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Author profile — Louise Candlish
Louise Candlish’s latest thriller is set in the privileged world of second home owners.
Love of money may be the root of all evil, but where Louise Candlish’s books are concerned one could easily swap the word “money” for “property”. Her 2018 breakthrough thriller Our House featured an estranged husband stealing a £2m family home from under his wife’s nose and an audacious final-page twist. It won the Crime & Thriller Book of the Year at The British Book Awards, was adapted into a starry prime-time ITV drama and received a Nielsen Bestseller Silver Award for 250,000 copies sold across print and e-book.
Her latest thriller is also concerned with people doing nefarious things for the sake of bricks and mortar, now in the world of second-home owners. Our Holiday is set on the Dorset coast in the fictional town of Pine Ridge. The first chapter begins with a bang – literally – as a house (a wooden summer house in the grounds of a large residence) is driven off a cliff, smashing into the sea below.
“I wanted something physically destructive to open this book to show the intentions of the characters who we then go on to meet as they arrive in Pine Ridge,” says Candlish, over video call from her home in France.
Our Holiday features an ensemble cast with the story unfolding from the perspectives of six different characters. It’s the first time Candlish has juggled so many points of view, and she was directly inspired by hit TV series “The White Lotus”, a black comedy drama about the wealthy guests at a luxury hotel and those who serve them. “I thought, I’d really love to do something like ‘The White Lotus’ but British and middle-class rather than the 1% super-rich.”
In the novel, Charlotte and Perry have owned their clifftop holiday home for years, and treasure the time they spend there because, after all, they’ve worked hard for it. This summer, their London friends Amy and Linus have bought a (vastly inferior) property nearby to renovate and all four descend, with assorted spoiled offspring, with plans to sunbathe, drink rosé and generally relax. But they are greeted by an (un)welcoming committee, a gang of locals turned activists, fed-up of being priced out of the town they live and work in all year round. Led by the charismatic Robbie and his handsome sidekick Tate, a campaign of low-level criminal damage commences, including daubing #NJFA (Not Just For August) slogans and trespassing on the grounds of second homes to film stunts that will go viral on social media. Tensions run high and over the summer things will escalate in Pine Ridge, to betrayal, corruption, and even murder…
The research
How did she set about getting into the mindset of the opposing factions? “For starters, for a year, every single day, I read the Telegraph and the Guardian, thinking that would give me Perry’s perspective and Robbie’s perspective… That told me everything I needed to know about the two extremes. And it’s always the comments where you get the best material, by the way, not the articles.”
It’s tiny violins with authors – all of us have a dream job and none of us would ever deny that. But there are times when you feel a bit unlucky
Our Holiday, as well as being an extremely addictive thriller populated by enjoyably awful people – particularly the DFL (Down From London) brigade – also has a strong element of social commentary with house prices now far out of reach for so many across the UK. “I just can’t keep away from the subject of this extraordinary transformation [of society] and this tragic outpacing of salaries to the extent that we now have a generation that can’t afford their own homes.”
Property is a subject she has returned to again and again in her books: “I’m really fascinated by it and I think, maturing as a person and as a writer, I care even more about it than I did 10 years ago when it might have been more about the struggle to get on the property ladder or strange things going on in a house. Now I am much more interested in how it fits in with society and the generations. I love generational conflict. Well, I love writing about it!” Candlish also mines a rich seam of comedy in the generational conflict between self-made man Perry, newly retired from the City, and his university student son Benedict and Benedict’s new girlfriend Tabitha, who purport to be outraged by the older generation of “wealth hoarders” while simultaneously enjoying the luxury lifestyle provided by them for free. Meanwhile, Amy and Linus’ daughter Beattie, a gorgeous teenager with sociopathic tendencies, is involved in murky crimes of her own.
Career highlights
Our Holiday is Candlish’s 17th novel over two decades as a published author. “I haven’t had a neat and tidy career; I’ve had four publishers across 17 books and lots of reissues.” Her début, Prickly Heat, for example, came out in 2004 and was later reissued as The Island Hideaway in 2013. The advent of digital publishing has made a huge difference in giving her books a second or even third life: “Back in the day, you were on the shelf if you were lucky and that was it, and if the book didn’t sell it was over. All your hard work; it was as if it had never happened. Whereas now there is that lovely enduring hope that an early book that wasn’t discovered at the time, there’s the opportunity for it to be discovered. I much prefer it now.
“With the benefit of this two-decade career I can see that so much of how your books are perceived all comes down to the marketing – and the covers and the fonts and the straplines. I think you can take a book and make it sound like a comedy or a tragedy or a thriller. Because it’s probably got all of those elements in it, if it’s a 21st century novel.” She doesn’t work from an office, or even a desk, but sits on her sofa to write, “no doubt creating back problems for future me,” she jokes.
When I ask about the secret to a such a long writing career, Candlish talks about the importance of “a well of ideas, good, strong ideas, enough to feed a novel” which she attributes to a keen interest in current affairs and an anthropologist’s attitude to human nature. But then she adds: “When people say I’m successful I actually find that hard to believe because I’ve had far more failures and disappointments than I have high points.
“It’s tiny violins with authors – all of us have a dream job and none of us would ever deny that. But there are times when you feel a bit unlucky. We are very subject to personnel changes within the publishing teams. I’ve had more than 10 editors – probably closer to 15 – whereas the dream would be to be with one editor and your careers to grow together… but you’ve got to ride out all of that and keep the faith.”
Metadata
Imprint HQ
Publication 04.07.24
Format PB (£9.99), EB (£5.99)
ISBN 9780008614652
Rights Rights sold in two territories to date
Editor Kate Mills
Agent Shelia Crowley, Curtis Brown
