Evie Wyld, take two

Two novels ago, All the Birds, Singing author Evie Wyld knew exactly what kind of books she wanted to write.

“I did the creative writing MA at Goldsmiths,” she says, “and I remember saying to a teacher, Stephen Knight, that I was frustrated. I wanted to write these big, dramatic action-movie-style stories with machine guns and blood and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I wasn’t getting anywhere with them. Instead, I kept writing these quiet little vignettes about fathers and sons, and it wasn’t what I wanted to be writing. And he said, ‘You know, if we could all write what we wanted to write, everyone would write Booker winners and we’d all be rich and it would be great. But you just have to examine what it is that you write, very closely.’”

Wyld must have had one hell of a magnifying glass – those father-and-son vignettes turned into her much-lauded 2009 debut, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice. Her literary accolades include landing on Granta’s Best Young British Novelists list, and her follow-up novel, All the Birds, Singing – its unsettling narrative both terrifying and beautiful – more than fulfills her writerly promise.

Way with words

Wyld has a way with words that’s both eerie and eloquent, conjuring indelible imagery and audio from the crackle of soap suds in an ear, the oddities of a farmer’s hands and the aspect of a girl who is so bored – or unimaginative ­– that she “does” a crossword puzzle by colouring in the white squares. Tracing the misadventures of Jake Whyte, a woman who’s made the journey from sheep shearer in the Aussie outback to sheep farmer on an English island, All the Birds, Singing, captures the lonesome, mesmerising elements of isolated places – and people – trapped in a bit of a time warp.

Jake is an enigma in skittish human form. She shuns the local pub, spatchcocks chickens with her fist, has a dog named Dog and sleeps with a hammer under her pillow. But scary as Jake’s world is, it’s not entirely without its wry – and humane – humour. When she inadvertently kills a pigeon, she gives it a sea burial, humming “the song from Titanic”. In an even funnier moment, a total stranger, cowering at the wrong end of Jake’s gun, is astonished into speaking: “God… you look awful. Do you cut your own hair?”

“I enjoy people being alone and seeing how they interact with the landscape around them,” says Wyld of her tendency to isolate characters in far-off spaces. “I talk to myself when I’m on my own in the bookshop” – she runs a Peckham bookstore  – “and it’s quite frightening when you realise you’ve been chatting away. It’s just a boring, running commentary of what I’m doing and what I’ll be doing later.” She pauses, laughter in her voice. “But sometimes there’s someone in the back and I don’t realise it."

Australia to Peckham

While she’s found rich literary fodder in her Antipodean heritage, Wyld’s third novel will target her family’s British branch. “It’s vaguely about my father’s parents. They’re from a weird, beautiful place called Dummer, and they’re very English and well-to-do and buttoned down – that world’s just as harsh as the Australian bush in lots of ways.”

She’s got a fascination for the extreme (even writing about the tranquil Hampshire countryside, I suspect, she’ll expose its uncanny, otherworldly edge) and the offbeat (“I used to have a phobia of people with black fingernails. I’ve no idea why – it used to scare the hell out of me”), and firmly enjoys her horror without the big reveal, recalling an early disappointment with Stephen King’s It. “Horror stories become a bit comical once you actually see the monster,” she explains, “so I’m all for never discovering what the creepy thing is. I think that’s more true to life. If something terrifying happens, you don’t necessarily get closure – you don’t get to find out why it was after you or that it feeds from fear or any those kind of hackneyed horror tropes that just make everything less frightening.”

Her approach to titles is just as considered. "All the birds, singing" was a deleted sentence from her debut and provided an initial spark for the second book: “It made me think there was something sort of threatening about so much beautiful sound all at once. And I like the idea that you might get the tone of what the book is about from the title.”

Bookshop and next novel aside, Wyld is also working on a graphic novel, and over on Wattpad there’s a tantalising glimpse of the writer venturing into YA territory. This July marks a more personal venture: she’s marrying literary agent Jamie Coleman whom she met on that Goldsmiths MA, clearly a life-changing course for Evie Wyld in more ways than one. “He’s my first reader,” she says of Coleman. “I always show him my stuff before I show it to anyone else.” There’s that laughter again. “That’s why I have to marry him.”

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld is published on 20 June by Jonathan Cape.