TRUST AND FAMILY SECRETS
SET AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF LOCKDOWN, CAROLINE OVERINGTON’S NEW THRILLER HAS TAKEN ON A SECOND LIFE.
THIS is going to sound a bit like a pop quiz, but on a scale of one to 10, with one being the least and 10 being the most, how trustworthy do you think people generally are?
Very trustworthy? Not at all trustworthy? Thinking about yourself, if a stranger came to your door asking for help, how likely would you be to let them in? Would you necessarily believe the story they are telling?
These are some of the questions I had when I started writing The Cuckoo’s Cry. I wasn’t setting out to write another novel. The Cuckoo’s Cry is a real book – it has a cover and everything – and the reason I say that is because it started life as an audiobook, meaning you could only listen to it.
Now you can read it.
Why did I write it as an audiobook? Well, the US giant, Audible, which is owned by Amazon, approached me in 2020, saying there were tens of thousands of people stuck at home because of Covid, and while some were streaming TV shows and listening to podcasts, many had taken up listening to audiobooks while they walked on the treadmill or cleaned out the kitchen cupboards.
Audible asked me to come up with a fabulous idea. They wanted a story that would take up about five listening hours, so people could start on a Monday and be finished by the end of the week if they listened for an hour a day, or else they could binge the whole thing at once or over a weekend.
I came up with the idea for a thriller, designed to catch and hold your attention.
But I have to admit even I was surprised when it was downloaded 250,000 times in the first six months.
A quarter of a million people listening to my little thriller?
I couldn’t believe it, and I want to give a lot of the credit to the narrator, Aimee Horne, who did such an amazing job with all the characters.
But while audiobooks are popular with many people, there are still readers who like an old-fashioned book – something you can hold in your hands, pick up and put down, take to the beach, stuff in your bag, read on the train.
So, once we had about 320,000 listeners, I asked my publisher in Australia, HarperCollins, if it wanted to turn The Cuckoo’s Cry into a “real” book – and it said yes!
And here we are.
The Cuckoo’s Cry starts with a young girl, with pink tips in her hair and a little golden ring in her nose, knocking on the door of an old house in Bondi, on the eve of the Covid pandemic.
An old man answers.
He’s the type who likes a morning dip in the sea, a shuffle down to the shops to get the papers.
He’s been living alone since his wife died. His daughter is married, with kids and a life of her own. She knows that he has been lonely, but she runs a lovely, popular accommodation venue in the country, where her husband is the chef. It’s miles from Bondi, where she grew up, plus they have the girls, so she hasn’t had much time to check in on him since her mum died.
The young girl tells the old man she’s related to him, and she’s in trouble.
He is a good person, so he opens the door and lets her in. Then lockdown comes, and he can’t ask her to leave. In truth, he doesn’t want her to leave. They are getting on like a house on fire.
The news that he has somebody living with him creates havoc for his family, especially his daughter. She is suspicious of this girl, but she lives outside her dad’s lockdown zone so she can’t drop by to make sure everything is OK. Then, when she makes a surprise “care visit”, she ends up even more worried than before.
It sounds like this girl is claiming to be part of their family, but how can that be?
The reader can’t decide: is this stranger trustworthy? Is she telling the truth about who she is? How many secrets can one family have?
I had to do a lot of work on the story to turn it from “audio” into “a book”. In an audiobook, you can have strangers saying, “Look, who’s that?”, and everyone will understand they have spotted a stranger.
In a book, you do quite a bit more: you can describe the stranger and surroundings. How creepy are they? How beautiful? And so on.
The idea is to have the tension building, especially as the lockdown tightens, with all the twists and turns dragging the reader to the very last page. I really hope you love it.