Today I’m delighted to feature author Deborah Lawrenson who first crossed my radar in 2016 with her fabulous novel 300 Days of Sun. The Women’s National Book Association in the USA, thought it was pretty special too and it was selected as a Great Group Read. Her latest novel, The Secretary is based on her late mother Joy’s 1958 diary, written in Moscow at the height of the Cold War when she was working at the British Embassy there.
After a childhood of constant moves around the world with diplomatic service parents, Deborah Lawrenson read English at Trinity College, Cambridge. She trained as a journalist on the Kentish Times, then worked on several national newspapers and magazines. She is the author of nine novels and co-author of two.
Her first, Hot Gossip came out in 1994 and was a satire based on her experiences working for Dempster’s diary on the Daily Mail. In 2005, The Art of Falling was chosen for the WHSmith Fresh Talent promotion that summer. Set in Provence, The Lantern (2011) was her first novel to appear in the USA, where it was published by HarperCollins to a fantastic critical reception. In the UK it was chosen for The TV Book Club on Channel4 and shortlisted for the RNA’s 2012 Romantic Novel of the Year award in the Epic category. This was followed by 300 Days of Sun in 2016, and more recently by The Secretary.
Deborah lives in Kent and a crumbling hamlet in Provence, which is the atmospheric setting for the Penelope Kite mystery novels that she writes with husband Rob as “Serena Kent”.
Over to Deborah :
Which five pieces of music/songs would you include in the soundtrack to your life and why?
Santana – She’s Not There
Growing up, I went to ten different schools as my father’s job meant we moved every few years. For A-levels, I begged to be allowed to go to boarding school back in the UK. A boys’ public school, with a few girls in the Sixth Form. I argued it was so I wouldn’t be the only new girl again, but the boy motive was pretty transparent. That first term I shared a room with two other girls, Felicia and Tanya. We were playing Santana’s She’s Not There on a loop while having fun getting ready for a party when I realised we had become good friends – and we still are, all these years later.
Randy Crawford – One Day I’ll Fly Away
This was on the radio just after my parents and sister left for Singapore, where my father was taking up a new post. I sat alone on the stairs of our house in South-East London and it suddenly felt very empty. I had two weeks to go until I started at Cambridge and though I saw friends, I was coming to terms with being on my own and my independent life beginning. Randy Crawford’s voice is so poignant. Of course, I did fly away to Singapore, too, for exciting university vacations. It didn’t occur to me at the time how upset my mother was to be leaving me behind.
Billie Holiday – I Cover the Waterfront
I had a wonderful time at Cambridge, though sadly not nearly enough of it devoted to my studies. The social whirl was all too alluring: bright, interesting friends to make, parties, cocktail evenings, discos and balls, plays to see, plays to act in, punting and picnics. It was the early 80s and fantasy fashion time. I was all in for vintage clothes and music. Billie Holiday was an important part of the soundtrack as we played and posed. To add to the heady mix, I met my future husband, never imagining we would last. That 2:1 at the end still feels like a cherry-on-the-top miracle.
Ella Fitzgerald – Nice Work if You Can Get it
This is the song that captures the moment life sprang forward again. I’d trained as a journalist on a south London weekly and was living with Rob in Blackheath when I made the leap to Fleet Street, as it still was (just). I’d applied to several newspapers, and the Mail had started asking me in for shifts in its terrifying news room. It was a hard knock place, and more often than not spat out young try-outs like me. But I had a glimmer of luck and the door to Nigel Dempster’s gossip column was opening. This reminds me of sitting on the floor back at the flat with Rob after days of fun encounters with famous people, drinking wine and soaking up Ella’s honeyed tones. “Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try…”
Stacey Kent – Désuets
Stacey Kent is another incredible singer, and her albums have become synonymous with our house in Provence, especially Raconte-Moi, which is sung entirely in French. This track, Désuets (it means “old-fashioned, quaint, obsolete things”) is particularly redolent of our laid-back, warm and self-indulgent times with friends and family there. I absolutely love the languorous beat that seems to slow life right down. Now imagine sitting on the terrace, the hillside streaked with a red sunset, while glasses of chilled rosé and a bowl of herb-flecked black olives appear on the table…
What five things (apart from family and friends) would you find it hard to live without.
Walks in the countryside
Books
Old photographs
Cups of strong tea
A sense of humour
Give five pieces of advice to your younger self?
Don’t give yourself such a hard time, learn how to relax.
You really aren’t that fat.
Not everything has to be complicated, stop overthinking.
It’s a terrible idea to sunbathe in the back garden slathered in DuoTan the afternoon before your long-awaited first date with Mike, 17. He will be unnerved by how orange and streaky you are, not to mention strange-smelling.
Just go to the doctor before you spend months coming to terms with the fact that you’re dying young.
Tell us five things that most people don’t know about you
I got contact lenses for my sixteenth birthday. Suddenly I could see details in the world outside the classroom where I wore glasses to read the blackboard!
Once I was sent out to ambush Michael Caine in Albemarle St, London, for a newspaper story. He was extremely charming about it (and surprising tall).
When I was a student I suffered dreadfully from panic attacks. Instead of medication, I was sent by a brilliant woman GP to a hypnotherapist when the practice was still at an experimental stage. The sessions worked like a charm and I have been forever grateful.
I have a phenomenal memory. Old friends call me the Memory Bank, though frankly it can be embarrassing, all the nonsense still stored there.
My daughter Maddy was born nine weeks prematurely, and nurses at the special care baby unit did their best to manage our expectations both in the short and long term. But we were blessed in every way: she had no physical problems, she started talking incredibly early, is hilariously funny, and recently gained a PhD in Linguistics at Cambridge. Take heart, anyone who goes through the same trauma.
Tell us five things you’d still like to do or achieve.
Achieve a film version of just one of my books
Design and build my dream house
Uncover a true story that no one else knows about
Have a wonderful party with all the old friends and acquaintances I’ve lost touch with over the years
Take singing lessons and somehow discover I had a good enough voice to perform one of my talented composer husband’s sultry, jazzy songs.
Many thanks for joining me today Deborah, it was lovely to discover more about you after all this time. I love the music today, you brought some great voices. Ella Fitzgerald is one of my favourites and Every Time We Say Goodbye, will always take me back to nights out in 1976/7. I’m with you on books and tea, life wouldn’t be worth living without them. I loved your sunbathing story, as a youngster I remember we used to put liquorice in a bottle with water, shake it up and rub it in for a sun tan, and then, proceed to lie in the sun! I think my skin cancer probability is somewhere off the charts. I’m pleased that Maddy went on to exceed early expectations. I put my appearance in 6 weeks early, I’ll leave it to my mother to say whether that was an impediment. Good luck in hopefully ticking off your future achievements, performing one of your husband’s songs would be great. Maybe you could sing it at your wonderful party, ideally in your dream home. Here’s hoping!
Deborah’s Books
(NB This post features Affiliate links from which I earn a small commission on qualifying purchases)
The Secretary
Moscow, 1958. At the height of the Cold War, secretary Lois Vale is on a deep-cover MI6 mission to identify a diplomatic traitor. She can trust only one man: Johann, a German journalist also working covertly for the British secret service. As the trail leads to Vienna and the Black Sea, Lois and Johann begin an affair but as love grows, so does the danger to Lois.
A tense Cold War spy story told from the perspective of a bright, young, working-class woman recruited to MI6 at a time when men were in charge of making history and women were expendable.
300 Days of Sun
Travelling to Faro, Portugal, journalist Joanna Millard hopes to escape an unsatisfying relationship and a stalled career. Faro is an enchanting town, and the seaside views are enhanced by the company of Nathan Emberlin, a charismatic younger man. But behind the crumbling facades of Moorish buildings, Joanna soon realizes, Faro has a seedy underbelly, its economy compromised by corruption and wartime spoils. And Nathan has an ulterior motive for seeking her company: he is determined to discover the truth involving a child’s kidnapping that may have taken place on this dramatic coastline over two decades ago.
Joanna’s subsequent search leads her to Ian Rylands, an English expat who cryptically insists she will find answers in The Alliance, a novel written by American Esta Hartford. The book recounts an American couple’s experience in Portugal during World War II, and their entanglements both personal and professional with their German enemies. Only Rylands insists the book isn’t fiction, and as Joanna reads deeper into it, she begins to suspect that Esta Hartford’s story and Nathan Emberlin’s may indeed converge in Faro—where the past not only casts a long shadow but still exerts a very present danger.
The Sea Garden
Present day. On a lush Mediterranean island off the French coast, Ellie has accepted a commission to restore an abandoned garden. It seems idyllic, but the longer Ellie spends at the house and garden, the more she senses darkness, and a lingering evil that seems to haunt her.
Second World War. Two very different women have their lives irrevocably changed: Iris, a junior intelligence officer in London and Marthe, a blind girl who works in the lavender fields of Provence and is slowly drawn into the heart of the Resistance. As secret messages are passed in scent and planes land by moonlight, danger comes ever closer…
The Lantern
When Eve falls for the secretive, charming Dom, their whirlwind relationship leads them to purchase Les Genevriers, an abandoned house in a rural hamlet in the south of France.
As the beautiful Provence summer turns to autumn, Eve finds it impossible to ignore the mysteries that haunt both her lover and the run-down old house, in particular the mysterious disappearance of his beautiful first wife, Rachel.
Whilst Eve tries to untangle the secrets surrounding Rachel’s last recorded days, Les Genevriers itself seems to come alive. As strange events begin to occur with frightening regularity, Eve’s voice becomes intertwined with that of Benedicte Lincel, a girl who lived in the house decades before.
As the tangled skeins of the house’s history begin to unravel, the tension grows between Dom and Eve. In a page-turning race, Eve must fight to discover the fates of both Benedicte and Rachel, before Les Genevriers’ dark history has a chance to repeat itself.
Songs of Blue and Gold
Sometimes the key to the future lies in the past . . .
In the horseshoe bay of Kalami in Corfu, a tumultuous love affair begins between a renowned novelist and a woman escaping scandal. Years later, her daughter Melissa, running from her own past, returns to the island …
Melissa’s life in England is in disarray. There are cracks in her perfect marriage, and her elderly mother, Elizabeth, is losing her memory and slowly drifting away. In the last glimmers of lucidity, Elizabeth presents her daughter with a gift that suggests a very secret history – one that leads Melissa to Kalami, where Julian Adie, poet, traveller and novelist, once lived.
But what is the connection between Adie – an alluring hedonist who discarded four wives – and Melissa’s mother Elizabeth? As Melissa chases Adie’s shadow across the golden places he loved, she finds her mother may not have been the person she thought. Forced to question morality, loyalty and her own unwillingness to let love in, Melissa is gradually led to a dramatic re-evaluation of her own life.
The Art of Falling
In 1944 Tom Wainwright, a British soldier, arrives in the small Italian town of Petriano. The war is nearly over, and in the lull before the Allied troops move further north to capture Florence Tom forges a friendship with the Parini family – and in particular with the eldest daughter, Giuliana. When the war ends he chooses to stay in Italy, planning to build a life with the woman with whom he has fallen deeply in love, but in the chaotic, tragic fallout of the end of the Second World War his hopes are dashed.
Fifty years later Isabel Wainwright, Tom’s daughter, sets off for Petriano herself, to attend a ceremony naming a piazza in her father’s honour. But Isabel isn’t so much going to represent her father as to try and find him – for she and her mother have heard nothing of him since, nearly twenty years earlier, he went out one day and never returned. She doesn’t even know whether her father is dead or alive, but hopes that by discovering something of his past, she can build a picture of the man she hardly knew.
Writing as ‘Serena Kent’
Death in Provence
When Penelope Kite swaps her humdrum life in Surrey for a picturesque farmhouse in the south of France, she imagines a simple life of long lunches and chilled rosé . . . What she doesn’t imagine is the dead body floating in her swimming pool.
Convinced that the victim suffered more than a drunken accident, Penelope plunges headlong into local intrigue and long-simmering resentments to uncover the truth.
But with a meddling estate agent, an unfriendly Chief of Police, a suspiciously charming Mayor, and the endless temptation of that second pain au chocolat, life in the delightful village of St Merlot is certainly never simple. . .
Death in Avignon
Glamour, intrigue, and a mystery to die for…
After a tumultuous summer, Penelope Kite has settled into the rhythm of her new life in Provence. Lavender-scented evenings, long lunches with new friends – and an exclusive gallery opening to attend, on the arm of the gorgeous mayor of St Merlot…
But beneath the veneer of glamour, scandal is brewing. Shockwaves ripple through the Avignon art world when a controversial painter, Roland Doncaster, chokes on an almond-stuffed olive.
A tragic accident? Or a ruthless poisoning? Embroiled once more in a murder investigation, Penelope discovers that any number of jealous lovers and scheming rivals could be in the frame. And with dashing art dealers to charm, patisseries to resist, and her own friends under suspicion, Penelope will need all her sleuthing talents to unveil the truth…
