The Third Book Has a Title (and a Cover)

After eighteen months, two false starts, and one entirely abandoned first-person draft, the third novel has a title.

I am not going to pretend the title arrived in a flash of clarity. It arrived the way most of them do: on a list of thirty candidates, sitting quietly in position nineteen, ignored for four months until my editor circled it and wrote "this one, obviously" in the margin.

What took so long

The honest version is that I wrote the wrong book first.

The original draft was told in first person by the younger brother. It was fluent, it moved, and roughly two hundred pages in I realised the narrator was the least interesting person in the room. He had opinions about everyone else's decisions and no decisions of his own. That is a fine character. It is not a fine narrator.

Rebuilding in close third meant losing about sixty thousand words. People ask whether that is painful. It was, for a week. Then it was a relief, because the book I actually wanted had been standing behind the one I was writing the entire time, waiting to be let through.

Cutting a draft is not the same as wasting one. You paid for information, and the information was that the book had a different centre than you thought.

About the cover

The design went through four rounds. The first three all did the same thing — they illustrated the plot, and the plot is not what the book is about. The version we landed on is quieter: a single interior, mostly dark, one window with the light on the wrong side of it.

I asked the designer why it worked and she said something I have thought about since: a cover should promise the feeling, not the events. Nobody buys a novel because of what happens in it. They buy it because of what it seems like it will be like to be inside it.

What happens next

• Copyedits go back at the end of the month. This is my favourite stage and I will not be talked out of it.
• Advance copies go out to booksellers and to a small group of newsletter readers in the spring. If you want to be considered, reply to any newsletter email — that is the whole application process.
• Publication is set for autumn, with a small tour that I will announce here first.

For the people who waited

Three years between books is a long time to ask anyone to stay interested. I know some of you have written to ask whether the series was finished, or whether I had quietly stopped. I had not. I was just doing the slow, invisible, unphotogenic part.

Thank you for the patience. The book is better for having taken the time, which is the only defence any writer can offer, and in this case it happens to be true.

More soon — including the first chapter, which I will publish here before it goes anywhere else.