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Jenn im book report12/15/2023 ![]() ![]() I have no idea where I'd drive it, but I imagine somewhere green and quiet. Although for years now I have been nurturing an ambition to own and live in one of these. I've forgiven you being on the wrong side of the Pennines, but have you ever thought of living anywhere else? BB: There's a very definite northern feel to the book.The whole idea of 'sympathetic' characters is a bit strange to me. And as a reader, I don't need to like a character to want to spend time with them - people in conflict with their world, with themselves are very engaging to spend time with. Writing a 'likeable' character might make my novels appeal to a different set of readers, but I'd feel like it was an incomplete portrayal. I just don't think anyone is pure good or pure bad. It's the same in my first novel, A Kind of Intimacy, and the same in the one I am writing now. ![]() Did you think it was a bit of a risk having three main characters, none of whom were all that sympathetic? Human nature obviously doesn't change all that much. BB: The characters of the three teenage girls in Cold Light – Chloë, Emma and Lola – rang so true that I was taken back to my teenage years.I hope none of my characters are heroes or villains, because it isn't like that in real life - we're all capable of surprising ourselves with the good and bad things we do, I think most unsettling acts have a logic behind them and I want my books to reflect that. I wonder if that means authors of unsettling books are less likely to do unsettling things? I'm not sure I buy into that theory and I'm not sure if I'd see my books as dealing entirely with the darker side of life and unpleasant kinds of people. JA: P.D James said recently that writing books about violence and murder was a way of containing the horror of these events - both in the outside world and the propensity for performing them in each of us. How does a nice girl like you think up a plot like that? BB: Cold Light is an unsettling psychological thriller.My readers, I think, are probably a very disparate group of people from the crime-thriller and lit-fic ends of the spectrum. Although I am, when structuring a story and making decisions about character, writing for someone who likes the same kind of books as I do - a reader who wants to be entertained as much as they want to be challenged. Jenn Ashworth: When I'm writing, I try not to imagine my readers at all. Bookbag: When you close your eyes and imagine your readers, who do you see?.Thankfully, Jenn was ready to talk to us. She met Jenn a few months ago and really wanted to know how a nice girl like Jenn could think up a plot like that. Sue loved Jenn's latest book, Cold Light. ![]()
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