by Sarah Rayne | Feb 9, 2017 | Sarah Rayne
There’s a sense of familiarity and reassurance in much-read copies of books by favourite authors. It’s comforting to turn a page and remember that this is the part where you spilled soup on the name of the murderer because last time you read it you had flu and were...
by Sarah Rayne | Dec 17, 2016 | Sarah Rayne
There are many theories as to when story-telling actually began. In the old Arabian legends, Scheherazade was allowed to live for the following day if she told an entertaining story that night. Which is singing for your supper with a vengeance. Our prehistoric...
by Sarah Rayne | Sep 19, 2016 | Sarah Rayne
While writing Death Notes, (Book One of the Phineas Fox series), I was initially delighted to discover the existence of the Opera and Ballet Theatre of Odessa – a building that had the splendid address of No 1 Tchaikovsky Street. The theatre had been burned...
by Sarah Rayne | May 20, 2016 | Sarah Rayne
There was a time when a degree of glamour attached itself to a journey – when journeys themselves could provide a writer with a splendidly atmospheric setting. You could place your characters on a train or a ship and cast them into all manner of perilous, murderous,...
by Sarah Rayne | Apr 22, 2016 | ancient legends, haunted houses, old diaries, Sarah Rayne, settings for fiction
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a quartet of fantasy books set in ancient Ireland and starring a charismatic, slightly-dangerous, and not entirely human creature… Cormac mac Airt was inspired by a medieval King of Ireland of the same name, and I...
by Sarah Rayne | Feb 27, 2016 | Sarah Rayne, settings for fiction
The legal profession has always been a novelists’ treasure house, and lawyers themselves are a gift to writers of fiction. If your plot has wound itself into a hopeless tangle, you can often solve matters by allowing the family solicitor to discover old documents or...
