Will Rycroft

Thank you very much, Rebecca.

And rounding out our authors in part one of this podcast, I now come to Angela Tomaschi.

Fantastic.

Thank you, Angela.

I'm glad you've mentioned the sort of tour aspect, because, of course, my my challenge is how on earth do I find a way of linking these three, just the three books we've been introduced so far, which are so completely different.

And I suppose one of the things we can talk a little bit about is structure.

As you mentioned there, it takes the form of a tour, your novel.

And as I mentioned, I'll be talking about the booksellers who've been championing your book and Jen, who's a bookseller in Harrogate.

said, this book was wonderful, like going on a tour of a National Trust house with someone who used to know the family.

And that's a perfect description of what it's like.

That sort of framing and narrative device for telling your story, I wondered when you decided on that and why it was the best way for you to tell this story.

And another bookseller, Esme, who's in Bury St Edmunds, was saying that the non-chronological approach to telling that story worked really perfectly, she said, from early on.

And as she was reading, she was desperate to untangle the events and sort of put everything together into a linear story.

That is quite a brave approach to telling a story, but it does mean that the reader has to do a little bit of work and therefore, to my mind, gets more invested in the story.

Was that, again, a sort of thing that you did on purpose to sort of put things out of order?

We will come back to that later, Angela.

But for now, I'm going to come to Rebecca, because there is, of course, a connection in a way between your book and Angela's with this idea of very specific objects and how they help us to tell a story or to understand what's going on.

Again, I'm going to come to a fantastic bookseller comment.

Charlotte in Manchester said that this was like the best historical fiction.

I could visualise the scene without the author having to over-explain or over-describe.