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Louise Dean is the author of novels and short stories published in the UK and internationally, including Becoming Strangers, This Human Season, The Idea of Love, and The Old Romantic Her first book, the award-winning Becoming Strangers was voted one of the top 5 fiction books of 2004 by The Observer. Louise Dean was born in Hastings and grew up in Kent going to Cranbrook School and Cambridge University where she read History. After working in marketing for Unilever she went into advertising in London, then Hong Kong, and New York. She is mother to three children and lives in Kent.
Louise Dean's website
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A lot of first fiction tends to be autobiographical to some extent, but
considering that you wrote Becoming Strangers in your early 30s and the
lead protagonists are two couples in their 50s and 80s, it's reasonably safe to
assume that it's not! Did you have a particular motive for writing it?
After a sadly failed early marriage, I suppose I needed to say "down with love",
and "friendship is good". That"s simplistic though. Away from home, in the US,
and unable, due to the INS, to go home to see my family for some years, my
grandparents died. I loved them dearly and it grieved me to miss their last
years (they had a major hand in raising me, I was their only grandchild). I
brought them back to life in this book. When I started to write seriously, aged
26, a friend said to me "Write what you need". It was good advice.
Reading the dialogue and thoughts of your various characters, it's as if
you've somehow got inside their own skins and are really seeing the world
through their eyes. How do you manage this?
Love. Sorrow. Guilt. A sense of your own stupidity.
You portray the clique of Americans in Becoming Strangers as
particularly shallow and, frankly, not very ...
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone in 1980. He moved to the United States in 1998 and finished his last two years of high school at the United Nations International School in New York. In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
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William Boyd has received world-wide acclaim for his novels. They are: A Good Man in Africa (1981, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize) An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize ... (more)
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Becoming Strangers
Try:
Any Human Heart
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