Elizabeth Noble: Homing instincts

A prompt 12 months after she surged into the coveted number one slot with The Reading Group, a warm, sparky comedy about life, love, sex and family set among a mixed group of women, Elizabeth Noble is back. The Tenko Club (Coronet, B format p/b, £6.99, 0340836822) will be published on 3rd January 2005, and given a strong push by the publisher. Hodder has achieved a UK trade sale of 200,000 copies to date for The Reading Group.

Lizzie Noble will be known to many from her years in publishing: coming straight from university, where she read English, she worked for Jamie Hodder Williams at Hodder, and later for Scholastic, HarperCollins and Reed, in a variety of editorial, marketing and sales roles--her last job was handling key accounts for Sheila Crowley at Reed.

Eight years ago she married David Young, now chief executive of Time Warner Books, whom she'd met at HarperCollins when he was trade m.d.; "Our eyes met across a crowded boardroom," she says. She wasted no time in leaving work to start a family, and the couple now have two young daughters, Tallulah and Ottalie. They live in a former vicarage in a village outside Guildford.

As you'd expect, her background makes Noble clear-eyed about her early success--though it certainly didn't diminish the thrill. "I was stock signing on the King's Road the day the charts came in, and when Jamie rang me and told me it had got to number one, I thought he was joking," she says. "I was lucky with my pub slot--it depends what you're up against and some weeks number one is easier to attain; and I was lucky with my sub--Hodder got a lot of copies out there. And I was luckier than I knew with the title: if that book had been called Surrey Housewives Have an Eventful Year, it would not have taken off.

"Because of my background, I knew that I was writing into the most crowded genre, women's mass market fiction, and that the book needed a hook. The idea of a reading group came like a lightbulb over my head [Noble has been in a Guildford reading group that she loves for four years], and I couldn't believe no-one else had done it."

Being so close to the publishing world was both good and bad as a first-time author, she says. "When you hold something up to public scrutiny, that's quite difficult--and to do that within my own industry is, I suppose, marginally more difficult. I'd never in my life had the running-naked-down-Oxford-Street dream until The Reading Group was in proof form and people were coming up to me in the car park and saying, 'I've been wondering which of the things in the book have happened to you.' 'Go away--I'm not telling you.'"

What has particularly pleased her, she says, is that The Reading Group has carried on selling: "It didn't just have a flash and die, it's made it into the summer promotions, it has had legs."

Noble has helped the process by spending a lot of time visiting libraries for talk events, "especially in Essex, I go there a lot. Round the M25 and a quick visit to IKEA. The first couple of times you're horrified when someone says anything other than, 'I loved your book and it's perfect'. But I don't think it's perfect, and it's really interesting to hear what other people think. I met one lady who had gone onto Amazon and bought a copy of all the books that my book group read. She said, 'I wanted to see if I agreed with them or not'--which is obviously lovely."

The new novel, The Tenko Club, is again a light and modern spin on domestic themes. Four young women form a close friendship at university in the 1980s. Fifteen years later, Tamsin--a warm earth-mother type--has three children and another on the way with her devoted husband; but Freddie is in trouble--her estranged father has just died and her husband's told her he's having an affair. Meanwhile, nervy Reagan is incapable of holding down a relationship, and beautiful Sarah has died--leaving her husband, Matthew, a widower.

Noble explains the title. "The 'Tenko' game is not my invention; I had a friend who played it, and she explained it to me. You can always tell what a woman's like within a very short time if you imagine what she would do if she were in the TV show 'Tenko' [the vintage BBC drama about a group of women in a Japanese internment camp] and put under extraordinary duress.

"Would she be dead in a week, with no stamina? Would she sleep with the guards for food? Would she sleep with the guards, but share the food? It is addictive and it is absolutely true. In the novel, it's just a hook, a kind of intimate shorthand that the four friends develop."

Noble says the theme of female friendship is very close to her heart. "In archetypal chick lit, it's about the girl and the boy, and friends are very peripheral. In fact, your relationships with other women are quite often the absolute backbone of your life--your mother, your sister, your best friend. My relationships with my girlfriends are completely sacred to me, and I wanted to write about that in both of the books.

"I'm not trying to be clever. I want you to think, 'Oh goody, the new Elizabeth Noble, that's going to be fun to read.' I like a nice romantic hero and I'm afraid I'm addicted to happy endings.

"Somebody came to a talk I did and said, 'When I saw that you lived in Guildford I thought, 'Who's been talking to her about me?' That's a great compliment, because it means the book is real for people."

It's time for Noble to go: first a quick visit to John Lewis' kitchen department, then it's back to Guildford to cook chocolate crispies with Tallulah and Ottalie.

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