About the author:
Lesley Kara is an alumna of the Faber Academy ‘Writing a Novel’ course. She completed an English degree and PGCE at Greenwich University, having previously worked as a nurse and a secretary, and then became a lecturer and manager in Further Education. She lives on the North Essex coast.
The Rumour is her first novel.
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Your debut novel The Rumour is about a tight-knit community torn apart by a single rumour – that a notorious child-killer is living among them under a new, secret identity. What inspired the idea behind the novel?
The idea for The Rumour first started when someone told me a similar story to the one my main character Joanna hears, that an infamous figure who’d once committed a terrible crime was living in my neighbourhood in a safe house. For a few days after hearing this, I kept looking at the houses I passed every day and wondering if it was true. Whenever I saw someone of the right age group and gender, I speculated on whether it could be them. It really got my writer’s brain ticking over.
Your protagonist, Joanna, finds herself in quite the predicament – on the one hand, she understands the dangers of gossip, yet can’t quite resist being a part of it all. What was it like writing from the perspective of someone who is so ethically and morally torn?
When it comes to rumours and gossip, I think we all feel ethically and morally torn. On the one hand, we know it’s wrong to indulge, but there are certain times when we can’t resist listening in. After all, it’s human nature to be curious about others and though we might think of ourselves as the sort of person who doesn’t spread rumours, even a casual comment to a friend we think we can trust is all it takes to set those wheels in motion, as Joanna finds out to her cost. It’s easy to be judgmental about people who gossip, but I bet we’ve all done it at some point in our lives.
This is your debut novel – how did you come to be a writer?
I’ve been writing on and off all my life – I have boxes of unfinished writing projects under my spare bed and notebooks filled with random jottings – but it’s only in the last 5-6 years that I’ve buckled down and taken my writing seriously. My teaching career and my family always took precedence before. Then I had a prolonged period of ill health and re-evaluated my life and what I wanted to do with it. Getting a novel published has always been a dream of mine and I couldn’t be more delighted that it’s happened at last.
The Rumour is a thriller novel, a genre that is incredibly popular amongst readers. Why do you think people are so drawn to thrillers? And what motivated you to write one?
That’s an interesting question, because even now when more feel-good, up-lit fiction seems to be on the rise, psychological thrillers are still being devoured. I think it’s because we like to be drawn into somebody else’s mind, especially someone who is morally ambiguous, and we like to feel scared. Not properly scared for our own safety – nobody likes that – but scared in a controlled way, scared on someone else’s behalf. We can decide to turn that page or not, and of course, we do, because the suspense is killing us. We have to find out what’s really going on, and whether we’ve worked it out or not. I love reading crime fiction, so I suppose it was inevitable that I’d end up writing one of my own!
What is the last book you read that really had you hooked?
Austin Wright’s Nocturnal Animals (originally published in 1993 as Tony and Susan) is one of the most unsettling novels I’ve read in a long time. It’s about a woman reading the manuscript of her ex-husband’s novel, and what a queasily disturbing tale it turns out to be. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling of dread and terror this book induced in me. And I’m a sucker for novels about novels…
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