Posted by Francesca Kay on March 3rd, 2024

Tell us a little about your latest novel, The Book of Days, published by Swift Press on 1st February?

The Book of Days is set in an unnamed village north of Oxford in 1546 and 1547, years of great turmoil. An old king was dying, a child succeeded him on the throne. In the manor house of the village, a young woman is grieving while her mortally ill husband is preoccupied with building a chapel and a lavish tomb. As one season gives way to the next, the crosswinds of religious strife blow through the community, with tragic consequences.

What was your inspiration for writing the novel? Why were you drawn to this particular story?

I have long wanted to explore this pivotal time in English history, when the old customs and the rhythms of ordinary life abruptly changed. It’s a time that has parallels in recent history too. But underpinning the concept were images that have also stayed with me for years: the blankness of whitewashed walls where once there were paintings, the stillness of medieval tombs.

Setting a work of fiction in such a distant time (in this case, during the Reformation) must have required a lot of research? Tell us a little about how you approached the research for this particular work?

The research was deeply enjoyable. I visited as many churches, chantry chapels and monumental tombs as I could, while at the same time studying medieval building techniques - how fan vaulting and stained glass were made, how to build an arch. I immersed myself in late medieval painting and sculpture. I visited a stone-yard and was shown the different kinds of stone that the masons used and how they cut them. I read about folklore, saints, women’s lives, food, weather, farming, plants and flowers; Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica was a treasure trove. I listened to sixteenth century music. I read the writings of this period, including the female mystics, and the poets. And I read a lot of Reformation history. Professor Eamon Duffy’s wonderful work The Stripping of the Altars was an inspiration.

Although The Book of Days is written from a specific perspective, time and place, it feels very relevant when you’re reading it, maybe because the themes are universal ones - gender, faith, personal fulfilment, and grief. Was this deliberate?

Yes. Although the Book of Days is set a particular time in history, it is not confined by it. I think of it as rather like those convex mirrors often seen in Renaissance paintings –although they are small and self-contained, multitudes are reflected in them.

How did you find the writing experience?

During the writing of this book, in which there is a dying husband, my own husband died unexpectedly. The sudden intrusion of reality into fiction gave a new dimension to the whole experience.

Is it a very different experience penning a historical novel to a contemporary one?

In some ways it is. My other novels were set in the present or the recent past. In this book I had to see through the eyes of people who lived almost half a millennium ago. I believe that human nature and human emotions remain constant but of course the world view changes. Accordingly I tried to stay as true to Tudor thinking as I could, using the words that they would have used, describing things they would have known.

The recent review in The Observer likened The Book of Days to the writing of Iris Murdoch and William Golding – how does this make you feel? Do you admire both writers?

Greatly honoured! Two towering figures of twentieth century literature. I’m a huge admirer of Golding especially: The Spire and Pincher Martin would be among the first books I would rush to rescue from a fire. But I am glad The Observer also said that the concerns of my novel are contemporary. I’m a twenty-first century writer after all!

Which writers would you say have most influenced your writing?

Despite my claim to contemporaneity, the writers who have most deeply influenced me are the ones I read when I was young and whom I re-read still. Mainly poets. TS Eliot in particular. John Donne. Thomas Malory. Virgina Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen and Penelope Fitzgerald. And I wonder if the rhythms and the imagery of things read or heard in childhood stay somewhere in the core of every writer?