Author Interview

Louise Doughty talks about her latest novel. By Hannah Stephenson

There’s been a buzz around Platform Seven, bestselling author Louise Doughty’s ninth novel, and not just because her latest chilling tale is narrated by a ghost.

Louise had been a moderately successful novelist for 20 years until the BBC adaptation of her thriller Apple Tree Yard, starring Emily Watson and Ben Chaplin, catapulted her to new heights of fame and enabled her to become a full-time writer.

Up until then, she had supplemented her income by teaching creative writing, penning newspaper columns and occasional broadcasting.

While her previous novels had been reviewed well and nominated for prizes, it wasn’t until Apple Tree Yard that she became more successful commercially. “It made me less poor,” she clarifies, smiling.

“I still have a mortgage the size of a planet.

“What is the most boring thing I could have done with the money?

“I took out a pension for the first time in my life.”

Now, Platform Seven has been optioned by a production company keen to bring it to the small screen.

It’s centred largely in and around the eponymous platform of Peterborough railway station, a bleak, cold setting inspired by her own experience of having to wait on many occasions at the station for a connection (from Leeds and East Anglia, where she went to university) to Rutland in the East Midlands, where her family lived.

“For the whole of my adult life, Peterborough railway station has been the transition place between the various stages of my life and my childhood,” says Louise.

“I’ve spent a lot of time there on cold winter nights with the wind blowing across the fens.

“I used to joke that if I’d have been really bad and died and gone to purgatory, I would find myself trapped on Peterborough railway station.”

Which is exactly where her deceased heroine Lisa Evans finds herself, caught in limbo, a troubled soul unable to escape the location or circumstances of her violent death until her soul finds peace.

“I don’t believe in ghosts but I believe that they are real for people who believe in them,” Louise muses.

“If you want to believe in something strongly enough, you can manifest it.”

Lisa’s is not the only death in the novel – in her ghostly state she witnesses another fatality at the station and questions arise among the living as to whether the two deaths are connected.

Meanwhile, her life before her demise gradually unfolds to reveal how she died.

This explores the other main strand of the novel, namely her coercive control relationship with a man who on the outside seems completely fine, but definitely isn’t.

Psychological manipulation and “gaslighting” (where an abuser manipulates information to make a victim question his or her sanity) all feed into the plot.

“Accidentally, it couldn’t be more current,” Louise observes. “Coercive control is very much in the air at the moment.”

Platform Seven by Louise Doughty, Faber & Faber, £14.99.