No One Will Know follows a young woman, Eve, who has lost everything.
“She is very much alone, friendless and penniless, and unexpectedly pregnant,” Carlyle said.
“She receives a dream offer to move to a spectacular private island and move into a beautiful new home and take up a brilliant-sounding job. But things are not quite as they seem and they are perhaps a little too good to be true.”
When starting with a book, Carlyle said, she began with a plot twist and built her stories around it, allowing her to weave clues through the novel.
“Once it’s revealed to you, you kick yourself because you didn’t get it. So, that’s the balancing act, to come up with a twist that’s really difficult to guess but when you look back there’s lots of clues.”
But she believed her story really started to come together when she chose the location: “Quite an isolated island off the coast of Tasmania, it’s beautiful and austere,” she said.
Author Rose Carlyle will visit Whanganui on her North Island tour for her new novel No One Will Know.
Carlyle was inspired by her grandmother for her main character, Eve.
“She had a very difficult start to life by being taken into CYS care as a child – and this was back in 1920 when getting taken into care meant that you were sent out to work from the age of 13 onward, so she didn’t get a high school education.“
This inspiration carries into the themes of motherhood in the novel, questioning how someone can be a mother when they never had one.
Carlyle’s first book, The Girl in the Mirror, has become a bestseller, leading her to sell the screen rights to a Hollywood production company.
The New Zealander felt “incredibly lucky” that her first novel’s success allowed her to quit her day job and start writing full-time.
Despite always wanting to be a writer, Carlyle did not begin writing until her forties.
“I think when I was younger I felt that I needed to live my life first so that I would have material to write about. I don’t really know if that’s true or not, but it has worked out for me.
“I’ve had some amazing adventures in my life. When you sail across the ocean, you see all sorts of amazing things, you have interesting encounters with wildlife, and all of that has played into my novel.”
One thing Carlyle discovered during her oceanic travels was the widespread issue of wildlife trafficking which has a significant role in No One Will Know.
“I became aware when I was sailing that some people do use yachts as a way to go underneath the Customs radar and take advantage of the high trust model that some countries operate with. It’s a type of organised crime that we hear very little about,” she said.
“It’s going to be another thriller. It’s going to have rich people behaving badly – I have an enduring interest in that theme. And, again, I’m planning on a spectacular setting and of course a great twist.”
