Brought THE SFX AUTHOR INTERVIEW To Book
CJ CAREY
Editing the past… Meet the writer of a new alternate history novel
Words by Jonathan Wright
OCCASIONALLY, A WRITER CAN TELL YOU exactly how a book began life. In the case of CJ Carey (a pseudonym), she’d gone out for lunch with a friend, who had offered condolences over the 2018 death of her husband, the novelist Philip Kerr. But there was a kicker. “And then he said, ‘Look, we’d really love to have you to dinner, but the trouble is we only have couples to dinner’.”
After lunch, a thought occurred to Carey: “Oh God, I’m living in widowland now.” A novelist’s question followed: “What if widowland was a place?”. Back home and “stunned” by the idea that “you suddenly exiled people because they’d had the misfortune to lose their partner”, she set to work.