The Lady in Black

Your new novel takes place on a fictitious volcanic island, where a group of extraordinary people, called the Lost, are mysteriously murdered. What exactly is a Lost?

A Lost is somebody who is capable of sending their senses—effectively fragments of their consciousness—away from their body in a loosely tethered fashion. And in fact, can send their senses independently in different directions. As a consequence, they tend to be left rather limp and defenseless while their consciousness is elsewhere. And some of them are in dire need of keepers to keep an eye on them.

I am naturally an introvert. For most of my childhood, I was largely invisible and inaudible and voluntarily so. Being an extrovert is something that I can fake quite well, but it’s very much a learned skill. My sister and I created an awful lot of really elaborate imaginative worlds and played in them. We had some massively complicated, interconnected worlds with their own leaders and interdependent politics and things like that. This went on for quite a few years.

It’s unfair to ask you to sum up a complex novel in a few words, but would you take a crack at it?

Uh, I can try. It’s my own silly fault. I ought to by now have learned to write novels that are easy to summarize in a couple of sentences.

The U.S. edition is 568 pages.

I’m terribly sorry.

Was the original manuscript longer?

It was a bit larger. There were more descriptions. Basically, I often had to be beaten by sticks to remove metaphors and cut down descriptions. Fortunately, my editor is quite good at that.

Ready to take a shot at that summary?

On the island of Gullstruck, there is one race that to a certain extent has not been interbreeding with the others and is ostracized, and these are the Lace. They’re despised because they’ve had an unfortunate history involving betrayal and sacrifice. For the first time in over 50 years, one member of the Lace is a Lost, and the consequence is they’ve had their fortunes improved immeasurably. However, they have a deadly secret, which is that after some initial signs of promise, the young girl who is their Lost has shown no further signs of actually having these powers. They are desperate to hide their secret and Arilou, the young lady Lost, and her sister, Hathin, are dedicated to preserving the secret.

The story is a page-turner, but what makes it exceptional is your examination of racism and how it shapes people’s perceptions of one another.

To a large extent, Gullstruck is the product of a yearlong trip that my boyfriend and I took around the world. So it could be regarded as a very long version of an article on what I did on my holiday. It’s the result of little differences and dissonances and misunderstandings that I was noticing in a number of different countries as we were traveling, particularly those that had a colonial history, which I found fascinating and interesting not in the least because I was noticing my own blind spots.

So what’s with the hats and dressing in black?

I cannot remember a time I didn’t like hats. There are baby pictures of me with hats. I’ve always liked black, but I didn’t start wearing it until I was about 16. I don’t know why I like it so much. I suspect it’s from seeing early episodes of The Avengers with Emma Peel. The hat and I, I’m afraid, are rather inseparable, and I particularly like hats from the 1930s and ’40s. I suspect it’s from watching too much film noir at an impressionable age.