We’re taking a look back at some of our favourite and most popular Entertainment stories of 2024, giving you a chance to catch up on some of the great reading you might have missed this year.
In this story from September, Rebecca Barry Hill talks to New Zealand author Rose Carlyle about her new novel No One Will Know. The book, ideal for a last minute Christmas gift, explores motherhood, illegal adoption and dark secrets.
When Rose Carlyle attended a booksellers’ conference in Brisbane recently, it struck her she now inhabited a split-personality world. After years of writing at her desk “like a hermit”, suddenly here she was at a glittering event overseas, being introduced to publishing VIPs dressed in sequins, and listening to emotional speeches as people cheered - about books! She felt as though she were at the Oscars.
“It was lovely, just brilliant,” says the Takapuna-based author, with an air of disbelief. “You’re shaking hands with all these people. Occasionally I’d meet someone who’d be gushing at me or rendered speechless like I’m a famous person.”
As she prepares to launch her second novel, No One Will Know, it’s clear she’s humbled by the fanfare surrounding her work, four years after releasing her globally best-selling debut, The Girl in the Mirror. Before the book had even been through the editing process, Carlyle received a rare, one-book, six-figure deal from Australian publisher Allen & Unwin. Later, she had the luxury of choosing which top US publisher to work with, opting for editor Liz Stein at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. The book has been translated into eight languages and has sold about 150,000 copies worldwide, including in Brazil, where Carlyle has been surprised to find she’s amassed a big fan base. Even Hollywood has come calling. The Girl in the Mirror has been under option since soon after the book’s release, not an uncommon timeframe for film producers to develop a script. The contract (the details of which are under wraps) has been lucrative enough for Carlyle to write fulltime.
Both books are psychological thrillers with a dose of wild, sea-faring glamour. Whereas The Girl in the Mirror explored the rivalry between identical twins Iris and Summer, forced to compete for an inheritance in a twisty page-turner set in the Seychelles and the Indian Ocean, No One Will Know follows a desperate young pregnant woman named Eve who finds herself trapped in the orbit of a charming yet secretive couple. It delves into deeper themes of illegal adoption, wildlife trafficking and motherhood, and is set against the alluring backdrop of a glamorous mansion and a remote, eerie lighthouse in Tasmania.
“Motherhood is just a total part of who I am,” Carlyle explains. “Even The Girl in the Mirror was actually about this neglected and forgotten child. But I don’t want to write grim books about child neglect because I feel like we have enough horrible things going on in the world. I want my books to feel a bit like fantasy and an escape into a beautiful world. I know readers love to be swept away.”
Penny Hueston, senior editor at Text Publishing in Australia, says she reads a mountain of manuscripts each year, and very few are publishable, let alone of best-seller quality. But she knew No One Will Know had all the hallmarks of a hit once she’d “devoured” it. Knowing she’d need to move quickly, Text offered Carlyle a competitive pre-emptive bid to become her new Australasian publishers.
“Rose can write compulsively readable page-turners [which also deal] with very serious issues,” says Penny. “She really places the reader front and centre by saying implicitly, ‘What would you do?’”
While it’s too soon to say how well this book will sell, No One Will Know has once again earned Carlyle a six-figure sum for a one-book deal with William Morrow in the US and Canada. As her agents entertain a flurry of translation rights, another screen adaptation remains a distinct possibility, thanks to Carlyle’s book-to-film agent, someone dedicated to bringing the story to the screen. You’d forgive her for feeling the pressure but Carlyle says there’s only excitement.
“It feels like a real milestone, like I didn’t just fluke it,” she says, of the release of her second book. “I’ve actually managed to do it again.”
The rising popularity of the psychological thriller genre has no doubt helped. Just as readers of romance paperbacks know what to expect from a bodice-ripper, fans of psychological thriller fiction know their time will be invested in a book that grips them immediately, a story often told by an untrustworthy protagonist living an otherwise ordinary life, until a mystery upends their existence.
Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and Patricia Cornwall are masters of the genre, and more recently Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, whose success has spurred a new generation of prolific top-selling authors from Ruth Ware to Shari Lapena and Lucy Foley. Readers often decipher what’s going on at the same pace as the main character, just as they will with Eve, Carlyle’s headstrong and wily protagonist.
“What I love about psychological thrillers is where they’re almost like a detective story, but the main character doesn’t yet know she needs to be a detective,” says Carlyle. “I feel like that’s very relatable. What if you were just living your ordinary life and you had no idea you were you were being targeted?”
Carlyle based Eve on her grandmother, giving her a name of a motherless woman who must invent the notion of motherhood, “becoming the ‘Eve’ of her family”. Her grandmother had endured a difficult childhood, growing up in foster homes, before eventually raising four children on the West Coast, largely on her own. With no fridge or car, she’d trek the children to the shop each day for supplies while her fisherman husband was away for much of the week.
“You’d think that I’m about to tell you how much she struggled and was never happy, but it was quite the opposite. She was amazing. And she was full of joy in being a mother and having a family. And that’s what I wanted to capture with Eve.”
The characters in her first novel were awful, she laughs, including the heroine, a woman she describes as “selfish, jealous, lazy. But this time I wanted to write one with a character who I just really thought that readers would get behind”.
Naturally, a big expectation of the psychological thriller is the twist, a plot point that is notoriously difficult to pull off, yet crucial to a book’s success. No One Will Know features at least two, including a mic-drop moment Rose added after the book had sold. She was swimming out at sea when it suddenly occurred to her exactly how the story should end.
“I was so excited. I swam as fast as I could back to shore, rushed home and wrote my new ending … I’m really into a twist. I want to be known for my twists. That’s my aim, because I just love those movies with the unforgettable twist that you then kick yourself for not getting it.”
The plot twists in her own life involve adventures on the high seas, too. One of Carlyle’s first expeditions, having learned to sail as an adult, was taking Kiwi scientists to and from remote sub-Antarctic islands.
“That was what really inspired me to write this book,” she says, “that part of the world, the really wild, high-latitude sailing.”
A former corporate and commercial lawyer, Carlyle started dabbling as a writer after having her first baby. When her third child, a daughter, was born three months premature, her health needs made it impossible for her to keep working, so she devoted herself to giving her the best start in life she could.
“Next thing I know, 10 years have gone by and then we went sailing off around the Indian Ocean,” she says.
The family odyssey took them from Thailand to Malaysia; later they circumnavigated New Zealand in 2012, taking the challenging route around the South West Cape.
A job teaching law followed, as did a divorce. There were stressful, sleepless nights when Carlyle would rise as early as 4am to write, driven by the passion she calls “a pure joy”. Later, having taken the daunting step of leaving law altogether, she completed a Masters of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland. She now teaches at the Creative Hub and sits on the board of Copyright Licensing New Zealand.
“It’s not like job security with a regular job - you really have to back yourself,” she says. “But I felt that all my life I hadn’t, I’d always taken the safe option. So now as a single mother of four teenagers [including her late brother’s son], I decided to take the risk. It’s kind of crazy. But it’s worked.”
With sailing decided on as integral to plot of No One Will Know, the idea to incorporate the trafficking of harlequin geckos, a species endemic to Rakiura (Stewart Island), came from pondering why people would need to get to and from the mainland in a sailboat. She enlisted the expertise of scientist Carey Knox, who told her the story of a German poacher who’d attempted to leave the country with 44 geckos and skinks concealed in his underwear. Meanwhile her research into illegal adoption led her online, where she unearthed heartrending stories of some 50,000 Spanish mothers told their babies had died, when in fact they’d been taken into a clandestine adoption network, many sold to wealthy Catholic families from the 1930s to the 1990s.
“It really doesn’t get much attention because people think the baby ends up in a loving home,” she says. “But it’s a terrible thing to do to a parent.”
Carlyle is now working on a new novel set on the South Island’s West Coast about a young woman who doubts the story of her aunt’s murder years ago. Although her previous books both have connections to Aotearoa, this is the first time she’s set one here.
“I want to fight some of the assumptions that people have about New Zealand literature,” she says. “That it has to be about New Zealand, what it means to be a New Zealander, and also that it has to be quite grim and literary, often open-ended. I want to write something completely different from that. I want it to just be a fun, exotic adventure that sweeps you away to a different world.”
No One Will Know by Rose Carlyle (Text Publishing, RRP$37.99) will be published in NZ on October 1.
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