Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Carole Cadwalladr is a British author. Her first novel, The Family Tree, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Author's Club First Novel Award, theWaverton Good Read Award, and the Wales Book of the Year. It was also a Daily Mail Book Club pick and was dramatised as a five-part serial on BBC Radio 4.
She used to be a journalist and travel writer for The Daily Telegraph and is now a features writer and columnist on The Observer. She has twice been shortlisted in the British Press Awards.
Carole Cadwalladr's website
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This book successfully employs an unusual and complicated structure
while balancing multiple storylines. How did you decide on this particular
mode of conveying the lives of the Monroes? How easy or difficult was it to
maintain the structure as you wrote the book?
I wish I could say that I had some grand design for the novel,
but I'd be lying. And the structure, the multiple plot lines, was something
that evolved along the way. I started out with two plots – the 1970s one and
the 1940s one. A few months in, I realized that they weren't hanging together
but instead of axing one of them (which would have been by far the most sensible
option), I ended up writing a third – set in the present day. Juggling these
was like undertaking a huge never-ending jigsaw puzzle. As soon as I shifted
around one segment, it impacted on all the others….and I spent months cutting
and pasting chapters, striking them out, jigging them around, cursing myself for
making life so complicated. A year or so into it, I developed intense pangs of
jealousy for "simple stories well told" sorts of books: one timeline,
one narrator, one perspective. But, at the end of the day, families and family
histories are ...
Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Family Tree
Try:
When Will There Be Good News?
by Kate Atkinson
Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including The Corrections, Freedom, and Purity, and five works of nonfiction, most recently Farther Away and The End of the End of the Earth, all published by Farrar, Straus and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Family Tree
Try:
The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
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