Cambridge Edition September 2020 - Web

BOOK CLUB

you get to meet people in person. It’s a bit weird: but I’m getting used to it.” Helen spent her lockdown at home in Cambridge: based in Girton, she’s spent the time working on her fourth book, escaping our city back at the start of July to visit Cornwall on a quick research trip. “That was really good – but strange as well,” she says. “You’ll go, and visit all the places, do all your research things – but at the same time, it’s like a sensory overload: it’s much more than you’re expecting. You get tired really quickly, which was very strange for me: normally I’m very energetic on these sort of trips, but I kept wanting to head home and have a nap!” she laughs. The action of Night Falls takes place on a set of islands in Orkney, and researching the book was a real joy for Helen, who is extremely fond of the archipelago. “I’ve done writing retreats there, and it’s a wonderful place for a retreat. You have set, very short daylight hours, so I would go out and buy food – and then you have those long nights to write in,” she says. “I’d thought for a while that it’d be a great place to set a book, but I didn’t have a story. I did have this other idea that I was working up, and then one day I realised that if I changed that idea, I could set it on Orkney and make the landscape work – and that was it, I didn’t stop after that.” Helen spoke to the country archaeologist and various residents of Orkney during her proper research phase, but it took a couple of years before she actually sat down to write the book, and though the friendship storyline wasn’t in the original concept, the idea started to form as the book took shape. “I found that really satisfying to write, almost more satisfying than the plot – not quite as satisfying as the setting – but a lot of work went into constructing their friendship. You read all these books and you have female friendships where they’re like sisters, they love one another – but then you also have books where they’re toxic, non-friendships – and maybe it’s giving a little too much away, but none of my friendships are like either of those!” Helen laughs. “They’re complicated relationships. None of them are based

on real people, but when you write, you put together composites of moments that you’ve had in your life, and you compose characters out of that.” Another thought-provoking subplot of Night Falls concerns the changing nature of long-term relationships, both friendships and family, and how resisting change and insisting or assuming that people stay in their defined roles can be disastrous for everyone concerned. “When you grow up with someone, they know the you that you were when you were a child,” Helen says. “That happens to Fiona several times in the book: she’s displaced into this person that she used to be, and tries to resist that. And also from the point of view of it being a thriller, you are then left in a

IMAGES Night Falls, Still Missing is a psychological thriller and the fourth novel from Cambridge author Helen Callaghan (pictured right)

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“When you write, you put together composites of moments that you’ve had in your life”

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