BOOK EXTRACT

The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins is back with a new novel!

Between June 2015 and June 2016, Forbes says she earned an estimated £10 million pre-tax!

Two years ago, we interviewed Zimbabweanborn writer Paula Hawkins when her thriller The Girl

on the Train was starting to take off. If you read it, you’re one in 20 million! Since then, Paula’s written another psycho thriller,

Into the Water. Dip into it with this extract.

‘Iwant to write about people whose lives are going along quite normally and then something suddenly goes wrong,’ says Paula Hawkins. Funny that, as it’s rather different to her own trajectory: from broke to best-selling author. When FAIRLADY spoke to Paula, she said she’d had limited success in writing chick lit, and that her decision to veer off into the thriller genre was her ‘last roll of the dice’. She was living with her ex, and had borrowed money from her dad ‘to tide me over while I was writing the book’. ‘But at the back of my mind I was thinking that if this doesn’t work, I was going to have to think of something else to do – either go back to journalism or get a completely new career. It felt like this was my last shot at making a living as a writer.’ Since publication two years ago,

The Girl on the Train has sold an average of a copy every 20 seconds, amounting to 20 million copies worldwide, and has been translated into over 40 languages. (Between June 2015 and June 2016, Forbes says she earned an estimated £10 million pre-tax!). The film adaptation, starring Emily Blunt, was a box office hit. Now the same producers are working on a film version of Into the Water.

So what sort of thriller has Paula turned out this time?

Besides a shared theme of memory, and the unreliable narrator, Into the Water is quite unlike GotT. Its focal point is the relationship between two sisters, Nel and Jules, and the Drowning Pool, where many women have died over the centuries. One sister is drawn to the water; the other fears it. A few days before Nel dies (in the Drowning Pool, of course), she phones Jules, but Jules doesn’t take the call. They say Nel jumped, but Jules feels sure she’d never have done that. Now Jules is left to look after Nel’s teen daughter, Lena, whose friend drowned in the pool a few months before.

Time to read the extract!