls with shiny dresses.)

But my favourite of all is the King’s Arms, the inspiration for the Wickham Arms in After I Left You, ‘a city pub with a hall of fame of past patrons displayed on its dark green walls: poets, politicians, sporting heroes… captured in dim corners and on banquettes, their features both emphasized and softened by the shadowy, forgiving light.’

I’m pretty sure I had some Moments of Destiny in the King’s Arms. Anna certainly has one in the Wickham Arms in After I Left You.

2. Bookshops.

I love having tea and people-watching in Blackwell’s. There’s always someone nearby tapping importantly on a laptop: writing what? An essay, a novel, a thesis, an email to a lover or a longlost friend? I also love a browse in Waterstones, where I very nearly ended up working after I graduated (I ended up taking a job at the JR hospital instead, as a secretary in the IT department.)

3. Cafés.

My heart belongs to the Queen’s Lane café, which brings back memories of cutting class to eat carrot cake with the indie-music-loving, long-fringed boy of my dreams. My son, who has autism and a fascination for things that go round, loves Brown’s in the covered market for the ceiling fans.

4. Colleges.

Ox skyline

I first visited Oxford when I was 10 or 11. I was into dungeon-and-dragons style books at the time, where you had to choose which way to go and then turn to the page to find out if you’d arrived at treasure or a nasty imp. Oxford, with its cloisters and quadrangles and halls, struck me as being a made-up fantasy place like the kingdoms in the books, where anything could be lurking round the corner.

5. Port Meadow.

Port Meadow, Oxford
Port Meadow

6. The White Horse.

A friend who read a proof copy of After I Left You said she was waiting for the White Horse to turn up, and sure enough, a version of it does.

On the way back from visiting the ancient chalk landmark, the friends discuss the game of truth or dare they played when they first met, leading to this exchange, which is pretty much the set-up of the story in a nutshell:

‘No one went for truth, then,’ I said.

‘No,’ Clarissa agreed. ‘In the end, no one did,’ and she started the drive back to Oxford.

7. The river.

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on the boat from Abingdon to Oxford

I love a walk through Christ Church meadows, and the Salter’s Steamers boat trip from Abingdon to Oxford.

In After I Left You, when Anna meets up with her friend Meg and looks through her photo album, she sees a snap of the friends together on a bench near the river: ‘there we all were, squeezed on to a bench overlooking the river on a frosty autumn morning, happy and complete and sure of ourselves, a pack surveying its territory’.

And here’s the cover of the German edition of After I Left You (out in June!) showing what I imagine to be the same bench years later.

Und dann, eines Tages, the German edition of After I Left You
Cover © t. mutzenbach design, shutterstock

If you go punting, in my experience, the trick is to find someone who knows what they’re doing and persuade them to do the punting bit, while you lounge around taking in the scenery and drinking something fizzy.

8. The Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Dinosaurs! Shrunken heads! Witchy stuff!

This is where we first meet Keith in After I Left You, ‘standing awkwardly in one of the dinosaur footprints… as if half attempting to strike a pose and half wanting just to get the photo over with.’

9. St Margaret’s Church and St Margaret’s Well.

An otherworldly place, along the lane from the Perch. The well inspired the treacle well in Alice in Wonderland and it’s the model for St. Bartholomew’s well in After I Left You, which is also in a churchyard:

A canopy of leaves sheltered the little congregation of the dead from the wind, the sun and the rain. It was as if we were already inside, if not a church, then some other protected space.

IMG_0324
my daughter took this pic near Port Meadow

10. Bleinheim Palace.

It’s a magnificent building, but what I love most about Bleinheim is the view. In After I Left You, there’s a stately home called Shawcross Hall where Keith spends a happy summer showing tourists round the orangery, and where Anna is finally given the chance to confront the past.

I was so lulled by the sun and the champagne and the scent of grass and lavender and roses, and the gentle thud of elderly pop hits issuing from the grand house behind me, that I didn’t even jump when I heard footsteps and realized that someone was about to find me.

What happens next? After I Left You is out in paperback in July and will be available from all good bookstores – but if you can’t wait till then, it’s available for Kindle and in other ebook formats now (click on ‘buying options’ to see the different available formats.)

the cover of After I Left YouSomething else I love about Oxfordshire, which you can’t help but notice wherever you are, is that it has such big and beautiful skies.

Oxfordshire sky, as seen from our house
Oxfordshire sky, as seen from our house

 

Benjamin Britten and three lessons in creativity

childhood time in the countryside
Benjamin Britten’s music makes me think of countryside and childhood

A cold clear blue-sky day in Oxford, children from primary schools across the county singing, young and old in the audience, everybody drawn together by the music. I went to see my 10-year-old daughter and her school choir at the Sheldonian today, taking part in a ‘Friday Afternoons’ concert to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten – and it was fantastic!

It was also a chance to hear Professor Robert Saxton, who is professor of composition and tutorial fellow in music at Worcester College, answering questions from the schoolchildren about Benjamin Britten, who taught him. Was Benjamin Britten a grumpy teacher? Well – a bit sharp sometimes, if people weren’t up to scratch or weren’t being efficient; but he was also very generous and very kind.

Dr John Traill, the conductor, passed on the children’s questions during an interview with Professor Saxton before the choirs embarked on the Friday Afternoons songs. Professor Saxton was also asked for tips for composers, and described three important lessons he had learned from his own teachers – including Benjamin Britten. His advice struck me as being relevant to pretty much any creative work, including writing, so here it is, paraphrased:

  • Think of the whole when you are working on the part. If you’re composing a line of music, have the impact you want the whole of the composition to make in mind.
  • Make it real. Get other people involved. Being able to record something and play it back via computer isn’t the same as letting other people loose on it to see if it works. (I suppose this is like the scary but essential part when you give your writing to readers.)
  • Work very hard! However great your ambitions for what you hope to achieve, none of it will be possible without working away on your technical skills.

It was amazing to hear the children singing songs I remember from my time in the South Berkshire Music Centre junior choir thirty years ago. You can’t beat a truly thundering finish with Old Abram Brown.

Happy St Cecilia’s Day everyone!

The cover of After I Left You

After I Left You cover
The cover of After I Left You

Here it is – the cover of my new book, After I Left You, due out in Jan 2014 from Black Swan.

I’ve posted it on Twitter and Facebook and have had a really lovely response – even the chaps seem to like it! I appreciate this so much, as this is a peculiarly, irrationally nerve-racking moment. It’s the tipping point at which the book begins to shift definitively from being mine − something that sits quietly on my computer − to being yours (I hope), in your hands. It’s not quite the top of the helter-skelter ride that is publication; that will come in January next year – but it’s well on the way up.

Lisa Horton, the designer, has put a lot of thought and ingenuity into this cover. You can see Oxford in the background, and that’s perfect because that’s where a lot of the story is set, and where the lovers met back in the day. And you can see straight away that all hasn’t turned out blissfully well for these two – well, for most university couples it doesn’t, does it? But who knows, maybe that could change…

I really love the torn photo in this design. It makes me think of a box I have tucked away that has various bits and pieces of memorabilia in it: 20-year-old letters, postcards, and yes, a few photos. I have a hunch that most women have an equivalent to that box somewhere. (Men too?) I don’t look in it, but I know it’s there, like a time capsule.

(The box that Tina uses for Justin’s letters in Stop the Clock is the same kind of thing, but doesn’t quite manage to stay out of sight – I won’t say any more about that though, in case you haven’t read it. Spoilers are BAD, as my husband recently reminded me when I dropped a clanger about Game of Thrones.)

Here’s the copy my editor at Transworld, Harriet Bourton, has written to introduce After I Left You: 

Every broken heart has a history

Anna hasn’t been back to Oxford since her last summer at university, seventeen years ago. She tries not to think about her time there, or the tightly knit group of friends she once thought would be hers forever. She has almost forgotten the sting of betrayal, the heartache, the secret she carries around with her, the last night she spent with them all.

Then a chance meeting on a rainy day in London brings her past tumbling back into her present, and Anna is faced with the memories of that summer and the people she left behind. As Anna realises that the events of their past have shaped the people they’ve all become, hope begins to blossom for what her future could hold…

An absorbing, powerful novel of love and friendship that will sweep you away

from the very first page.

Praise for Alison Mercer’s debut novel, Stop the Clock

‘This is grown-up chick-lit at its very best’ Closer

‘Funny and moving, this is a fab debut’ new!

‘Mercer has a satirical eye which she puts to good effect . . . A funny, promising debut’ Daily Mail

After I Left You is available for pre-order from the publisher, Transworld.

More about After I Left You

Five rules for writing an Oxford novel

Ox skylineLabels can be pretty annoying – I’m sure there’s many a female author who grits her teeth when she hears her fiction described as ‘chick lit’, or is simply perplexed, as I would be if anyone referred to me as a chick. (Chicks are young, cute, vulnerable and clueless, right? I guess any of us might fit the bill on the last two counts, but as for young and cute, well, now I’m 39 I think that boat has sailed.)

But… labels are also jolly useful; and perhaps we only really chafe under them when we begin to feel that they diminish rather than strengthen our appeal. And now that I’ve written one, I’m beginning to realise that the description ‘Oxford novel’ is rather handy.

In my last blog post, I explained that I didn’t originally intend to set my forthcoming novel, After I Left You, in Oxford at all… but that’s where it ended up, albeit a lightly fictionalised Oxford, just to stop ye olde dreaming spires from taking over and trying to make it all about them.

Here are five rules that all those who write about Oxford students are likely to find themselves up against, whether they choose to comply or not.

1. Thou shalt have read Brideshead Revisited, and Evelyn Waugh’s novel will engender more Anxiety of Influence than Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, though you’ll have that somewhere in the back of your mind as well.

You will also, more problematically, have vague memories of Antony Andrews and Jeremy Irons looking fetchingly pouty in cricket whites in the television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Which is still blooming brilliant if you catch an episode now, btw. Even after the great Age of the DVD Box-Set, and The Wire and Six Feet Under and Battlestar Galactica and everything.

Because they did make great telly back in the olden days, though not all the time, as you will realise if you ever catch any of old Poldark.

2. Thou shalt find thyself tackling at least some of the subject matter that the mention of Brideshead Revisited evokes.

In no particular order: youth vs experience, privilege, aristocracy, searching for a home and finding it and losing it, drunkenness, alcoholism, addiction, religion, sex, sexuality, the backwards glance, what the passing of time does to people, betrayal, friendship, responsibility for a friend who is self-destructive, love, art, and what it takes to make or recognise good or bad art, and to find the good and bad in both oneself and the people one loves.

What’s that you say? Oxford possibly can’t lay claim to all that territory for itself, because, come on, zillions of novels from all over the world touch on those themes? Quite so. The Oxford novel must always be more novel than Oxford. Otherwise it’s just a tour guide.

A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee is not an Oxford novel, but a novel about India and England with some early chapters set in Oxford, which it captures brilliantly. This is an Oxford of hit-and-miss socialising, institutional toad-in-the-hole, cold, rain, and cottaging at St Giles’. It is also where Ritwik, the Indian student who has come to Oxford after the funeral of his parents, begins to write his novel, and it is in words, as much as with anyone or in any place, that Ritwik finds fleeting comfort.

‘At the lit display window of Blackwells, a shy, uncertain Mary looks down from her home in the shiny open pages of a luxury art book at some unspecified spot near his feet.’ Mary-in-the-book looks as if she has just finished ‘doling out some grace’; but if so, where has it gone? Ritwik, who has just used a helpline to confess a terror from his past, ‘almost looks around him to see if it is still dispersed in the restless air.’

3.       Thou shalt feature a home, maybe stately, maybe run-down, which the protagonist gains access to because of Oxford. (The stay is not quite free, but the true cost may be unclear.)

 Brideshead’s wartime neglect and decline frames Brideshead Revisited and it is a visit to the house that tugs Charles from the present back into the past. ‘I have been here before…’

Nick Guest (and of course he is a guest) feels he can appreciate the beautiful things in the Feddens’ plushy place in Notting Hill rather better than they can – and I think of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty every time I catch the Oxford tube, and pass those white stucco-fronted houses with their secret gardens. (I’m including The Line of Beauty here as a post-Oxford novel that elides the student bit.)

Naomi Alderman’s The Lessons casts a less than flattering light on the posh and their property, suggesting that people are likely to be as careless with their belongings as they can afford to be. Mark is absolutely loaded, and uses his money to buy himself friends (though he likes to keep them a little bit insecure, too, and deploys sex to help with that). However, the Oxford house that he installs them in is rather grubby and unloved and unappealing. Also, the object d’art that comes James’s way because of Mark, the music box, is a rather hideous thing that no-one really seems to want. Mark’s flaws, and the effect he has on others, suggest that wealth may have a corrupting effect, quite possibly on a person’s good taste as well as the capacity for other kinds of judgement.

Mark’s funds are limitless, and prone to being wasted, as the brilliant opening scene, with a spoilt feast sinking in the swimming-pool of an Italian villa, makes clear. In Brideshead Revisited, by way of contrast, Rex Mottram points out that the Flytes are much less well-off than they appear, and are heading towards financial disaster – though in their different ways Cordelia, Sebastian and Julia all appear to be willing to renounce their riches.

‘Creamy English charm’… and the lack of it

In The Lessons, though his apparent generosity helps, it is Mark’s self-destructiveness that is his most seductive characteristic. He is in many ways a bit of a git, and knows it. From the yobby food-throwing opening onwards, he is generally lacking in the ‘creamy English charm’ that Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited tells us Charles Ryder’s paintings convey, even when Charles attempts to ‘play tigers’. (Charles agrees.)

Blanche describes charm as ‘the great English blight’. Nick Guest has creamy English charm in abundance, but in the end it is not enough to save him.

NB: where would British fiction be, without its great houses? What would Darcy be, without Pemberley? Or Rochester, without Thornfield? Which has to be razed to the ground before Jane can meet him as an equal.

That’s the problem with the property of the wealthy. The act of visiting may close the gap, and marriage can establish the right to remain, but even that falls short of the entitlement bestowed by inheritance.

Ownership can be undone, though. Rebecca does pretty much force the de Winters into exile from Manderley. Popular fiction can be enticingly subversive in fulfilling the fantasy of taking over from the old guard; take, for example, Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance, in which Emma Harte eventually gets her own back on the Fairley Hall lot after her time in service there ends in her apparent ruin.

4.       Thou shalt also have read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

This demonically clever novel is a very different beast to Brideshead Revisited, though in some ways they are flip sides of the same coin.

Now, if you’re the kind of person who worries about spoilers, and you’ve never read Brideshead Revisited, The Secret History, or Antonia White’s novels Frost in May and Beyond the Glass, you’re going to need to skip the rest of this, because I’m going to talk about endings.

The Secret History is, to me, a truly terrifying novel, a horror story almost, that ends on a note of damnation rather than redemption. Its conclusion reminds me of the end of the film of Carrie, when Carrie’s dead hand reaches up from the grave to grab the penitent, remorseful schoolmate who has survived her.

And yet, how could the narrator of The Secret History have possibly avoided arriving at his final bleak vision? His loyalty is with the lost. His life has been saved – who could forget the scene in which he nearly freezes to death over the course of the university vacation? – but who has he really been saved by, and what for, and at what cost?

The conclusion of Brideshead Revisited is the inverse of this, a glimmer of salvation rather than a glimpse of hell. Brideshead Revisited strikes me as being at least as much a Catholic novel as an Oxford one – but does anyone talk about Catholic novels any more? Perhaps it is a label that has fallen into disuse, if it was ever much used in the first place.

5.       Thou shalt consider redemption, though it is bound to be, at best, ambiguous.

In Brideshead Revisited, God is going to get you in the end whether you want Him to or not, however much you resist, and Charles, the narrator, does resist, as far as he possibly can, but in the end, it’s no use.

The conclusion, when Charles Ryder reflects on the lamp burning in the chapel – ‘it could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians’ – is despairing and sardonic and redemptive in quick succession, and ultimately, I think, cathartic; it certainly lingers in my memory just as much as Sebastian Flyte’s throwing up and teddy bear, and eventual strange fate. And I say that as someone who is not in the least devout, and who likes lighting candles in churches very much and does so rather superstitiously, but has not actually been to church, apart from on obligatory school visits, for a very long time.

Also, who could forget devout Cordelia fretting about her vocation, the deathbed scene of Lord Marchmain, Julia’s decision not to go with Charles, Sebastian with the monks? (NB – Cordelia is thrown out of her convent school for something she is writing, and the heroine of Frost in May suffers a similar fate for a story about a lurid bunch of sinners, though of course her intent in making them so lurid is only to make their eventual repentance the more powerful.)

Brideshead Revisited is a novel in which the religious faith of the characters shapes what they do, and what they choose to deny themselves. When Charles says to Sebastian that Catholics seem ‘just like other people’, Sebastian says, ‘My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not – particularly in this country, where they’re so few.’

The rosary in the hand and the man in the mirror

So, Catholicism is written through Brideshead Revisited like Brighton through a stick of rock… and yet it manifests itself as a source of mysterious comfort as well as playing a part in Charles Ryder’s heartbreak. The conclusion of Brideshead Revisited reminds me of Clara Batchelor at the end of Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass, turning away from the darkness because of the rosary in her hand; faith is something to live for, a reason to carry on when it seems all else has been lost. (That is a heartbreaking novel, too.)

It is a very different matter in The Lessons, where Catholicism is associated with Mark’s mother’s rejection and attempted repression of his sexuality, and with the expectation of suffering. James is not in the least drawn to Mark’s faith, and concludes that there is ‘only one subject on which life’s lessons are in any way informative’ – the ‘man in the mirror’.

So who is the man in the mirror? At the end of The Lessons, James is free to be who? What? He hardly knows, although he has decided what he is not willing to be. Like Paul at the end of D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, it is in moving away from the past, alone, unmoored and insubstantial as a ghost, that he is finally able to save himself.

After I Left You: the story of my second novel

cover of After I Left YouEvery story has its own story – the story of the story. Any debut novel is a tale of hope against the odds; you write it, you have no idea whether it will ever see the light of day, and then, miraculously, it does. That was so for Stop the Clock, my first novel, and yet it’s also true for After I Left You, which I started work on long before. So you could say that After I Left You is my other first novel.

The very first prototype of one of the main characters in After I Left You, which is due to be published in November this year, appeared in a fledgeling story about university students that I began and abandoned way back in 1999. The character who first emerged back then was Clarissa Hayes, the second-generation celebrity whose sitcom actress mother is a national treasure.

Clarissa didn’t start off having a famous mother, but she always seemed like a potential star herself – from the start, for good or ill, she was the sort of character you notice. It’s the presence of Clarissa in After I Left You that takes the story overseas for a brief interlude in 1990s Los Angeles, where three of the characters go rollerblading on Venice Beach – or rather, two go rollerblading and one sits out, for reasons that will become clear when you read the book. (Just to prove that I am a conscientious author and do my research, see below for a snap of me on Venice Beach in 1995.)

Venice Beach
Some other elements of the story were present from the very first fragmentary drafts, including the idea of a secret that has caused one person to break away from a group of friends, and will eventually be revealed. Another character who appeared early on was Keith, the melancholy Gothic misfit. He attempted to squeeze into an early draft of Stop the Clock, but was cut out, which was just as well, because After I Left You is certainly where he belongs.

But much of the novel that will be published in paperback in July 2014, and is now available for pre-order on Amazon, only really came together once I had decided to tell it from the first person point of view. Anna, who is the eyes and ears of the novel, knows all too well what happened back in the past to prompt her decision to exile herself from her friends, but she’s keeping it to herself. That tension between telling and holding back kept me on my toes as a writer and hopefully will have the same effect on readers too.

IMG_3342 ed

Writing in the first person

What happened to prompt the choice to write in the first person? While I was working on Stop the Clock over 2009 to 2012 I read all the Twilight books, and then the Hunger Games series. Also, Fifty Shades of Grey sat at the top of the bestseller charts for months on end, and I looked through that too, purely for research purposes of course… All of these books are first person stories, and that’s what gives them a lot of their immediacy and drive.

Another book I tried to learn from is I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith’s brilliant novel which foregrounds the fact that its narrator is not just telling you the story, she’s scribbling it down – right from the start when she tells you ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’, and then goes on to explain she’s actually sitting on the draining-board with her feet in the sink, because it’s the last place in the kitchen with any light left. (As good a metaphor as any for the situation in which the woman writer finds herself working, with domestic concerns never far away?)

I’m a big fan of the first person narrative, and always have been. Jane Eyre and The Catcher in the Rye are two of my very favourite books. The first person works brilliantly for coming-of-age stories, and After I Left You is a coming-of-age story with a twenty-year interval, so it struck me as an approach I should try.

I also love Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which puts age in sharp contrast with youth, and has a story-within-the-story – you’ll find a bit of that in After I Left You, too.

The novel as timetravelling machine

After I Left You has two timelines, one set in the early 1990s and one in the present day, which was fun for me because I could time travel, which is something that, in my view, the novel does better than any other art form. (See The Time Traveler’s Wife, which does this so brilliantly it was always going to be hard for the film to match up.)

Like zillions of other readers, I was very taken by One Day, and part of the pleasure of that was recognising the times that the characters pass through, from the late 1980s up to the present day, which are so sharply and astutely observed; I started a little later and missed out all the years in between, but was able to play with a similar timescale.

Where? An Oxford novel, or a novel set in Oxford?

Another decision that I made at a late stage was the decision to set After I Left You fair and square in Oxford. Now, I love Oxford, and Oxfordshire, which is where I live. But I was nervous about writing about Oxford students. Brideshead Revisited, another book that I love, casts a long and rather daunting shadow, although of course it isn’t really about Oxford students at all; it’s about the big, universal themes – love, family, loss, change and the passing of time; innocence giving way to experience; wrongdoing and redemption.

Actually even Brideshead isn’t even quite what you think it is. When I re-read it I was amused to find a scene I had quite forgotten, in which the students go up to London and get bladdered and drive the wrong way up a road and nearly end up getting arrested. Not so much of the cricket jumpers and fine wines, more your everyday big-night-out-on-the-town bender. But anyway, you’ll find at least two sideways nods to Brideshead in After I Left You; a scene in which somebody throws up, and another, on a quite different note, that takes place in a chapel.

My editor helped to get me over my scruples over setting After I Left You in Oxford by sending me Jilly Cooper’s Harriet, which opens with an account of Harriet, an innocent student, being quizzed by a rather randy-seeming tutor about which of Shakespeare’s characters would be best in bed. (She reckons, not Hamlet – he would have talked too much). So then I just got on with it and Oxford fell into the place in the story that it should really have had all along.

Another novel set in Oxford (but not explicitly about students) that I’m an admirer of is Charlotte Mendelson’s fantastic Daughters of Jerusalem, just for the record.

book signing at Wargrave libary for blog

The story behind the story

Stevie Smith typed on yellow office paper while working as a secretary; Colette was locked into a room by her husband; Jane Austen wrote in the drawing-room and covered up her work when somebody entered. There’s always a story behind the story, and when we read we often want to know about that other story, too.

When my first novel, Stop the Clock, was published in August 2012 I knew exactly what the story behind it was: it seemed clear and distinct, with a structured timeframe and a hopeful ending. The first draft was written in instalments over the course of a year, a chapter a month, and handed over to a colleague, a fellow part-time working mother, in a series of A4 envelopes. A writer friend, Neel Mukherjee, suggested an agent to approach; two rewrites later, it found a publisher.

Shortly before Stop the Clock came out, my son, then four, was diagnosed with autism. The experiences of working on the novel and having it published, and working towards that diagnosis and obtaining it and moving on, are intertwined for me. The book was a breakthrough that helped to keep me upbeat, and the diagnosis was a traumatic but fundamentally positive watershed that showed the way to our family’s future.

‘So is it easier second time round?’ This is a question that friends have asked me a few times over the last few months, and I’ve found it hard to answer, because, like one birth compared to another, it has just been so different. One thing I do remember, though. Some years ago, around 2007 or 2008, I ceremonially posted off the first three chapters of an earlier version of After I Left You to a selection of agents (not including Judith Murdoch, the brilliant agent I am now represented by, who I approached later on with Stop the Clock.)

The agents who saw this early version of After I Left You all rejected it so fast it made my head spin, and probably they were quite right to do so, as it was a long way from taking the shape it has now. Anyway, that was obviously a bit of a downer, but not at all the end of the story.

Because what I really remember from that experience was this. I had gone into Oxford with my husband, and we sent off the chapters from the post office on St Aldate’s before going out for a celebratory lunch. And it felt special. It felt Christmas Eve, when everything is quiet and expectant, and the magic is just about to kick in. It felt like something was going to happen. And now it is.