-
1 month ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Sian Dennis |Madeleine Knowles
Samantha Sotto Yambao describes her UK debut novel, Water Moon, as “dreaming while you are awake” - a sentiment that perfectly encapsulates its immersive, otherworldly quality that electrifies every sentence. Marketed as Erin Morgenstern meets Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, the novel combines the wistful lyricism of contemporary Japanese romantic fiction with the sharper, more intricate edges of modern phantasmagorical storytelling, whisking the reader away on a journey unlike any other.
-
1 month ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles |Sophie Percival
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. We’re so happy to have The Other Valley as our March Book of the Month!With The Other Valley's release in the UK this month, I’d love to know how your experience as a debut author has been so far and how it feels to know your novel is being read around the world? First, thanks so much for choosing The Other Valley as your book of the month! I appreciate the international angle of your question.
-
2 months ago | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles |Sophie Percival
First, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me! To start, could you tell me about the origins of The Alternatives? Thank you so much for picking it as your book of the month! And for the gorgeous review! And for chatting with me about it now. I never know what a book will be from the outset, but I started out with this boomy, funny, heartsore geologist character, Olwen. She came to me on the west coast of Ireland in a place called Connemara, where I wrote a lot of the book.
-
Dec 13, 2024 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles
Your latest book stemmed from your podcast In Writing, so I was just wondering if you could share the process of transforming a podcast into a book. I started the podcast in 2019, and it really started as a passion project. It’s just something that I was really interested in; I love podcasts and I’ve always been interested in the writing process.
-
Oct 29, 2024 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles
“We say that we cry for the ones who have left us. But the truth is that we only ever weep for our own powerlessness.” I began reading Québécois writer Eric Chacour’s What I Know About You with no preconceptions, expectations, or knowledge about what I was delving into, and I was blown away.
-
Oct 28, 2024 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles |Sophie Percival
First of all, I would love to know more about your journey to becoming a novelist and the process of writing What I Know About You? Well, the journey was a long one! I think it took me something like 15 years to write this novel. To be honest, there were some years when I was focusing very intense on it, and some when I wasn’t touching my manuscript at all. And I also had the privilege of this being my debut novel, so I wrote it without any pressure – I took my time, it was like my hobby.
-
Sep 19, 2024 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles
First, for those who haven’t yet read Liars, what should our readers expect from your latest novel? Liars is a novel about how an apparently progressive marriage between equals becomes a domestic abuse scenario. Your narrator, Jane, writes from a very specific generation and point of view – you could say she is riding the coattails of second-wave feminism, and she expects that her marriage won’t succumb to the heteronormative man/wife dynamic, but the reality lets her down.
-
Aug 23, 2024 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles
Chapter viIt was early Spring . . . time to write ads of “Easter Apparel and Accessories” . . . to get out extra fashion pages, after last-minute buyers’ conferences. Rush the art work; rush the cuts; rush copy to the typographer; tell him to rush proofs. The fashion copy-writer left. Then I was fashion copy- writer. The assistant advertising manager was ill—they let me do her work. I was glad. It made the days go fast.
-
Jul 23, 2024 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles |Sophie Percival
Yoko Tawada’s highly anticipated, Spontaneous Acts, is an immersive and mesmerising expression of friendship, language, conversation, music and most importantly, of seeing and being seen. The experience of reading Spontaneous Acts feels like a heady dream that continually blurs the lines between the boundaries of truth and fiction and memory and reality.
-
Jul 19, 2024 | 
nbmagazine.co.uk | Madeleine Knowles
Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me! As we’ve already talked about, this book is very important to me, so I’m really honoured. Just to start, at the heart of your book is the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia so, for those who don’t know anything about this landmark, could you tell us a little bit more about the hotel, its significance, and why you chose to use it as the central pillar of Brandy Sour? Yes, of course.
