NATASHA PULLEY

IT WAS ON BOXING DAY IN 1900 THAT THE lighthouse tender Hesperus reached Eilean Mòr in the Outer Hebrides, a remote island that should have been home to a trio of lighthouse men. Relief keeper Joseph Moore was put ashore. What he discovered has spooked people ever since. The island was deserted, and to this day it’s unclear what happened to the men. Among those fascinated by the story is novelist Natasha Pulley. “What really caught my interest about it was not necessarily what happens from the point of view of those lighthouse keepers,” she says, “but what was it like for the first person to reach the lighthouse after them?”

It was a question that got her working on her fourth novel The Kingdoms, a book that mixes timeslip plotting with alternate history as it follows the story of Joe Tournier, resident of Londres. He’s a man suffering from amnesia, who’s moving through a world where Britain lost the Napoleonic Wars after being defeated at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805: “One of the things I’m really interested in are those moments in history where you can see, very clearly, two possible futures hanging in the balance.”

An answer to Tournier’s nagging doubts about who he is may lie north, which sets him off on “a very gradual wild goose chase up the coast of Scotland”. To say too much more is to risk spoilers, but the story of Eilean Mòr so intrigues Pulley that she’s heading for Scotland’s islands herself this summer, aboard a square rigger, Pelican of London, “in the unlikely capacity of a marine scientist”.

Hang on, is Pulley actually a marine scientist, though? “I talked my way around some easily swayed people,” she deadpans. More seriously, having researched sailing for The Kingdoms, she’s been welcomed aboard because of her previous experience as someone who’s been up the rigging of a tall ship. “The owner was terrified that he’d end up recruiting six people who had no clue about sailing, and they would just go overboard and it would be a complete disaster,” she says.

SMALL WORLD

It’s relatively easy to imagine Pulley talking her way onto a ship. It’s not just that she’s sharp and funny, but because she’s described her childhood self as a compulsive liar. Is this somehow related to writing fantastic fiction, or is that just cheap psychology? “I think that’s completely valid.”

Pulley says she had “a very nice childhood” in the Fens. It was always summer and her mum baked, but she grew up in

“rural poverty”. It was unusual to want to leave her closeknit community. “I think when your world is small, no matter how much you enjoy it, and how much you enjoy the people in it, you are aware that it is small. So if you’ve got very little likelihood of actually leaving it, you start coming up with ways in which it might be more interesting.”

For Pulley, this meant SFF. She was a huge Star Trek: Voyager fan, a show she notes was “about exploring and distance”. But it took a friend’s intervention during a conversation in the school canteen to make Pulley begin to see her future career. “She looked at me and goes, ‘Well, obviously, you’re going to be a writer,’ and I was like, ‘I’m gonna be a what?’ ‘That’s the only thing you can do.’”

Meet the author fascinated by a century-old mystery

FLAT EARTH THEORY

A bright kid, she made it to Oxford: “I’m almost certain I was fulfilling part of their state school quota.” Ignoring the university’s careers booklet – “There was a tiny entry under writer. It said, basically, ‘Don’t do it, you’ll die in poverty’” – she went on to do an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Unaware it was the most prestigious course of its kind in the UK, she applied because it was close to where her mother lived.

First, though, she spent time teaching in China, where she was “the only white person that I saw for two months, and it was brilliant”. Subsequently, she’s spent time in Peru and Japan too. On returning from China she worked at the Cambridge University Press, where she was “the worst publishing assistant who has ever lived” because she was too busy with her own writing.

Her first novel, The Watchmaker Of Filigree Street (2015), a steampunk-tinged tale of Victorian London, became an international bestseller. She now divides her time between her own fiction and teaching creative writing in Bath and Cambridge. She’s travelled a long way, except that all her writing, she says, is rooted in landscape. Which takes us back to the Fens and their oh-so-flat strangeness.

“If you stand in a field, you can’t tell how tall anything is,” she says. “You see what you think is a kind of shack that’s quite close to you, and then you realise it’s Ely Cathedral and it’s 10 miles away. There’s no gauge. At the time, it felt very normal to be in that landscape. But looking back, I think if you grow up with something as weird as that, you end up on the look-out for weird.”

The Kingdoms is out now, published by Bloomsbury.

I’m almost certain I was fulfilling part of Oxford’s state school quota