NEW AUTHOR PROFILE
Sarah Lawton
The author tells Adrian Magson how blogging set her on the course that led to her debut thriller
Adrian Magson
Starting a blog, as debut author Sarah Lawton, from East London discovered, can lead on to other things. In her case it was deciding that what she really wanted to do was write books. That in turn led to her first book All the Little Things being published by Canelo in April.
‘I’ve been writing full-time for the last eighteen months,’ she explains. ‘Before that I was working in the charity sector. Then, when my son started school I set up a blog to occupy my time. That’s when realisation hit me.
‘The book’s theme is secrets and how they can come back to haunt you. It’s a mother/daughter narrative, with the mother desperate to believe anything but the truth of what her daughter really is. It started as an idea of why someone might see what looks like a solid relationship and find themselves wanting to break it. It made me think, why would you want to do that? What might they have done to deserve it? That brought me to revenge and repercussions, another theme of the book. In truth, one of my characters went dark and took over, and I went with it. No idea I have seems to maintain its original shape for very long – the characters evolve in unexpected ways as I write.