Hi I'm Eva Dolan and I'm here in gorgeous Waterstones Piccadilly to have
a little chat to you all about my new book and some of the fabulous books that
have inspired it. So This Is How It Ends which is out on the 25th is a tale of
sex, drugs and political activism in London. It's about a block of flats on the
side of the Thames which is being pulled down as rapacious developers move in and
push out, you know, the good, ordinary people, like you and me, that live in it.
And they're not going to take that lying down. So The Talented Mr Ripley has been a
massive influence on my work and actually on loads of writers.
I think Patricia Highsmith is a real touchstone for a lot of crime authors.
The thing that inspired me so much about it was This Is How It Ends is really about
it's about a toxic friendship that we don't realize is toxic at the beginning.
Tom Ripley who is, he's a bit of a drifter and a waster but he's a conman
he's a very, very smart conman, gets hired by the father of a rich kind of
dissolute playboy to go to Europe and bring him back to face his
responsibilities in the family business. Now Dickie Greenleaf is, well, to give you
some idea, he was played by Jude Law in the film so, you know, we know what kind
of guy he is. And Tom becomes incredibly drawn to
Dickie to the point where it's not enough to be in his life and to be part
of that kind of glamorous European lifestyle he's living. He wants to go
further, he actually wants to take Dickie's life. And the thing she does I think is
so great, she's – no she's terrible actually, because she makes you, she makes
you complicit almost with Ripley in this, because you come to hate
Dickie and you actually, you are completely rooting for Tom to take over
his life. And the whole 'Ripleiad' which is I think four books are – they really
should be a starting point for anyone that's getting into psychological
thrillers because they really are the best ones out there. Also the film is
lovely which I know I shouldn't say when I'm selling the book but it is a fabulous kind
of duvet-day film. So, yeah, Patricia Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley. Get on it.
My second book is Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller.
Now this one's been out a little while I think it came out in 2003 but it's
actually aged remarkably well. And again it's perfect for people who
are reading kind of the current crop of psychological thrillers like The Woman
Next Door by Cass Green or Clare Mackintosh's books. It kind of is a
forerunner again to those. It's set in a school in Archway in London and follows
What I really love about this book actually it's you've got this
fabulous unreliable narrator again so it's kind of got the same thing that
Patricia Highsmith did. So Barbara, she's kind of sixties, I hate the word 'spinster'
but I'm afraid she just is and you know she calls herself in it in the
book so that's fine I can say it as well. She's teaching at this school and a new
teacher called Sheba comes along who's very upper-class, very elegant, she's
teaching pottery, she's just returning to work for the first time after being out
with her family and Sheba embarks on what at the time was described as an
affair with a 15 year old student which I think now we would probably just call
abuse because that's what it is. And that initially seems like the
central storyline to this book, is that this affair that she's having with this
boy, but actually very soon you come to understand that Barbara is an unreliable
narrator, is writing far more about her own prejudices and her own complicated
attraction to Sheba that I don't even think she understands. It's very much a book
about kind of about class and sexuality and these kind of parasitical
relationships. This book was one of the first ones I thought about when I was
writing This Is How It Ends because I was writing an intergenerational female
friendship between Ella who's in her 20s and Molly who's 60 and it's not a
massively common thing in fiction. I'm not really sure why, not sure maybe if it
isn't that common in real life. But this was kind of my go-to book for that and
on reread I saw completely different things in this book to the first time I
read it when it first came out. So even if you've already read it I would
strongly recommend looking at this book again because it is, it's just so
incisive and such a brilliant portrait of a destructive controlling friendship
between women. So that's Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller. Alright so I'm now
up here in Waterstones Piccadilly's fabulous world
politics department which is very, very distracting and full of fascinating
looking books and I'm now going to turn my back on them so I don't get any more
distracted. My third book is Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New
Global Revolutions by Paul Mason. This was a hugely influential book when I was
researching This Is How It Ends because, more than anything I think this is, he's
a writer that Ella would have been 'interested in' let's say. I'm not going to say
why she would have been interested. Partly it's the stubble, mostly it's the
book. But this book is, it's a really good grounding if you're very angry about
what's happening politically but you don't want to read loads of really
chunky complicated books. Because this is a narrative
nonfiction about the rise in global protest, the Arab Spring, the Occupy
movement. It's a lot about really being a disillusioned young person who you know
you've maybe got a degree but you can't get a job, you've got a job but you can't
afford to live in London. It's about kind of the things as a young person
that you've been promised that society hasn't delivered to you. Because it's
narrative as well it's a very easy read. It gave me a really good sense of the
kind of personalities that were involved in the protest movement at the moment
and the kind of people you know Ella would have been friends with and Molly
would have seen coming up after her. This new generation of activists that are
very much based on social media, working with memes and blogs rather than
necessarily smashing up windows and setting fire to stuff. Which might be
more effective but you know they're good kids essentially so they're not doing
that. Really the thing with this book that I liked is it is just a fabulous
entry point into post-capitalism and globalization. This is kind of, this is
the one to buy your student child or niece or nephew especially for
parents who are a little bit more right wing, you're a bit more left-wing and
you'd like to kind of drag them onto your path. So yeah, Paul Mason's
Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere.