Interview with Nicci Cloke, author of Her Many Faces

This week we're bringing you an exclusive interview with the wonderful Nicci Cloke, author of Her Many Faces one of our June Well Read Women subscription picks.

We chatted about her role at Faber in permissions, looking after the work of some of the UK's most cherished writers, why she chose to write Her Many Faces through the male gaze and how she developed those different narrators. We also touch on the random encounter that sparked the conspiracy theory thread in the novel, plus her literary favourites.

Make sure you follow us for more author interviews with some of the women behind our fabulous subscription picks coming soon 📚

To find out more about Well Read Women and our subscription, visit our website at www.wellreadwomen.co.uk

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi and welcome to a brand new episode of the Well Read Women Podcast. If you don't know us, we're a UK-based subscription service dedicated to spotlighting new and established female authors. Each month, our team of passionate bookworms picks six books from the buzziest new releases to underrated backlist gems to bring readers books we believe deserve a permanent spot on their shelf. Today on the podcast, we are bringing you the conversation we had with the wonderful Nikki Cloak. Nikki is the author of Her Many Faces, a twisty feminist thriller that was one of her July subscription selections. We chatted about her role at Favour and Permissions, where she looked after the work of some of the UK's most cherished writers. We also spoke about why she chose to write Her Many Faces for the male gaze and how she developed those definite narrators. We also touch on the random encounter that sparked the conspiracy theory Fred in the novel plus her literary favourites. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Nikki just as much as we did. Hi Nikki, thanks so much for joining us here at Wellread Woman today. We are so excited to discuss her many faces and your writing and find out your literary favourites. Thank you so much for having me. So you've written eight novels and two of them have been under the name Phoebe Locke. And I wanted to ask what inspired you to write under the pseudonym for these books, and did it change the way you approached writing and storytelling?

SPEAKER_01 1:20

It was quite a long discussion, actually, the pseudonym. And I think partly I was advised to do it because the books before that had been young adult novels. And I think they wanted to have a distinction between those books and The Tall Man, which is my first Phoebe Lock book, because that was a kind of maybe supernatural-ish psychological thriller, quite different to the YA stuff, and maybe they didn't think there was like much of a crossover. And there is also, it's true in publishing that everyone loves a debut and a shiny new thing. So sometimes if you reinvent yourself with a new name, you get a bit of extra push. So that was kind of the thinking. I was a bit resistant to it, and I kind of wish I hadn't done it now, because those two books feel a bit detached from me in a way. They that it feels slightly separate. Yeah, although it was kind of fun also in a way. You know, if you get negative reviews, it feels like, oh, well, that's Phoebe Locke is getting that negative review, not me. But yeah, it's an interesting one. I've seen lots of friends in publishing experiment with pseudonyms and go back to their name or or really enjoy reinventing themselves. And I think it's a strange part of the business, really.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

And where did the name come from? Is there any inspiration why you chose the name Phoebe Locke? Is there any meaning behind it? So Locke is just cloak with the C moved into the middle.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Ah, that's so clever. Yeah, and it's kind of a bit thrillery sounding, isn't it? Like Locke. Phoebe, I just like the name. I wish I had a more interesting story for that. My dad wanted me to call myself Charlotte Locke because our family dog is called Charlie. But I didn't really want to name myself after a dog, so I went for Phoebe. If I had could do it again, I probably would have kept my own first name because which lots of people do, they just changed their surname for a pseudonym because then what in events when people are talking to you or on podcasts or you it's easier to answer to the name you actually know while then remembering, oh, I'm Phoebe today.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

So my next question is you previously worked for the publisher Faber and your role was being in charge of permissions, which involved caring for the work of some of the world's most celebrated writers, like Sylvia Plath. And I wanted to ask what that experience was like, and how did it feel being like entrusted with the legacies of such influential offers?

SPEAKER_01 3:25

That was like the most interesting and the strangest job. So I went into that job quite soon after university. I did work experience and then I had a temp job at Faber, and I think I just worked so hard that they eventually let me just stay in this role. But I don't think I really appreciated at the time. You know, I'd be sometimes picking up the phone to speak to Seamus Heaney at 23, just working in publishing, and it was the most like fascinating, interesting time. And I'd be sp I spent a lot of time speaking to Sylvia Plath's daughter or Ted Hughes' widow about their work and about their legacy, I guess, because part of permissions, which is a very boring admin job in a lot of ways, it's just a lot of processing requests and getting payment for people wanting to use an author's backlist, usually. You're kind of shaping, I mean, these those poets, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, T. S Elliott was another one that I looked after. They were long dead by then, but it you were still shaping the way the world was receiving their work because you were getting these requests people who wanted to write essays about them or who wanted to use their poetry on a radio show or in a film. We had a big deal once that was using some lines in a PlayStation game, and it felt really it felt like a big responsibility actually, in a way, to be kind of just a tiny part of that ongoing kind of canon of literature. So yeah, it was really cool. I keep trying to use that in a novel because I had such a great time doing it, and it was a really fascinating job. I just can't find the story yet. I had the character, but I can't find a story for her.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

That's so interesting. Even just using the snippet from the PlayStation game and the sort of admin process that's behind it. It must have been really cool to have that sort of behind-the-scenes knowledge of how just even a small thing like that ends up in the sort of end theme, I suppose.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

Yeah, it's really interesting. And I we'd have people who'd write in because they wanted a tattoo of, you know, lines from a Sigar Plath poem. And you don't need permission to do that, you can just go ahead and do it. But it kind of felt that it's insight into people's lives and the way they connect, especially Plath, have connects so passionately to her work all these years later. And I mean, we had other things that were really bizarre, like somebody had wanted to translate all of T. S. Eliot into pirate, which I didn't know was an actual language, but they wanted to do all of his work. Um, we also had somebody who had written a novel where a serial killer used T. S. Eliot poems to as inspiration for their murders. And understandably the T. S. Eliot estate weren't that keen on his work being used in that way. So it's kind of an interesting balance between how we're allowed to use, you know, copyrighted works and and when you should step in and yeah, it's it is a really for an admin job, it had lots of interesting insight.

SPEAKER_00 5:58

That's so interesting. And how did you end up in that role? Was it just you finished? I know you'd said you'd finished after uni, but did you just want to work in publishing and it was a role that was available, or did you sort of seek out doing something like that?

SPEAKER_01 6:11

I think I was just desperate to work in publishing or with books in some way, and it it hadn't really occurred to me at that point that I could write my own books. I just didn't think that was some something that people did as a job, I guess. It just seemed so far off and like a fantasy. So I kind of applied for any jobs that I could get in publishing. I did a few things, academic presses or editorials, probably what I really wanted to do, but they're very competitive roles. So yeah, I ended up seeing a temp job at Faber that was in the writers department, which was to do with permissions, and then I ended up staying there for a while. But I very quickly realised, I think being in lots of meetings about books that were being published and seeing lots of book launches and reading all of these exciting proofs that were coming in. I had that like creative, like that burning desire to do something of my own. And I was lucky in that I was at Fabre at a time when they were publishing an author called Richard Millwood, who was 18, I think, when they published his first book, so much younger than I was at that time. And I suddenly realised, oh, actually, this is something that if you work hard and have a story, you can do. So I think that really set me free to try.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

It's good that you had that behind the scenes knowledge of how it all works before you put pen to paper and decided to put your own thing out there. That's so cool.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

But pretty soon after I, I think immediately actually after I got my first book to, I left publishing because I felt that seeing both sides of the curtain was actually harm harmful in a way. I think you can when you're creating, you kind of just want it to be purely about the book. And I think if you know too much about the mechanics of publishing and how difficult it is to sell books sometimes and what works in the market and what doesn't, that can be quite stifling. And I find that now later in my career and with friends who've been published for a while, you do know too much, and it does when you sit down to write a new book, you have that thought all the time of what's the market gonna be like for this and what's the readership? And as nice as it is to be experienced now and to have been published four or eight books, I do sort of miss the innocence of those first couple where it was just about this story that grabs you and you want to put it on paper and you don't have to think about the business side of it.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

No, that separation sounds really healthy to have, absolutely. So the next question is how many faces as a filling novel following a murder trial where a young waitress is suspected of killing four wealthy men? The book is told through the eyes of the different men in our life, and I wanted to ask what sparked the idea for that structure.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

I think I had been thinking about that structure for quite a while, and their initial spark was quite a few years ago, but I was thinking about nicknames that I've had in my life and the people who have given them to me, whether it's family members or you know, ex-partners or colleagues in previous jobs. I did a lot of kind of retail and bar work and I had loads of nicknames in those settings, or like the difference between like my male friends and my female friends and nicknames that I've had. And I was looking back at it and thinking about how those kind of all represent a part of me or a past self, but not the whole picture. And I kind of wanted to do that with a character to look at her through on a basic level the names she has been called by people in her life, but how those represent the way those people see her and the way she presents herself to them and how we are all many selves to many people in our daily life. So I had that and I was really interested with that, wondering how to what to do with it. I didn't know whether it would be a crime novel at first or whether it would be something else, but I had to wait, which is often the case with my books. Like I have what half of it, but I have to wait for the other shoe to drop, I guess, and to to find the thing that's missing, and it was this murder in a private member's club. This was around, this is just after lockdown, so I think I, like much of the country, felt very angry about rich people having fun in elite places. So having a murder happen there, a story that kind of grabbed me, and then I thought, oh, those two things can go together. This waitress can be the person we're gonna examine through other people's eyes.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

And when you said that you get the idea for the story, and then there's that gap before you decide what to slot in next, how long can that be? Is it something that can be super quick or it takes months, especially and with how many faces, how long did it take before you put those two pieces together?

SPEAKER_01 10:04

I think a couple of years. Wow. But I had a gap. So after book seven, The July Girls, which was the other Phoebe Locke book, I think it comes back to what I was just saying, actually, about knowing too much about the market. I had a bit of a confidence knock, I think. I just suddenly woke up one day really worried about career trajectory and what was going to work. And that was a difficult time for publishing, of course, because of lockdown, and things are still in flux a bit in publishing. So I think more than ever we're all we're all thinking about exactly what we want to do with our books. It just gave me stage right, I think. So I started and abandoned about 12 different ideas during a space for about two years, and then and one of those ideas was to do with the names thing, like looking at a character through her identities with the people closest to her. And I think it was probably maybe two years before I kind of slotted those two things together. But then the writing of it was very fast, which I think sometimes is. I think your brain is working on things without you really realising in the background sometimes. So it was a long generation of the idea, but actually the execution of it was relatively painful.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

So when you put those two together, how long did it take from putting that idea on paper to the first draft being finna? I think that was about six months, which is fast for me.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Um and I think it helped as hard as it is to write in five different voices, it does help a bit because you just get kind of an energy in each different voice, and I think it helps to tell a mystery through five different voices because it's much easier to give information to the reader, but also withhold information from the reader when you are flipping between heads. If you tell a mystery in the first person, but you're just in one character's head for the whole time, you have to be, you have to play tricks on the reader sometimes to keep information from them. Whereas when you put five people telling the story who all are only know part of the story themselves, they're not hiding anything from us, they just only have their side of the story. It's it's easy, it feels more honest to write when you're trying to give clues and stuff. So that kind of helped. And editing was much easier as well because, well, easier and harder, I would take each of the voices separately and edit them. So although the chapters are all mixed up in the book and you hear from each of them in turn, I would take all of say her dad's chapters, edit them all as one, and then eventually slot the puzzle back together. So that was a different way of working for me, but I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

That's really interesting. And I suppose, in a way, if you're and the sort of mainset of their voice, it would be easier to put it all together and then slot it back.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Yeah, to stop their voices kind of bleeding into each other and try and keep them distinct. Yeah, definitely. That was the best way to keep me sane during that process.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

So was there any character that as you roll the perspective the more they grew on you? I wondered if there was one that as you were putting the pen to paper, they took you on maybe a different journey to what you thought in your head. That's an interesting one. I think they all did in a way.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

And I think what was interesting for me is as I was going through the drafts and getting to know them better, part of their I mean, their main purpose in the text is to tell us about Katie and to give us their side of her story. But actually what they reveal to us is more about who they are than who she is. And I I enjoyed that process. Like it's revealing the things they think about her and the person that they need her to be really is about who they are and their biases and their backstories. And I that kind of surprised me in a way how much that affected things and how interesting I found to kind of get under those layers with those characters. And so, for instance, the journalist Max, who really takes against Katie and reports very negatively against her in the press. His backstory made me more sympathetic to him, I guess. I think I didn't want him to just be this tabloid journalist villain. I wanted him to be somebody who does who is biased towards her, but there are kind of reasons that hopefully you kind of understand as the story goes on and and to give him a family and a child and just to make just to give him some dimension. And I think that helps because as well as our perspective changing over the story and our opinion of Katie's, hopefully all of their opinions change too, and we can s kind of see them go on that journey. So yeah, they all did surprise me a bit. They were all enjoyable and difficult in their own ways.

SPEAKER_00 14:25

That's what I loved about the book is just how distinct every inerator was. And I must admit, I just found it so fascinating to get into the groove of writing from five different voices. Sounds so fun, actually.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yeah, yeah, thank you. That's really kind of you. When I was editing maybe the last draft, I thought, oh, I can't wait to write something simpler next time. Actually, I do kind of miss that structure. So I'll probably go back to it the book after this one.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

So I'd love to talk about Katie next. One thing that I really admired was the way that we got such a vivid picture of her through the perspectives of all the men around her. She felt so real and fully formed, but yet there was the distance that the reader had away from her which kept that air of mystery there around who she really was. How did you balance giving the readers a strong sense of who she is while still maintaining that air of mystery that she had around her?

SPEAKER_01 15:15

I think that was actually probably the hardest part. And I think when we submitted the book to publishers, there wasn't originally any chapters from Katie's perspective. It was completely told by the men because that was kind of the hook of the book. Like it is a woman from men's, it's the male gaze as a thriller, basically. But once I had an amazing editor on board and we talked a lot about this, and I think we started to realise that actually it isn't that satisfying if we never get to hear from Katie. And so we experimented with how much of Katie's own voice to put in there and and settled on having a small chapter at the start and a small chapter at the end. And I think the process of doing that for me, actually getting into Katie's voice, helped me get it straight in my head exactly who she is. And I don't think any of those men know who she really is, but I did, and so I could that helped me to work out who she would be to them, who what she would show of herself to them, and hopefully that will kind of feed through to the reader who's getting the whole picture from them, a better idea of who she might be. But I do think that part of her character is she's very guarded, she's quite protective of herself. So she she it's on purpose sometimes that she doesn't give them her whole or her real self, I think. So that's kind of an interesting thing to play with as the author. Like, how much can we even trust what she's telling us? Because she's by nature quite a chameleon, I think.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

No, absolutely. And one thread that I found super fascinating in the book was her online conspiracy theories that she have. What made you want to weave that into the story? That element of having these opinions that are online that some days people won't realise will come to the surface at some point. So I wanted to ask what made you want to weave that into her character and story?

SPEAKER_01 16:58

It's actually something that happened to me in real life. My treadmill that I bought during lockdown, like many people, broke. And my dad has recommended this man to come and fix it for me. And he was a really nice, friendly guy. We went out to my garage where the treadmill was, and as he was kind of taking it apart, he started to I cannot even remember how he got onto it, but he started talking about how 9-11 had been faked and how COVID was fake and how the war in Ukraine was fake, um, and the vaccine was trackers that you know were being injected into us by the government. And he was getting quite aggressive about these opinions, I guess, because probably my face betrayed like my shock at what he was saying. And it was quite scary because I was in quite a small space with him being like a natural-born people pleaser. I like didn't know what to say. And as he left, having not fixed the treadmill, I should add, he couldn't fix it. So it wasn't a useful appointment in any way. I just thought how that had been happening more and more in my kind of world. I love I've seen people that who I went to school with on Facebook posting conspiracy theories, family friends who've really kind of gone down a rabbit hole, and this kind of weird online radicalisation that is happening when nobody trusts anybody, and news can be fake news, and it's quite like a new modern paranoia that is spreading more and more mainstream. And so I kind of wanted to weave that in a little bit because I mean we don't know, do we, until the end whether that has played a part in in the mergers or not. But yeah, it was just something that I became really aware of prior to the writing of the book and drawing.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

I think you did it really well. I love the nosiness of having someone's internet history there as you're trying to piece who that person is, and I think it's so interesting that a lot of people now who have voices online about specific topics that they're passionate about, it almost feels like it's like a split personality, but it's people can be really passionate and and go on about things online, but then in real life can just present as if these opinions aren't really a huge part of them yet in this other world.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah, I mean Katie is she's very young when she starts reading these forums about 9-11 being faked, and she has a you know a personal family reason for being very invested in in that topic, and she's very impressionable and yeah, posts lots of things. But is that enough to say that somebody would go and murder four grown men who are politicians and businessmen and influential in different ways because of this kind of conspiracy about, you know, the secret, shadowy organization who run the world behind the scenes is quite a big jump. But for somebody prosecuting her to have this information that she has in in the past been interested in these conspiracy theories, but in the book, the conspiracy theory kind of um is centered around an unknown private member's club where supposedly these men meet and people speculate that the club in the conspiracy theory is the club in that the murder's taken place at.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

So the next question I have is without spoilers, did you always know what the verdict was going to be? Did you always know whether Katie was going to be guilty or not?

SPEAKER_01 20:07

I knew whether she was guilty or not, but I didn't know what the verdict would be. I think there's always a it's oh god, I don't want to speak about this in case I don't have spoilers, but I think there's always a temptation in a thriller to put like a last page twist. So I think whether or not she was guilty, there was always a temptation to flip it on the last page. So it was deciding what where to go with that. But yes, I did always know whether or not she'd done it. I just didn't know whether they would find the core because Taryn, her barrister, one of the voices in the book, is very good at his job. So the verdict could have gone either way, I guess. Then as I say, the the barrister who helped me did throw a spanner in the works at one point with um some of the evidence and whether what the verdict would have been and what the process would be. So I d I definitely experimented with the other ending. But I'm glad I chose the one I did.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

I think it must be the strangest feeling to have this plot that's sort of tied up and you kind of know, and then to have well legally that wouldn't stand and that research to go, oh well, I have to go back to the drawing board about this specific, you know, element of it. It must have been kind of such a strange experience.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

And even just like some of the courtroom scenes, I think we have this idea of what it looks like to be, you know, on the stand and to be cross-examined. And I don't think it's actually that accurate, or certainly maybe a lot of it we get from US legal dramas, which is a different system. And so as she went through a lot of my original chapters and said, Oh well, he can't say that, he can't ask her that, he can't. So I mean, I have this a lot of times where Taryn would be cross-examining and he'd ask several questions to try and, you know, force the the witness into saying something or to kind of put pressure on them, and she'd say, No, you can only ask one question at a time. He needs to let them answer that question. You can't throw chains like that at them. And I was thinking, oh, that's kind of his style like in this draft. So I had to rethink that.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

So I wanted to ask uh how many faces we do get, Katie, but it's all more. Mostly through the male gaze. And I wanted to ask what conversations do you hope readers have after they've finished her many faces?

SPEAKER_01 22:08

The selves that they present or that have been given to them. Because it's a kind of two-way street in the book and in life, is that people do put us into boxes. That's a kind of a human tendency, I think. But we also do it ourselves. We kind of present ourselves in different ways to different people. And I've really enjoyed hearing people talk about that. In some ways, I think that I didn't necessarily need to make them all male characters. The book probably would work just as well if there were women in her life who also had given her those identities. But I I think that I I was very interested in the male gaze and how it works in that way. It's not always in a romantic way in the book, like her dad does one of the characters, and his his version of who she is is obviously very different to her ex-boyfriends. But yeah, and the other thing that I have really enjoyed hearing people talk about and telling me about is who they believe in the book. I find that really interesting because people identify with different characters in the book and therefore seem to find what they say more trustworthy than somebody else. And I found that very interesting. And there are people out there who kind of think Comrades' version of her is the true one. You know, this kind of bunny boiler ex, which is really fascinating to me because to me he's the least that on paper he'd be the least trustworthy because he has behaved very badly, so has a vested interest in her not being a good person. I wonder what it is in those readers that connects with him. And that I find that fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

You see, if I think of my interpretation of it all, he was reveling in that downfall. He had no indeed in qualities where he would have been believable in my sense. I just thought he was the one that had the most, not phantom, but the most, you know, the slight and he would have wanted that downfall. So for me, I'm so surprised at that because if I was to do a ruling out of who I thought, he would definitely be the top of, no, this guy is not to be trusted.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

I think it's maybe like some people have internalized this idea that, yeah, women are crazy and women who've been slighted romantically, or you know, you know, hell half no fury like a scorned woman. And I think they see the version of her he presents who, you know, she does like s say some terrible things to him or behave quite like erratically, but they then I think they they have kind of this idea that that means that she must be crazy and she must be capable of all these terrible things without looking at what he actually did to provoke that reaction from her.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

There's definitely a line between saying awful things and maybe being terribly toxic in a relationship to actually quite committing my doubt. Yeah. So we always ask the authors who come on the podcast more about their literary favourites and the books that shaped them. So I wanted to ask, looking back on your life, which female writers have had the greatest influence on you as both a novelist today and a reader too?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Oh, that is a good question. Uh, the book that I always come back to and that feels like it showed me is Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte, which not particularly because I really, you know, love that story. I mean, I I do, but I just remember it at very significant points in my life. And I remember j during university, like having a bit of a tough time and coming back, finding my copy of Jane Eyre. I think I was going to use it for my dissertation, so I was looking through an old copy and finding the underlinings that I had made at 16 when I was studying it at GCSE. Like the bookmark in there was like a two-for-one drinks token at the local nightclub that I used to be able to get into when I was 16. And looking at that and the lines that had clearly resonated with me then felt like this kind of letter from my past self. And then, you know, much later, like in my 30s, I found that again, and the annotations have been layered in from when I was studying at university, and it just feels like this kind of book that I come back to and its kind of message about, you know, independence and standing up for yourself has clearly connected with me at various points in my life. So definitely that. Megan Abbott is probably my favourite thriller writer, and I think I would aspire to be able to write as well as her. I love the psychological level of her books and the way she really digs into what it's what it's like to be a woman and difficult parts of being a teenage girl or an adult woman, and the kind of there's like a it's like a sensory layer to her writing that I find really compelling. Um say her, I can't think of any others which there's loads. There is loads. Taylor Jenkins Reed is probably my favourite, one of my favourite authors to read as well. And I think she inspires me because I mean her books are all so different, but you just can't put them down. And I think she really goes deep with her characters, no matter what the setting, whether they're, you know, professional tennis player or an astronaut. She just has this gift of making you care so much about what's going to happen to them, and this kind of joy in storytelling that I yeah, find very inspirational. I think Daisy Jones and the Six, you know, like I love an interesting structure. It's one of my favourite things to read. So Daisy Jones and the Six is probably my favourite just because it's got that oral history way of being written. So love her.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Wanted to link back to Meg Abbott. Is there a specific book of hers that stands out?

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Damie is really good, and there was a re actually a really good Netflix adaptation of that, which I think she was involved in, which is maybe it's why it's so good. The newest one, El Dorado Drive, is really good. That's kind of about this kind of like a pyramid scheme slash like local lottery that these these sisters get involved in, and it goes dark, like all Megan Abbott books, but all I love all of her stuff.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

So I wanted to ask, what was the last book you read at five stars?

SPEAKER_01 27:30

I just read, it's not out yet, but I read a proof of understory by Chloe Benjamin, which is brilliant. She wrote The Immortalists a few years ago, and this book is how to describe it. It's about this couple who've lost their son and they go to what they go to work on an Antarctic research base and they discover this kind of gateway into another universe where time goes backwards, which sounds complicated, and it is complicated, but it's told so beautifully, and it's one of the most original, kind of imaginative. I just had to keep thinking about it long after I'd stopped reading each day because she must just have the biggest and most creative brain ever. But also on Antarctica, I loved Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaughey. And then after I loved that so much that I then went back and read When There Were Wolves, her book that had come before that, which I really, really love. That's about a kind of rewilding of um wolves being reintroduced into Scotland and an American, I think it's probably Canadian, actually research scientist who moves there to oversee that project and comes up against a lot of local pushback about these predators being put into the local area. So yeah, love both of those. They're both five stars for me.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Are you working on anything new that you can tell us about at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Yeah, I have a new book coming out next I think next summer. Um so I'm working on the edits for that. And it's a bit different to How Many Faces. So they're kind of um brief pictures that it's set in a small English town on a night where somebody has set free all of the animals in the local wildlife park, which includes some big cats. So the all these kind of authorities descend on the town, the police, the army, the RAF to try and control this chaotic situation and put the town into a sort of lockdown. But our two main characters are a police officer and one of the women who worked at the zoo, and they are both searching for a missing child in amongst the madness of the night and for each other. So it's a bit of a love story, a thriller as well, but yeah, quite different.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

That's one last question, and I think it's just because as we've been talking, it's been in my head. So we obviously see Katie through all of the different male characters. If the book was to be adapted, who do you see as Katie? Is there anyone that's an actor that you think she would play the perfect Katie? She looks like what you have in your head.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

I did actually get asked this because it has been optioned. Wow. Yeah, which is what I'm really excited about. I love Ella Panel, who played Sweet P in the series, and I could really I I don't, I guess because TV takes so long, and Katie is kind of 15 in some of the um scenes, but I I feel like she could pull it off. She's kind of timeless beauty, so maybe she could pull it off. But yeah, she's how I picture the adult Katie, I think. But I also really love Kaya Scario, who was effing in skins. Again, I think maybe she wouldn't want to play a teenager anymore. But yeah, I both have done have that kind of like sweet but edgy. Could play both, could could cover both facets of Katie, the guilty or the innocent.

SPEAKER_00 30:31

Well, thank you so much for everything today, Nikki. It's been so good to chat to you. I've just had so many questions and like I really appreciate you taking the time to join us because it's been so great. Thank you. It's been so lovely to talk to you. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Well Read Women Podcast. We have more interviews with offers coming very soon, so make sure you hit follow wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.