Challenging comfort zones

BEYOND THE SEA by Paul Lynch (One World, $33)

Beyond the Sea opens on a beautiful sunny day in a South American fishing village but right from the start there is a hint of menace in the air — what lies beneath the actions of the various characters and how did they wash up on this quiet piece of coastline?

Bolivar — the main protagonist — and Hector go to sea despite an impending storm on the horizon. And when their panga (boat) is plunged into roiling seas and roaring winds — the motor cuts out and the radio is no longer working — both men know they are on their own. If they are to survive out in the open ocean, past the safety of the lagoon, they will have to learn to trust and rely on each other.

As reality merges into hallucination, the two men struggle to pin down what is actually real. Bolivar

by Nalini Singh (Hachette, $35) is out now.

There’s a cheeriness to Singh as she chats from her home with its views of the Waitakere Ranges. Her love for what she gets to do as a full-time career bubbles through as we talk. Singh writes from her own study in her own house nowadays, but her desk has been the same for 25 years. As a teenager growing up in Mount Roskill, she imagined tales and wrote them down at this two-level computer desk without drawers that her parents bought for her.

From the early manuscripts she submitted by post to overseas publishers — she was still a student and these became training runs for what was to come — through to her breakthrough debut, then the first of a string of 30 New York Times bestsellers and right up to A Madness of Sunshine, Singh has written dozens of books standing or sitting at that desk.

Now it’s part of her study space filled with things that inspire her storytelling — and Singh has long loved writing stories. She was born in Fiji and moved to Auckland with her family while she was at primary school. As a student at Mt Roskill Grammar School, Singh wrote speculative fiction, fantasy and romance stories and submitted her first novel-length manuscript to an overseas publisher.

“It was very swiftly rejected but I was already writing my second book,” she says. “I think it helped that I was a teenager, because I just had that kind of, ‘Well, I’ll show them’ — that sort of teenage sort of confidence — and I just kept going because I just loved it so much.”

Singh is a self-taught writer, absorbing the lessons of her high school English classes and her own learn-bydoing scribblings while never doing a writing degree or creative writing course.

“I started as a teenager trying to figure things out story wise,” she says. “I knew I wanted to write stories and I just wrote. Even before I submitted my first manuscript, I was writing short stories and doing those activities that high school English teachers assign. I was the happy kid in the class, like, ‘Woo-hoo, I can go and do creative writing’ or whatever we were in. I just found that it fed my soul.

“Then I was probably about 16 or 17 when I started to try to put full novels together. The one I submitted, obviously at the time I thought it was great but looking back I can see the faults in it. At the same time, I’m really proud of myself for doing the whole book, because learning the structure of how to write a full book is different from trying to write pieces of a book or doing the short stories that I’d been doing until then.”

It was the mid-1990s, before the e-book boom or geographic borders being broken down in the publishing world. Having looked around the local books scene and realising no one seemed to be publishing the kind of stories she was writing, Singh began by sending her first manuscripts to overseas publishers, after doing some sleuthing to find a first contact.

“I wasn’t hooked into any literary community at the time,” she says. “I was very isolated; I couldn’t google anything because it was the nascent days of the internet.”

Having found a book of a similar style that she enjoyed to read and write, the teenaged Singh peered inside for the publisher details, found out who distributed the books in New Zealand, then called that company to ask how she would go about sending her own book to the overseas publisher.

“Whoever answered the phone was such a nice person and said, ‘We’ve actually got some kind of form here that tells you how’ and stuff, and they sent it to me, and that’s how I submitted my first book, off this photocopied address to a publisher in London kind of thing. And from then I was just saving up my money for posting, because it was so expensive to submit back then.”

Singh kept writing various manuscripts while she earned a law degree, then began working as a young solicitor. She wrote seven or eight novel-length manuscripts before finally breaking through with Desert Warrior, a contemporary romance. The call came from a New York publisher at 7am on September 6, 2003. It was a Friday morning and easy for Singh to remember because it was her birthday that weekend.

“I didn’t want to answer the call,” she says now, chuckling. “I had someone else in my family pick up the phone then, because I was still at home. Anyway, she said, ‘I want to buy your book’ and I was just completely stunned and I said, ‘Can you just send me an email because I need proof I didn’t imagine this conversation.’

“The funny thing was I went to work, and the law firm where I worked they gave you a little chocolate cake, like a celebration. Since it was a Friday, I got the cake that day and everyone thought I was so happy because I got this cake and my birthday was coming up when really I’d sold a book. I only told my best friend in the firm. It’s quite a funny memory, it was a happy day but surreal as well. I think surreal is the right word.”

Soon afterwards Singh left legal practice and decided to work on her novel writing while teaching English in Japan.

“I had been writing both speculative fiction and romance, science fiction-type fantasy stories and romance, and it just so happened that I was published first in contemporary romance, so that’s the path I took, initially anyway, until I actually figured out that you could combine both of those things into paranormal romance and urban fantasy.”

It was that combination, the plunge into paranormal romance, that saw Singh’s star quickly rise after she wrote Slave to Sensation, the first book in her Psy/ Changeling series that now numbers 18 novels, several shorter stories and a spin-off novel series set in the same world. Many of those books became New York Times bestsellers, along with Singh’s other paranormal romance series, the Guild Hunter books with angels and vampires.

While Singh has had huge success imagining worlds far beyond our everyday reality, she’s also brought her own reality and perspective to her pages. Living in a diverse world, she wrote a diverse world; after the publication of her early Psy/changeling novels she received letters from readers around the globe who were stoked to see a heroine of colour in paranormal romance.

the highly enthusiastic Rinchin Bolot, a selfdescribed “factotum” who becomes highly useful to Renko.

The Siberian Dilemma is the ninth Arkady Renko novel, a series that started in 1981 (Smith has admitted in interviews that he does not write fast) with Gorky Park. The series is set against the changing political and economic landscape of Russia, from the Cold War to the tyranny of Putin in The Siberian Dilemma, which drops references to such infamous Russian hanky-panky as poisoned umbrella tips. Unusually, the book also features beautiful photographs of Moscow and Siberia.

It is the background that sets The Siberian Dilemma apart from your average crime novel. Such devices as a perfectly timed work trip that coincides with a personal quest and meeting just the person you need sitting right next to you on the plane is, frankly, lazy.

But Smith is more interested in the oligarchs and a society that is still under the hammer and sickle — yet features beauty contests with a swimsuit competition. In Siberia. The alleged attempted assassin is quickly sent on his way (he didn’t do it, of course). His role is that of a mere pawn to allow Arkady (and us) to understand that captors are as much prisoners as those behind bars when justice is gagged.

The action then heads into the bear-infested taiga and things quickly get very bloody indeed. Smith’s greater picture is of immense wealth and the evil mankind is prepared to do to get it. The lazy devices that get our characters where they have to be, and handily given the help they need, can be forgiven.

This is my first introduction to Renko and although at first I didn’t warm to him, I found myself increasingly drawn into the drama, and to the unforgiving but magnificent landscape of Siberia. Smith even leaves us with a grudging sympathy and understanding of his bad guys. I’ve added Gorky Park to my reading list and I really, really want to go to Siberia. 6 7