THE FIRST FIVE PAGES
BOBBY PALMER
The author of the wildly acclaimed Isaac and the Egg describes how he created the beginning of a genre-blurring book that challenges traditional masculinity
Ricardo Marques
TAP HERE
To read an extract from Isaac and the Egg
1 Isaac Addy stands on a bridge, unsure whether to jump or not.
No matter what else I changed, this was always the first line of the book. I knew I needed to convey the sheer weight of Isaac’s despair from the very beginning, because he’s supposed to be a man at his lowest point. You need to understand that this is someone in crisis, and that it’s going to take something extreme to get him out of that crisis. So, from the very first line, the reader is presented with two questions to which they’ll want an answer. Why is Isaac in such a dark place? And what on earth is going to be able to get him out of it?
2 He breathes in, a shocked and rasping breath, as if he’s suddenly arrived from another place.
The more of the novel you read, the more important it becomes that Isaac’s isn’t an entirely trustworthy point of view. Because of this, I needed to establish in your first interaction with Isaac that he suffers from blackouts. The intensity of his grief means that he often finds himself in places without remembering how he got there, or suffers from bouts of selective memory loss. Not only did this make him a fun puzzle of a character to write, but it meant that I could create scenes like this – Isaac on a bridge, not knowing how or why he’s there – which hint at revelations which might come further down the line. While Isaac and the Egg isn’t a mystery, it has plenty of mysterious elements, and I think this kind of foreshadowing is important in drawing readers into a story which, on its surface, is fairly simple and fairly strange. I always enjoy reading the opening of a book where all is not as it seems, then being able to reframe or re-examine those moments once I know what’s actually going on.