In The Spotlight:- Lucy Atkins

Name: Lucy Atkins

Job:- Author and journalist

Twitter:- @lucyatkins

Website:- https://www.lucyatkins.com

Introduction:

Lucy Atkins is the author of four novels. The most recent one being Magpie Lane. Her third book The Night Visitor has been optioned for television. She also teaches on the Creative Writing Masters degree at the University of Oxford.

Current book? 

I’m currently reading an early proof of Little Wing by my friend Freya North - one of the joys of writer friendships is getting to read novels long before they hit the shelves and being able to support each other in the journey from proof to publication. 

Favourite book? 

This is just about my least favourite question ever as I find it so hard to pin a single book down. I always go back to Jane Eyre which is the book above all others that makes my spine tingle. It’s powerful, and complex and also unsettling – but ultimately heart-warming.

Which two characters would you invite to dinner and why? 

I would invite Maggie and Tom Tulliver from George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, as I find them both so appealing and interesting as individuals, but they also really need someone to take them in hand, and help them to iron things out. They are a bit lost, too, and the motherly side of me wants to give them both a good meal and a hug and tell them it’ll all be okay (which is won’t clearly – if you’ve read Mill on the Floss you’ll know why…). 

How do you relax? 

I’ve been doing regular yoga for 11 years, and I walk my dog in the countryside. I also watch an embarrassing number of TV dramas – though in my defence, I’m always trying to find the really brilliant ones, like Succession or Mare of Easttown. 

What book do you wish you had written and why? 

I would have quite liked to have written Notes on a Scandal as so many people have likened Vivian, from my third novel, The Night Visitor, to Barbara Covett. Zoe Heller did something really clever and memorable in that book, and I do wish I’d got there first. 

What would you say to your younger self if you were just starting out as a writer.

I would tell myself to take a very good creative writing course, and not to doubt my gut instincts about writing fiction. I was held back for decades by a combination of massive self-doubt, and a lack of very basic fiction writing skills. For my fortieth birthday I gave myself a creative writing course, and it changed everything. 

Why do you prefer to write standalone novels as opposed to a series and would you consider writing a series?

I wouldn’t consider writing a series. My last two novels took longer to write and these days, I tend to get very deeply immersed in a character’s inner world. By the time that’s done, I feel I’m ready to let that person go, and move onto someone and somewhere new.

Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins (Quercus Publishing)

When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers. As Dee looks back over her time in the Master's Lodging - an eerie and ancient house - a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother. But is Dee telling the whole story? Is her growing friendship with the eccentric house historian, Linklater, any cause for concern? And most of all, why is Felicity silent?