Heather Rose

I mean, I'm thinking of Middlemarch and there's a feeling of that silence, of course, in rural England of the past.

I don't know if that's true still.

I recently read an amazing book called Ghost Wall by Sarah Mosser, a British writer.

Isn't that wonderful?

Oh my, what an incredible novel.

Oh, it's really stayed with me.

And that silence that she captures there at night as they're camping, very interesting.

And have you read Elmet?

Yes, by Fiona Mosley.

Yes, that's right.

There's something very similar in that too.

So it's not necessarily a benign silence.

In fact, that family have moved for the silence.

But then what comes at them is certainly not silence.

Potentially.

I'm not sure that I've read very many thrillers.

I didn't even mean to write a thriller.

I simply felt that the story was so deep in content that it needed a lot of pace for the reader to not feel bogged down by the content.

So it felt as if it needed a faster pace than a literary novel would normally have.

And that came in part because Astrid was such a sort of ferocious character and she has an urgency about the things she starts to notice and the way her family life is unfolding on her return to Tasmania that seemed to drive the plot.