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2 weeks ago | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
The Sisters finds three Swedish Tunisian siblings grappling with their sense of home in a sprawling narrative that spans 35 years. You originally wrote The Sisters in English, then in Swedish and again in English. How did all this come about? The strange thing was that the characters kept speaking to me in English. I’ve been a writer long enough to know that when a character wants something, it’s a bad idea to fight it.
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2 weeks ago | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
"I don’t have a mother tongue,” Tatiana de Rosnay says via Zoom from Paris. “I learned French and English at the same time. My English mother spoke to me in English; my French father spoke in French. I feel English in France and French in England.”For some writers, this slightly unusual relationship to language could present challenges, but not so for de Rosnay.
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2 months ago | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
Natalie Jenner has been a Jane Austen devotee since she was a child. As a precocious nine-year-old, she tackled the gift box edition—complete with ribbon bookmark and illustrations—of Pride and Prejudice in her parents’ library. There was no turning back. “She’s a lodestar,” Jenner says via Zoom from her home outside Toronto.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
“I’m clearly English,” Evie Wyld says via Zoom from her home in London, her accent supporting the statement. Still, it’s Australia that fills her books, and as a child, filled her dreams. Wyld’s Australian mother came to England in the late ’60s and met her English father. The couple’s plan was to return to Australia, Wyld says, but her father “couldn’t really hack” the county, so they stayed in England.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
In Good Girl (Hogarth, Jan.), poet and debut novelist Aria Aber follows a club kid’s coming-of-age in Berlin’s underground scene. What inspired Good Girl? Is it auto-biographical? I was a party girl, and I always wanted to write about a character who inhabits this dialectical tension between self-destruction and self-fulfillment. Like my narrator, Nila, I come from a traditional Afghan family, and though I also rebelled, we’re much different from her family.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
For Clare Chambers, the function of her novels is both simple and profound: they are what she calls a “reaching out” to readers, a chance to share “a moment of communion.”“In my novels I am trying to put into words feelings and insights that readers may not have articulated to themselves but nevertheless recognize as being exactly what they have always thought,” she says via Zoom from her home in London.
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Aug 2, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
Like most authors, Susan Minot is no stranger to writing about love, sex, and relationships. But for her latest novel, she wanted to take an erotic love story into somewhat uncharted territory. “Usually, an erotic story is told separate from the story of motherhood, but we are still the same people, with the same urges to nurture, urges to disappear, that don’t necessarily go away when you’re a mother,” Minot says via Zoom from her island home in Maine.
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May 3, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
It should come as no surprise that Ayşegül Savaş’s new novel The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, July) is about a couple searching for home and community, hoping to belong somewhere and put down roots. The 38-year-old author was born in Istanbul; grew up in Turkey, England, and Denmark; and went to college in Vermont, where she met her future husband, who is from Latvia. After graduation, they moved to San Francisco; they currently live in Paris.
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Feb 2, 2024 | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
With Godwin (Pantheon, June), O’Neill tracks the fortunes of a freelancer on a quest to sign the next big soccer star. What inspired this book? I suppose the starting place is really my love of soccer. Also, my cousin is a soccer agent obsessed with African talent. He speaks French and lives in England, which is where the money is. And then there’s the idea of how greedy everyone is. Football is a contested avenue, the idea of play and purity and greed.
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Oct 20, 2023 | 
publishersweekly.com | Louisa Ermelino
In the Booker Prize–winning Prophet Song (Grove, Dec.), Lynch imagines an Ireland falling into chaos under an authoritarian regime. Much of your work is set in the past. What inspired you to write a dystopian novel? In 2018 I was rereading Herman Hesse, and in 1927 he foresaw the next world war in the chaos that was Germany. I had a chill thinking this is where we are now. Your protagonist Eilish Stack is a complicated character.
