The Shadow Year (55 page)

I am indebted to Sarah Lutyens, Kate Mills and Vanessa Radnidge for giving me the courage to pursue this story when it was a whisker away from never being written. Their encouragement, advice and editorial insight were, as always, invaluable. Thank you to everyone at Orion, Hachette Australia and Lutyens & Rubinstein for the talent and flair that went into publishing this book. I also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Varuna Writers’ House and the Sydney Writers’ Room for giving me the time and solitude to complete this novel. Finally, I thank my family and friends for their support. I owe you all heartfelt gratitude for putting up with me on those days when I am lost inside my head – especially my generous-hearted sister Jess, my wonderful children, Jude and Gracie, and my husband, Matt:
‘the best time of the day’
, always.

READING GROUP NOTES

A READER’S INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK

The Shadow Year
tells two stories, intricately intertwined, each with a tragedy at its heart
.

Five friends – Kat, Simon, Carla, Ben and Mac – are about to graduate from university, but their future seems bleak. It’s 1980, and the newspapers are full of doom and gloom. In a last-ditch attempt at escape, they take off on a summer’s day to the Peak District where they stumble upon an abandoned cottage on the shores of a shimmering lake, hidden deep in the heart of the countryside. Isolated and run-down, it offers a retreat, somewhere they can escape from the real world. It’s a chance to live the dream, doing exactly as they please, with lazy summer days by the lake and cosy winter evenings around the fire. They decide to stay, convinced they can survive on their own and determined to stick it out no matter what the cost. But as the seasons change, tensions begin to rise, and when Kat’s sister, beautiful art student Freya, appears at the door, their idyllic life is turned upside down – with devastating consequences.

Lila and Tom are a young London couple, reeling after the sudden loss of their first baby and struggling to hold their marriage together. Lila lost the baby in a fall but can’t remember how it happened, and the memories of that day are coming back to her only slowly, piece by painful piece. When she inherits a remote Peak District cottage from a mystery benefactor, she flees there to spend time alone, away from her husband. Renovating the tumbledown house gives her a renewed sense of purpose, but as she sifts through the evidence left behind thirty years ago by the five young drop-outs, she becomes curious. Why did they leave in such a hurry, with their belongings still strewn about the place? Who are the figures in the mural scrawled on an upstairs wall? And why is there a bullet hole in one of the timber beams in the kitchen? Most disturbing of all, why can’t she shake the feeling that someone might be watching her?

As the story of the five young friends unfolds it starts to overlap with Lila’s own and, in a harrowing climax on the shores of the lake, secrets that have haunted her family for years are finally exposed. But will all the secrets of that one shadowy year come to light, or will one remain hidden beneath the cool, clear water, never to surface?

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

The Shadow Year
is your second novel – was writing it a very different experience from writing your first,
Secrets of the Tides
? Were you more confident the second time around, or did you find yourself facing a whole new series of challenges?

I know it’s a cliché but writing this second novel was like being strapped into a rollercoaster. Some days I felt buoyed by the knowledge I had ‘done it’ before and confident that I could write another novel (receiving kind comments from generous readers and reviewers of
Secrets of the Tides
was especially heartening), but most days I felt cowed by the weight of expectation and the looming publication deadline. I also didn’t make things easy for myself. I stumbled upon the story for
The Shadow Year
while bogged down in the first draft of a very different novel. I was 100,000 words in when the lake and the cottage and the character of a broken young woman (who would eventually become Lila) jumped into my head. I tried to push the ideas away so that I could focus on my work-in-progress but they wouldn’t leave me alone. I agonised for a few weeks about ditching the other draft to concentrate on what would become
The Shadow Year
, but eventually I knew in my gut that it was the right thing to do. And just like that – I didn’t have time for anxiety and self-doubt – I had to write the story and get it done. The clock was ticking.

Your character Lila shares something with you: she grew up in Buckinghamshire in England, and in a similar period. Did this shared background make it easier for you to ‘get into her head’ and imagine how she would think, feel and react in different circumstances?

No, Lila grew with me as I wrote the novel. She was very much a ‘Londoner’ in my head, which added to her fish-out-of-water feelings on arrival in the Peak District. It was only as I began to delve into her early childhood and the life her parents had given her that I decided to base her family home in Buckinghamshire, a place I knew well from my own childhood. The fact that we are of the same generation was perhaps the greatest help to me in trying to get inside her head.

As in your first novel, the setting plays a pivotal role in
The Shadow Year
. Is the beautiful lake in England’s Peak District based on a real-life place you know well? What came first – the setting or the story?

The very first thing that came to me about this story was the lake and the abandoned cottage, and the idea of a broken young woman taking solace in the remote surroundings. I didn’t know who the woman was or where the lake was for a long time but I knew I had to find an actual area of England that could offer such an extreme sense of detachment. I thought about the Lake District for a while, but eventually settled on the Peak District. I was attracted to the area’s diversity – the uplands and escarpments, the rolling hills and farmland as well as the barren moors. The more I researched the landscape and the shifting seasons, the potential for foraging and living off the land, as well as the hazards and pitfalls of such remote living, the more the plot began to fall into place. The story, in many ways, grew quite organically from the setting.

Walden is an American classic, describing Henry David Thoreau’s two-year experiment in simple living in a cabin in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts, in the 1850s. You’ve chosen a quote from Thoreau’s book as your epigraph, and one of your characters, Simon, reads his work in the course of your story. Was
Walden
an important reference for you as you wrote
The Shadow Year
? Do you believe that in seeking to understand nature we can understand ourselves?

I read American Studies at Nottingham University and was already acquainted with Thoreau’s writing before I started on this novel but as I began to play around with the story,
Walden
came back to me, very clearly It was so obvious, really: the idea of detachment and escape, of separating yourself from the everyday to understand who you truly are or to make sense of your current life. These are themes Thoreau explores in his writing and themes that are, of course, embedded in
The Shadow Year
. When I began to notice the parallels it seemed clear to me that Simon
had
to be reading
Walden
at the cottage, and then, when I revisited the quote about a lake being ‘Earth’s eye’ I also knew it would make a perfect epigraph. The idea of the lake as an ‘eye’ is something I have borrowed from Thoreau at the very start of the book, and there is also a scene where Kat studies herself in the lake and ruminates on her own dark nature.

Since completing
The Shadow Year
, I’ve noticed that both this book and
Secrets of the Tides
contain a strong sense of the power of nature embedded within them – both in terms of its capacity to nurture and heal, as well as to wreak havoc and destroy. On a personal level, I find nature immensely inspiring in my writing. When I am stuck, I’ll often take myself outside for a walk. I never feel more free or at peace than when I’m tramping across the English countryside in muddy boots . . . or trekking through shadowy gum trees in the Australian bush . . . or walking along a coastal path, listening to the rise and fall of the ocean. It’s a curious thing, isn’t it, that act of taking yourself
out
into the world to assist with the more introspective process of creativity or self-discovery?

The structure you’ve chosen for
The Shadow Year
is interesting: you almost give away the answer to the final mystery in your prologue, but then you manage to keep the reader guessing all the way to the very end. Was it difficult gauging which piece of information to give away when? When you’re writing and editing your work, how do you keep track of what the reader already knows and what is yet to be revealed?

I really hope I can keep most readers guessing to the end . . . fingers crossed! It’s tricky withholding information from the reader, but it’s also a great way to build tension. For me it’s one of the best bits of writing – I love playing around with the structure of a story. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but the more I write, the harder it is to see all the pieces clearly. My earliest readers – my sister, my husband, my agent and editor – were vital in helping me to ensure the flow of information was happening at the right time. The prologue was the last passage I wrote. For a while the novel didn’t have a prologue at all, but my editor and I kept coming back to the idea. We discussed it a couple of times and in the end I wrote something which I hope is a bit of a tease of what’s to come and also sets the scene of the lake and the cottage clearly in the reader’s mind.

There are twin tragedies at the heart of this story, and a single character is ultimately responsible for both of them – yet you clearly don’t regard the question of blame as a simple one. What draws you to this question of blame, and why did you want to explore it?