Meet the new neighbours. Whose side are you on?
When Gav and Lou move into the house next door, Sara spends days plucking up courage to say hello. The neighbours are glamorous, chaotic and just a little eccentric. They make the rest of Sara’s street seem dull by comparison.
When the hand of friendship is extended, Sara is delighted and flattered. Incredibly, Gav and Lou seem to see something in Sara and Neil that they admire too. In no time at all, the two couples are soulmates, sharing suppers, bottles of red wine and childcare, laughing and trading stories and secrets late into the night in one another’s houses.
And the more time Sara spends with Gav and Lou, the more she longs to make changes in her own life. But those changes will come at a price. Soon Gav and Lou will be asking things they’ve no right to ask of their neighbours, with shattering consequences for all of them…
Have you met The People at Number 9? A dark and delicious novel about envy, longing and betrayal in the suburbs…
I'll be reviewing The People at Number 9 soon; in the meantime, I welcome the author, Felicity Everett, to the blog.
Guest Post: Where I find Inspiration - Felicity Everett
Inspiration is a slippery concept. I suppose if you look at my books, the answer to the question where does it come from, would seem to be my life. My first novel The Story of Us, is about five women, who meet at university in the 1980s, and about what becomes of them over the next two decades (I went to university in the 1980s, where I met some awe inspiring women, some of whom went on to great things, but not all…). My new novel, The People at Number 9 is about a couple who live a humdrum life in a London suburb, then meet some exciting new people who inspire them to make changes to their lives which they come to regret. I too lived a humdrum life in a London suburb. I also met some cool new people who made me see things differently. Fortunately I didn’t remake my life in their image, or come a cropper like the characters in my book, but the inspiration for the book was on my doorstep. The novel I am working on at the moment is a gothic psychodrama about a menopausal woman in a bad marriage who moves to the country and loses her mind. And yes, I am a woman of a certain age and I have just moved to the countryside. My marriage, I’ll have you know, is in very good shape!
That’s what I mean by a slippery concept. I start off with something I know – a situation, a person. I tweak it a little, play a game of ‘what if?’ and it starts to get interesting. Before I know it, I’ve constructed a plot involving suicide and abusive celebrity marriage (The Story of Us); adultery (The People at Number 9) or marital gas-lighting (my new novel, as yet untitled). I’ve tried a few other scenarios – I was keen on the idea of a novel about a twenty-first century commune, but I couldn’t breathe life into it. I kept getting the characters mixed up – a sure sign that my heart wasn’t in it, so eventually I gave up. There’s no objective reason, really why that one should have flopped, and the gothic countryside idea should have grabbed me, as it has. All I know is, when the inspiration comes I don’t look it in the eye, I just crack on and write.
Thank you Felicity!
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