I have always wanted to write a book about unlikely friendships.
They’re some of my favourite ones to read and I really love the idea of
bringing together people who wouldn’t normally meet, but for one common
interest.
I also knew that there was a mystery in Vedran’s life that
needed to be resolved. He was a character I rather fell in love with, so I
decided to ‘borrow’ him from The Collaborator’s Daughter – although I must stress
these are both standalone novels – so I feel deeply sorry for what I put him
through this time.
Of the other main characters, Claire came to me next and the
book starts when she arrives in Dubrovnik, terrified of catching Covid again,
to jump start her life as the book shop manager. She’d do anything for anyone, and
that’s her problem. She needs to learn to do things for herself.
Her assistant is Luna, and they hit it off from the very
beginning. She was definitely the most fun to write, but she hides the secret
that she’s lesbian. Sadly Croatia is not like the UK in terms of acceptance; it’s
a largely Catholic country and this plays a bigger part than I realised until I
began to research queer life there and met with a wall of silence. There wasn’t
even a gay bar in Dubrovnik until the summer of 2023, and even now there are
only two Pride marches in the whole of the country.
Karmela was the hardest character to get to grips with. She was
always a rather dry historian, but she started her life in the book by trying
to write a romance and failing to understand why she couldn’t do it. But when I
pinned her backstory to Sarajevo at the start of the war in the 1990s she began
to take shape and now I love her dearly.
I like to think that the final principal character is
Dubrovnik old town itself, with its wonderful streets and hundreds of steps,
its fabulous medieval buildings and ubiquitous cats. It also, of course, has
bookshops, but of course for the story I invented my own. Thank you to my
collaborator Darko for naming it; Knjizara Svih Nacija – the bookshop where all
are welcome.
