THE FIRST FIVE PAGES

Author Lucy Diamond describes creating the set up of her new novel, set in a Greek island hotel

T he Island Getaway is set at a busy hotel on the Greek island of Kefalonia,and features multiple interweaving storylines – those of several guests staying at the hotel, as well as members of staff who work there. It’s a goldmine situation for an author, being able to throw all sorts of different personalities together in one location, where they will constantly be coming across one another – at breakfast time, at the pool and so on. Such a set-up provides ample scope for drama – whether that might be clashes or more positive connections! – and it’s fun to describe characters’ first impressions of each other too, especially if they turn out to be wrong.

Having worked in hospitality myself, I was keen to involve the hotel staff in various narratives, and wanted to give them their own passions and concerns outside their work. We can all be guilty of seeing staff at such places as ‘the receptionist’, ‘the cleaner’, ‘the bartender’ etc without thinking much else about their lives, and I made the decision to anonymise these characters at first, calling them only by their job title until somebody says their actual name aloud. So for instance, the novel starts with a prologue, where an unnamed office manager is typing up some advertising copy for the hotel. We later discover the office manager’s name – Claudia – and in fact, she turns out to have a big story of her own within the novel, and is a key character who crosses all the other plotlines. But I liked the idea of keeping the staff members at a distance from the reader initially, before eventually revealing the people behind their professional facades. (I liked this idea perhaps a bit too much, as I ended up editing out several extraneous chapters called The Waitress and The Night Porter when my editor decided (rightly!) that I was juggling a list of characters that was getting ridiculously long, and that no reader would be able to keep up!)