Will Rycroft
speaker
867 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Will Rycroft’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
But I know that it's not effortless.
I'm sure you put a lot of work into it, and we will find out with your new book, Villa Coco, just exactly how that works.
Before we get into that, I have to say I was intrigued by the little letter that was at the front of my proof, where you mentioned that this novel had its basis in real life.
There was a real Baronessa, and I therefore, of course, was like, I need to know more.
I'm not expecting you to tell me all the details of her life, because as you say, this is a fictionalized version of things.
But what was it about that experience that made you think, ah, there's a novel here?
Seeing as you've mentioned about the charm novel, why don't you sort of explain a little bit what you mean by that?
And maybe some, I suppose, some other examples of sort of authors who've written charm novels.
Well, I think it's actually a very British thing.
Yeah, okay, that makes perfect sense.
You've done that thing again, which I think is such a brilliant narrative trick, which is that the...
the protagonist through which we see this story is always just slightly behind, I suppose, what's going on around him.
And that's what makes him so endearing because he's sort of permanently catching up.
Is that something you're very conscious of as a useful dramatic device?
Because it's worked so well with both Les novels, I thought, as well.
You all look back one day and go... Good attitude, yeah.
I was really intrigued by... This novel is set in Italy, and I was really intrigued by one moment in the book where you describe the fact that a lot of people think of Italy as being a very old country, but actually...
in its modern form as a unified country, it's actually younger than America, and it was these separate kingdoms, and that that's why you have these very separate rules about food or customs and things like that.
When did you notice that, I suppose, and how did you use that in the telling of this story?
This is one of the things I love about Italy is they are very strict about their food rules, even though they seem slightly absurd to anybody.
Showing 561–580 of 867 · page 29 of 44
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