STAR INTERVIEW
The bad OLD DAYS
Britain’s best-loved saga author Rosie Goodwin talks to Tina Jackson about tough times, working class voices and why her characters deserve their hard-won happy endings
Anyone labouring under the misconceptions that sagas are a ‘soft’ form of fiction needs to encounter the marvellous Rosie Goodwin.
Rosie’s latest book, Our Fair Lily, is the first of her new Flower Girls trilogy and on the cover there’s a pretty picture of a beautiful young woman. Inside, though, the reader will encounter a tangled tale of trials and tribulations involving class schisms, hidden illegitimate children, the struggle to survive in the wake of a mining disaster and more before the story reaches a happy ending.
‘It was my last editor who came up with the idea – girls with flower names – and I thought it was a bit twee!’ exclaims Rosie, cheerfully adding, ‘I can be brutal to my poor girls! But she said, just do your thing.’
Well she might. With more than 40 titles in print and four million books sold, Rosie is the UK’s best-loved saga author, with an unerring instinct for telling the stories her readers love. What makes it work, she says, is that she’s as involved with her characters as she wants her readers to be.
‘When I’m doing an event, or at the library, people say, which is the favourite, and I always have to say the one I’m writing now,’ says Rosie. ‘Because if I don’t love each character as much as the last one, and try to make it better, I’m letting readers down. I put my heart and soul into my books. And people say, “I cried”, and I say, “yes, so did I”.