![]() As they set out to search for her, they realise how little they know about Nisha. No one cares about the disappearance of a domestic worker, except Petra and Yiannis. His dreams of a new life, and of marrying Nisha, are shattered when she vanishes. Nisha's lover, Yiannis, is a poacher, hunting the tiny songbirds on their way to Africa each winter. By day she cares for Petra's daughter at night she mothers her own little girl by the light of a phone. The story is about a domestic worker called Nisha who has crossed oceans to give her child a future. ![]() No matter what story I’m writing, whatever the circumstances are, it is the bond and the love between people, between friends, between a parent and child, a husband and a wife, that is the real heart of the story. What is the message you would like the reader to take away with them? Your book is regularly discussed by book groups and read in libraries by people who could never imagine being in the situation that Nuri and Afra find themselves.I like it that when people read it they think at first that Nuri is the stronger of the two but later discover that it is in fact Afra with her deep, quiet strength. I decided that I didn’t want to include them, that I wanted Afra’s strength to be revealed in the story slowly and subtly. I’m not sure if there is anything I nearly left out, but there is something I definitely left out and those were chapters that I had written from Afra’s perspective. As soon as I found his voice it all started to come together. At first it was written in third person, but when I started to write some of the asylum interview sections Nuri’s voice really came to life and I knew that I needed to go back and change the narrative from third to first person. When I went back to the UK, I decided to write the scene and it grew and developed from there. In this image his wife was blind and they had lost their son. He offered the fruit to his wife as a gift. While I was volunteering at the women and children’s refugee centre in Athens, I kept having an image in my mind of a man walking into a crumbling home holding a pomegranate which he had found on the streets. How did you find Nuri's voice in the book and what was it like to write? Was there anything you nearly left out of the final version? Readers in Suffolk will be familiar with your novel The Beekeeper of Aleppo.Later, my favourites were Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Steinbeck, Orwell and Tennessee Williams. ![]() I also loved the Point Horror Series by different authors. I loved Roald Dahl, Penelope Lively, Pauline Fisk, C.S Lewis.
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