What is the working title of your book or project?
Boraya
Where did the idea come from for the book or project?
I was once at a New Year Party and met a Russian who, at 9 o’clock, said he was going to bed as it was midnight in Russia. The whole novel grew from that premise.
What genre does it fall under, if any?
This is hard. I hope, above all, people will find it a good story. I weave together three broad genres: romance; thriller and historical - at the same time the book isn’t an historical romantic thriller.
If applicable, who would you choose to play your characters in a movie?
There are 23 characters, who would require casting if ever the book became a film plus various historical characters. I have been wrestling with who might play the younger characters but no-one quite seems suitable. I’d have Dame Judi Dench, though, playing Ludmila, the matriarch, and, were he up to it, Peter O’Toole, playing the elderly Loic, the nearly eighty year old gardener cum groom at the Casa Malinka dacha. But I’d also need a younger 1940’s version of Peter and perhaps someone to play Loic's father.
There are two horses as well: Borodino and Tantsovshitsa.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your manuscript or project?
In Russia love, war and chocolate inspire ordinary people to do most extraordinary things.
Will your book or story be self-published or represented by an agency?
Have to see first whether anyone wants to take it up.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
I began in August and was finished by mid December - so four and a half months. It’s about 120,000 words. I'm on the final edit at the moment.
What other book or stories would you compare this story to within the genre?
I can’t think of an easy comparison. I have definitely been influenced by Rose Tremain and William Boyd.
Who or what inspired you to write this book or story?
I met Rose Tremain at the Hay Literary Festival some years ago. I didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know who I was. Rashly, she told me to write. Boraya, I suppose, is the result.
What else about the book or story might pique the reader’s interest?
Well, there’s some good sex in it! And a lot of snow! I’d like to think there’s a fair amount of human interest, too, given that it’s a book about four principal characters: one Scots, two Russian and one French, compelled by love, war and chocolate (Boraya is the name of a chocolate company in St Petersburg whose uneasy privatisation forms the backbone of the novel) to do extraordinary things. It’s a story of people a long way out of their comfort zone and also a city moving between grandeur, terrible affliction during the wartime siege, and rebirth.
Although the story is set mainly in the late 1990’s there are excursions into the 1940’s and although it is set mainly in and around St Petersburg, we drift to London, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Zurich, Brittany even. On the way we meet various historical figures, including Elizabeth the Great, the illegitimate, cross-dressing, washerwoman’s daughter who becomes Empress of Russia, (who proves yet again that fact is always stranger than fiction); Rodolphe Lindt, who accidentally revolutionised chocolate making in the nineteenth century, and Flora MacDonald, whose eventful life on two continents is reflected in that of her descendant - the Elizabeth MacDonald of Boraya - whose unknown Russian leaves her at nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve.
Oh, there’s a ruined wooden church in it as well.
