FAMILY AFFAIR
Author Sophie Hannah tells us how her quirky relatives are a constant source of inspiration
READERS often ask her the same que st ion : “Why are the characters in your books so unusual?”
Sophie Hannah says she has her own quirky relatives to thank for it.
“So many mad things happened in my extended family, and it gave me the firm conviction that most people are very weird,” the British thriller writer says as she chats to us about her new book, The Couple at the Table, from her home in Cambridge. What kind of mad things? “Well, my grandmother and her third husband got to the point where they loathed each other, but divorce was thought to be too expensive. So, they got lawyers in, which was cheaper, to divide their bungalow into two sections, but nobody realised that my step-grandfather’s part of the house didn’t have a door [and she was not letting him use her door].
“So, for a while he had to climb in and out of a window to get in and out before they could have the border redrawn to give him a door.”
On her mom’s side, things were equally eccentric. When Sophie’s parents got married, her grandmother boycotted the wedding because she didn’t approve of the groom and she also forbade her husband from attending.
“If you look carefully at some of their wedding pictures you can see Granddad trying to hide behind a car, so his wife wouldn’t find out he went to their daughter’s wedding!”
Sophie says a lot of people want to believe humans are much more normal than any of us actually are.
“I write about the world as I see it. Wherever there’s a family or a collection of people, there’s strange sh*t going on that really needs to be investigated.”
In Sophie’s new book, The Couple at the Table, Lucy, one of the main narrators, and her partner are holidaying at the same posh resort where her ex-husband, William, and his soon-to-be-murdered new wife, Jane, are on honeymoon. And someone has sent Jane a cryptic note warning her to “beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours”. Except all the tables at the dinner that night are equally spaced out.
Lucy is determined to solve the murder. She pesters the investigators, married couple Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer – Sophie’s regular Culver Valley detectives – who also happened to be holidaying at the resort at the time of the murder.
As the only suspects are those who were at the resort it provides a lockedroom feel to the book, giving it an Agatha Christie touch. Sophie, who’s a huge fan of the late author, says this was intentional.
“For one of the inspirations for the book I was rereading Death on the Nile [by Christie] and I wanted to write a contemporary homage to it, where there’s a poisonous love triangle and somebody is intruding on the honeymoon of their ex-partner and their new spouse.”
The book has two timelines, 2019 and early 2020 before the global lockdown, so the author could dodge Covid’s looming presence in the story.
Her next book, out in August next year, is also Covid-free. Set in 1931, it’s her latest Hercule Poirot novel, the fifth time she’s writing about Christie’s famous Belgian detective after being commissioned by the late author’s family.
Writing during the pandemic didn’t changed her process, she says, but it did give her a lot more time once events in her jam-packed schedule were cancelled.
“I was at home with far more free time and the ability to just do things, like hang out with my family [husband Dan Jones and their teenage kids Phoebe and Guy] and go to the gym every day.
“For me, it was amazing; it made it easier for me to write and to do almost everything I wanted to do.” THE COUPLE AT THE TABLE BY SOPHIE HANNAH Hodder & Stoughton