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Why did you choose
for your character to have a back story that took place in India?
I borrowed a little
from real life here. My own father was born in India and, like Audrey, I grew
up with tales of life in Bombay, and I think those stories, told to me over
dinners as a young child, really stuck in my head. India was always this
parallel universe in my head; a place I longed to go.
My father left India
when he was four years old and yes, you guessed it, he sailed to England on an
ocean liner. I have a faded picture of him on board the ship and I’m fascinated
by what it must have been like to make that voyage from balmy India to cold,
grey England. In The Disappearance, Audrey could easily have made the trip to
Bombay by aeroplane but I wanted her desire to go on a cruise for her 70th
birthday to be rooted in her history – so this cathartic sea journey was born.
The decision to base
Audrey’s past in India was also quite selfish as it meant I got to spend a lot
of time reading about life in India in the ‘60s and ‘70s, which didn’t feel
like work at all. Writing those sections of the book was very enjoyable – one morning
I Googled how to say a couple of words in Hindi and then spent a whole morning
completing an online language lesson!
My daily word count
dropped noticeably as I spent hours poring over old photographs and accounts of
life in Bombay in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and losing myself in accounts of what the
sea voyage would have been like. I’d do that all morning and find it really
hard to get my head back into 2015 when it was time to go and pick up the
children from school!
Title: The
Disappearance
Published: 21st
April 2016
Publisher: Mira Ink
Genre: Thriller
Audrey Bailey will never forget the moment she met Ralph Templeton in the sweltering heat of a Bombay café. Her lonely life over, she was soon married with two small children. But things in the Templeton household were never quite what they seemed.Now approaching 70, and increasingly a burden on the children she’s always felt distanced from, Audrey plans a once-in-a-lifetime cruise around the Greek isles. Forcing twins Lexi and John along for the ride, the Templetons set sail as a party of three – but only two will return.On the night of her birthday, Audrey goes missing…hours after she breaks the news that the twins stand to inherit a fortune after her death. As the search of the ship widens, so does the list of suspects – and with dark clues emerging about Audrey’s early life, the twins begin to question if they can even trust one another.
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