We are so lucky to have amazing relationships with the publishers that help us find new books to fill our catalog pages…And Greenwich Park by debut author Katherine Faulkner was no exception! This week in the Bluestocking Salon, we interviewed this inspiring author on her career trajectory, her writing process, and her advice and recommendations for other aspiring authors.

Don’t worry, there are no spoilers ahead—so if you find yourself intrigued, you can pick up a copy of Greenwich Park here. And here’s our review of the book!

When Helen is abandoned at her first prenatal class by her high-flying architect husband, the fear that she will endure her pregnancy alone settles in. Perhaps that's why she accepts Rachel's friendship so easily, despite the red flags. Rachel effortlessly weaves herself in to the patterns of Helen's lonely life, and when Helen begins to uncover secrets from her husband's past, Rachel takes advantage of her position and threatens to shatter Helen's peaceful (but oblivious) existence. An intriguing, crafty mystery, Greenwich Park is a captivating study of the precarious lives we build…And how quickly they can come tumbling down. Part of our Summer Reading Collection: Mysteries.

Bas Bleu: First of all, we are so excited to be featuring your debut novel Greenwich Park in our catalog! We love our thrillers and this one was full of delightfully wicked twists and turns. Could you tell us more about yourself and your journey to becoming a writer?

Thank you so much for having me, and I’m so glad you enjoyed Greenwich Park! It’s funny, I think I probably always knew deep down I was going to write a book. I used to make stapled-together books out of my stories as a kid and give them to my parents and teachers and anyone else I could palm them off on! But I don’t think I ever considered it a possible career choice as such. I decided to study journalism after my degree, and for the past twelve years I’ve worked  in newspapers – which has given me plenty of inspiration! I have worked as a reporter, an investigative journalist and latterly as an editor—I’m currently the Head of News Projects at the Sunday Times.

I always wrote creatively in my spare time, but it was when I was pregnant with my first daughter in 2017 that I started writing Greenwich Park. I had started novels before but never finished one. Greenwich Park felt different and special to me, so even though I had a new baby when I was writing it, my belief in the idea somehow kept me going. I wrote most of the first draft during my maternity leave, while also completing a novel-writing evening course at the Faber Academy. That was brilliant and it gave me the structure I needed, I think, to finish. I'm so proud of how Greenwich Park has turned out and seeing it on shelves as a real-life book is a total dream!

BB: What was the inspiration behind Greenwich Park? How did you decide to write a thriller?

The original idea for Greenwich Park came from wanting to write the story of toxic friendship and how difficult it can be to disentangle yourself from it. Then when I went to my antenatal classes, I instantly knew that this was the perfect setting for the story! I was so struck by the idea of being expected to be friends with this group of strangers, of sharing intimate information with these people I barely knew. I started imagining what would happen if one of these women actually had an ulterior motive, or wished you ill, and that is how the story was born. As I was writing it, it occurred to me that when you are pregnant, you measure time in weeks and even days in a way that you don’t in normal life—because you are constantly counting down to this life-changing physical and emotional transformation, albeit one you can’t really comprehend. There is a sort of inherent tension and anxiety about this countdown and so it seemed a perfect structure for the novel, too.

I’m a voracious reader of thrillers and I have known for a long time that that was the sort of novel that I would want to write—although I really wanted it to feel like a really strong, satisfying thriller with complex characters. There are so many brilliant writers—especially female writers—writing thriller or thriller-adjacent novels now, with difficult, quirky, multifaceted characters with complex inner lives. Authors such as Stephanie Wrobel, Louise Candlish, Lucy Atkins, Louise Doughty, and Sarah Vaughan, for example, are all writing the sort of thrillers I like and have always aspired to write. 

BB: You don’t have to give us names, but how real are Rachel and Helen? (Because they were very real to us!) Which characteristics of theirs are based in reality? Which were summoned by your imagination?

I had so much fun writing these two characters and their increasingly awkward interactions! Neither of them are based on real people, but of course like all authors I do tend to steal traits I notice in people and collect them, magpie-like, for my own characters. I will admit that in a previous job there was a slightly odd girl in the office who seemed to really want to be friends with me and the feeling wasn’t really mutual, and I found myself thinking about the dynamic a lot, and how difficult it was to manage, so the Rachel idea really came from there! In terms of Helen, it was more a case of exploring lack of confidence and social anxiety, which is something I think we all feel from time to time, but really dialing it up. For Helen, her lack of confidence in social situations and her lack of faith in her own judgement is such a dominant trait that it really distorts all her choices and prevents her from actually grasping the reality of what is going on in her own life. For that reason she is somewhere between an unreliable narrator and a narrator who believes herself to be unreliable. I found that really interesting to write.

BB: Daniel and Helen’s house, as well as the Greenwich location itself, take on their own character arcs as the book progresses. How did you land on that setting? What is your own relationship with architecture? 

I have to confess I don’t really know anything about architecture, but I am obsessed with the beautiful houses that I see as I walk around London, and with imagining what the lives might be like of the people who live inside them—so that’s a large part of it! Greenwich is a part of London that I visited a lot as a child. We would get the boat down the river and it always felt like an adventure. Greenwich has always struck me as a really atmospheric place; like many places in London you feel as if you’re moving through layers of time and history as you walk around it, and the ghosts of the past feel very present. I also love that as well as the beautiful parts—the park, the market, the stunning houses where I imagined my characters to live—there’s a real seedy underbelly to Greenwich, with the tunnel, the river and the less salubrious areas, which is why it suits the story so well I think. Despite this,  it wasn’t really a conscious decision to set the story in Greenwich; it was just that when I started writing the scenes I found myself imagining them unfolding in Greenwich, the two of them meeting in the market. It was my tutor at the Faber academy in London, where I was doing an evening course while writing the novel, who encouraged me to make Greenwich more obviously part of the story.

BB: Much of this novel seems to focus on themes of the past—specifically, how our past choices directly affect our future. What message do you expect readers will take away from the book’s ending? Should wives be culpable for their husbands’ choices, and vice versa? 

That’s a very good question! I definitely don’t think wives should be culpable for their husband’s choices, but I suppose when you intertwine your life with someone enough to share a house and a child with them, your futures become enmeshed, whether you like it or not, and their actions will have consequences for you as well as for them. I think a big message of the book is the impossibility of judging what is really going on in another person’s life, and how deceptive appearances can be. We live in an age where, through social media, we have the illusion of intimacy and familiarity with other peoples’ lives. In fact, no one has the perfect life, and things are rarely as they appear on the surface.  

BB: At what point in the writing process did you know you wanted to publish? What was the most difficult part of your process? The easiest? 

I suppose I always hoped Greenwich Park would be published. I was absolutely bowled over, though, when it turned out that actually lots of people wanted to represent it and, later, that quite a number of publishers wanted to publish it! Seeing it out in bookstores all over the world—from Brazil and South Africa to the US and Canada—has been one of the most incredible things for me and I still have to pinch myself about that sometimes. My absolute favourite thing is getting messages from people all over the world saying how much they’ve enjoyed it and that they’ve been unable to put it down for days, or they’ve been up all night reading it. That’s exactly what I set out to create with Greenwich Park—I wanted it to just be a pleasurable, immersive, gripping read.

One of the trickiest parts was probably the editing process to get it ready for American readers, actually. I had to agree to change all my pavements to sidewalks and my bins to trash cans. I drew the line at changing biscuits into cookies, though. In London, we eat biscuits with our tea!

BB: How long would you estimate your writing process lasted, from start to finish? Did Covid complicate any part of it? 

Writing the first draft was actually pretty straightforward – compared to book two, which has been complicated both by Covid and the arrival of a second baby!—but the editing took a while. From start to finish it was about two years and then Covid did delay the actual publication date a bit. 

I don’t think it’s ever all that easy to fit writing a book around your life – it’s definitely something you have to really commit to! For me, although writing a book on maternity leave might sound slightly mad, actually my job then (as Head of News at The Times) was so demanding I don’t think I’d ever have finished it alongside working! At least on maternity leave, I could allow my brain to completely focus on it. 

BB: What advice would you give to aspiring authors that aren’t sure where to start?

I don't know how qualified I am to dispense advice really—I still count myself as an aspiring writer!—but I'd probably say that, obvious as it sounds, you only become a novelist by actually sitting down and writing the novel, and making all the necessary sacrifices: taking time out of your weekends and so on. But, of course, it's absolutely worth it. 

When my daughters were very young babies I had to be quite creative about writing during their nap times. My elder daughter only napped in the pram so I had to keep the laptop in the bottom of it and whip it out in the park as soon as she was asleep. My younger one is much more easy-going and she would just nap on the floor of the attic while I wrote, which was a dream!

Once you manage to carve out the time, it’s just about focusing. I think it’s easy to fall victim to a false sense of urgency about things like replying to emails, and always put your work in progress to the back of the queue. I find this can really impede progress and creativity so I find it’s important to be quite disciplined about things like checking the news, emails and social media. Sometimes disconnecting the internet can be helpful! As can switching off your phone. Sometimes I allocate myself specific times of day—such as first thing, lunchtime and 4pm—to check emails.

What books are you inspired by? Can you recommend anything to our readers?

I read lots of other fiction and nonfiction as well as thrillers, and I get lots of ideas from being a journalist and reading a lot of newspapers and magazines. Patricia Highsmith has been a big influence on me—I love her unlikeable characters and the way that they collide into uneasy, toxic relationships. I’ve always loved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writing on the lure and dazzle of money and wealth, and the disparity between the surfaces of peoples’ lives and what lies underneath them. The writing of Jean Rhys has always spoken powerfully to me on the feeling of being lost, the loneliness and vulnerability and drift of being a young woman, an outsider. More recently I’ve been hugely influenced by Deborah Levy—I read Swimming Home around the time I was starting Greenwich Park, and immersing myself in Kitty’s arrival into that group of strangers and the cracks it created really helped me to pinpoint the sort of atmosphere I wanted to build with Rachel in Greenwich Park.

There are so many brilliant women writing thriller, or thriller-adjacent novels now—Stephanie Wrobel, Louise Candlish, Lucy Atkins, Louise Doughty, and Sarah Vaughan for example—with difficult, quirky, multifaceted characters with complex inner lives, and those are exactly the sort of thrillers I like and have always aspired to write. Three of my all-time favourite thrillers are He Said/ She Said by Erin Kelly, Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty, and Our House by Louise Candlish for a final line twist that made me gasp out loud! It’s not strictly a thriller, but this year’s Girl A by Abigail Dean is a total must-read for thriller fans, too—it’s terrifying and impossible to put down.

What’s next for you? 

Right now I’m very focused on finishing my second novel, and then I’ve decided to take a break from my journalism career to focus on a third book, which I’ve already started sketching out some ideas for. My daughters are still very young (four and two) so it’s wonderful to be able to do a job I love so much and which allows me to be around for them.  

Thank you so much for your time! We can’t wait to see what your second novel has in store for us.

Feeling inspired? Want to read more author interviews? Send us your suggestions, questions, or personal submissions by emailing us at [email protected]!