Island life with Francesca Segal

Who's up for a literary trip to the tropics? P.S. Francesca also has impeccable taste: one of her favourites is one of my favourites.

My joy was unbounded when I first heard that Francesca Segal was writing a series of books set on a remote tropical island. Firstly, I love Francesca’s writing - it is so coolly elegant and beautifully constructed. Secondly, there is something very Jane Austen-ish about the idea of a novel set on an island: the limited parameters of geography and characters, and the escape into a different world. And they are sunshine and joy in book form: a reminder that literature can be utterly charming, beautifully constructed, pure escapist pleasure.

In the first novel, Welcome to Glorious Tuga, newly-qualified vet Charlotte Walker took a fellowship on the tiny, remote, regrettably imaginary, tropical island of Tuga de Oro. It is so remote it can only be reached at certain times and when weather conditions prove propitious; and it has its own unique culture, language, and utterly joyous calendar of events. Charlotte is fleeing grey London, her formidable and uncompromising mother, Lucinda Compton-Neville, and secretly delving into secrets of her past…. But when she arrives on the island, she finds an awful lot more than tortoises, and the sunshine and island life start to seep into her very being.

Island Calling, the second in the trilogy, finds Charlotte settled into the rhythms of island life as the resident vet, enjoying its eccentric cast of characters - and her alluring landlord. But paradise is rudely interrupted by the arrival of her imperious, quite frankly terrifying mother, who is intent upon rescuing her daughter from herself. But Lucinda, characteristically undeterred by the challenge of reaching the island, finds that even she cannot control the weather (shades of King Lear), and is trapped on the island until conditions permit her return. A tropical storm in her own right, she promptly moves in with Charlotte (throwing a considerable spanner into the workings of her nascent romance) and starts wreaking havoc. It is extremely funny and quite honestly the perfect summer read. So it is with enormous pleasure that I bring you Francesca and Tuga. Delight awaits…

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What came to you first: the idea for a trilogy, the island of Tuga, the characters? Or was it the perfect storm where they all collided?

It was the perfect storm, with perhaps the island itself leading the way by a hairsbreadth. I was doing a lot of intense thinking about loneliness, and what it means to live a life of meaning - and it began to dawn that my next project could be a sort of wish-fulfilment on both those counts. This island, with its tropical weather, its close-knit community, its social idealism, its extraordinary isolation, began to shimmer into being. But of course once it existed in its perfect form I began almost instantly to interrogate the next layer. The challenges; the secrets - nowhere is perfect, nor as readers would we want it to be. Life on Tuga can be very hard, very painful. But Tugans have perhaps a dash more kindness and open-heartedness than most. I want readers to close the book feeling hope for humanity. To hope is a radical act.

How exacting is your world-building? To me, it is so brilliantly realised that I was practically googling 'book holiday on Tuga' when I read the first book. Do you know it intimately and in far more detail than any reader will ever need to know? And how much esoteric research does this require?

I cannot tell you how much I adore this question precisely because my research and world-building is as exacting as the limits of my capacity and intellect permit. I am obsessional. All remaining mistakes are the author's own, and all that, but my goodness I will go to extreme lengths not to make any. Having decided where it was - longitude and latitude - the flora followed, with as much internal consistency as I could manage, and then fauna, animal by animal, endemic and imported. I know more than any reader would ever find out by about six hundred percent.

What’s the strangest thing you have looked up?!

The strangest thing I have looked up - I mean, there have been hundreds. Iguana hysterectomies. The value of South Atlantic stamps. Grades of hurricanes; climbing equipment; zoonotic salmonella transmission. The lost tribe of Gad. I adore every single moment of research, I would research truly forever. This week was how to castrate a donkey which is, in fact, harder than you'd think. They have particularly vascular testicles.

Do you think of Tuga and its cast of characters as the tropical equivalent of Jane Austen's 'three or four families in a country village is quite the thing'?

It is my thing certainly as a reader, and yes, it is to precisely that I aspire. In fact it was Middlemarch I had in my mind and in ears as I wrote Tuga. I think I have listened to that audiobook about nine times, and all while emptying the infernal dishwasher. It would be my desert island novel for so many reasons, and one because I love nothing more than moving between close neighbours and friends, twitching curtains, strolling country lanes, eavesdropping upon secrets. Austen is of course my high priestess - and I am constitutionally very nosy.

I find the novels a real palate-cleanser. I don't mean that they are comfort reads - although they would make perfect rainy day in November reading; more that they are in a different tradition to much modern fiction. They are elegantly constructed, 'quiet' books. Do you know what I mean? Not show-off-y and maniacally paced like Romantasy. (Although of course there is a place for that.) Are you conscious of writing a corrective to the modern frenzy?

I love that you say that, because it is absolutely intentional. Those are the books I most treasure, and thus the books I most want to write - I am, in my blood and bones, a nineteenth century novelist. I do not often quote my own reviews but one that made me actually hop about with the joy of recognition was a recent Observer review of Tuga and Island Calling which said, amongst other lovely things, that they were 'defiantly classical'. If I were ever to get a tattoo those two words would be it. Defiantly Classical, always.

Do you permit yourself favourites amongst the characters? If so, please spill the beans!

Taxi is one of my beloveds, and Lucinda is just a treat to write. I have such absolute joy on any working day spent with her.

Did you always envisage it as a trilogy and do you know how (all? Some?) of how it will end?

I did. Having invented the island - and knowing as much excessive detail about it as I do - I always knew I would want to stay there for longer than the scope of one novel. I could see it unfurling, and almost immediately wanted to rotate so I might have scope to bring peripheral characters forward, and go back and forwards in time. I know quite a lot of how it ends! But book three is nine years ahead, so I have some stories to fill in the middle.

Will you feel bereft to leave Tuga behind when the trilogy is completed?

Bereft. It is at the moment entirely unthinkable to face reality without it.

Do characters or plot ever surprise you or refuse to behave in the manner you wish them to?

Oh, definitely. I am at the mercy of one right now - someone behaved in Island Calling in a way I had not remotely planned for her, and my entire structure of Book 3 now needs to be upended because she isn't where I expected. It is an extraordinary intellectual exercise to work with absolutely fixed material. No matter how many imploring emails I send to the production department, it seems I am not allowed to edit published work.

Have there been any significant changes in the novels from the first draft eg new or deleted scenes or characters?

I have a few deleted scenes, which are mostly back stories for very minor characters. They go into that strange Tugan bible I carry around in my brain, knowing secrets and histories about characters that dictate their psychology or behaviour, but which readers will never learn.

Do you ever suffer writer’s block - or are you one of those people who don’t believe in it? How do you push through on the days when the words refuse to flow?

All the time. It's horrible. My "process" is about 75% self-loathing. I have not found a way to make it painless - my first draft feels like a slow evisceration with a teaspoon, one spoonful every three hours. Then each draft is better until the final smoothing and polishing and cutting when I am enraptured and think I do the best job in the world.

My daughter has - in a happy twist of coincidence - recently read Love Story for the first time. Did your father offer you any writing advice? (I interviewed Nick Harkaway earlier this year, and he said his father never uttered a word of advice but Nick thinks he absorbed it via osmosis, because there is so much that is similar about their method and approach.)

That is very lovely to think of young people reading it still. I think I would say something similar to Nick, no specific advice, though probably the main osmotic absorption of my childhood came from my father's day job, as a professor of Classics. He took language and etymology extremely seriously, and so word play was his love language. The dictionary was the only permissible reason to leave the dinner table. But what I also now understand to be foundational was that he never questioned my wanting to write. It was an astonishing gift, that faith.

How do you write? Where, when, during set hours in a certain place? Word or Scrivener? Daily word count?

Love this question.

8am to 2pm, 5 days a week. Then 8pm to 10pm 7 nights a week when it's really flowing, usually with a bourbon.

Scrivener 4 Ever.

500 words is a cause for champagne. Minus 250 more common.

Writers/books your adore and think we should all read?

Everyone should read Barbara Trapido, and AS Byatt's Frederica Quartet is a work of genius.

Which author or book do you consider under-rated?

Elizabeth McCracken is criminally unsung - Niagara Falls All Over Again is one of the greats - let's all get someone in the UK to reprint it.

Welcome to Glorious Tuga and Island Calling are both out now. (So you only have to wait impatiently for book three.)

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It would be remiss of me not to mention Francesca’s previous novels, The Innocents (highly acclaimed, award-winning nod to The Age of Innocence which I read on holiday last year and ADORED) and The Awkward Age (which I think I will take on hoilday this year). Her memoir, Mother Ship, is an extraordinary, lyrical, beautiful telling of the premature birth of her twin daughters and their time in the NICU.

DO share the goodness if you wish - or drop me a heart or let me know which island you’d like to escape to at this very moment.