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Synopsis

'It's the same small world; it just depends who you are and how you see it'

Birthday Girls is Annabel Giles' sparklingly compulsive debut. Set on six different birthdays, and dealing with six different women who are all connected to each other, though they don't all realise it, the story opens with Scarlett, on her 10th birthday, and closes with Constance, on her 60th birthday.

Funny, tragic and engrossing, Birthday Girls is a must-read book from a major new voice in women's fiction.

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Interview

Annabel Giles, TV and radio personality and comedy writer, talks to penguin.co.uk about writing her first novel, painful birthday memories, and the trouble with reading.

Birthday Girls is your first novel, what inspired you to write it?
I wanted to write a book that I would like to read because I don't get much time to read. I'm a very busy single parent of a teenager and a toddler, which means my life is a living nightmare. If I am going to read a book I want it to be quick and good, and to be a little bit cheeky in places and quite sad in others. I want to put it down and go 'ahh, that was a good read' and then get on with something else.

You're a well-known TV and radio personality, how have you found the switch from TV and radio to writing?
Well I prefer doing this than doing TV and radio because you don't have to look nice during the day. I wear a really nasty old tracksuit and thick glasses, because I'm very, very short- sighted in real life, and I work in a shed at the bottom of my garden. I prefer it because you can be yourself and you don't always have to be smiling and sparkling, you can just be normal and quite nice.

Birthday Girls is very funny as well as touching. Did your experience in TV and radio help you to write this novel?
I would never say I was a comedian by any stretch of the imagination, or a comedy writer, or anything other than quite amusing sometimes, witty on a really good day with a comedy wind behind me. I think women are funny when they are doing something else, as opposed to doing stand-up comedy, or whatever. To me that is where the comedy comes from, the situation that the people we know and love are in, rather than standing up and telling a joke, so yes and no to that question.

Can you briefly introduce us to the six women in Birthday Girls?
There are six women in Birthday Girls and we start off with Scarlet who is ten and on the way to have her appendix out. She's just finding out that the world isn't quite as sweet and lovely as she thought it was.

Then there's a twenty-year-old who's a hairdresser, lives in Ladbroke Grove, and is very 'street and happening' as my mother would say. Then there's Sophie who's thirty, who's the mother of Scarlet, are you keeping up? She's very dreamy and a bit hopeless and cries all the time because she lost a baby and can't quite get over it. Then there's Jessica, who's forty and based on a sort of has-been TV presenter with dark hair and quite a straight nose, I don't know where I got that character from.

Then the fifty-year-old is a lady who is by chance the mother of the twenty-year-old hairdresser and from a very peaceful Caribbean island. She comes to London where everything's got a beep and a code number so she's quite disillusioned. Finally there's the sixty-year-old who is the grandmother of the ten-year-old and the mother of the thirty-year-old and the forty-year-old and she has just discovered a terrible, terrible thing that connects all these woman together.

The characterisation in Birthday Girls is very varied - where did you get your inspiration for such a range of characters?
Sometimes when I read a book I get fed up with the main character, if you get bored with the main character or you don't like them the book becomes less interesting. I didn't think I had the confidence to maintain a whole book with one person, so I rather sneakily put in this format, which means that each girl tells her story from her point of view in that chapter. I love the idea of everyone harbouring secrets and not being quite what you think. I also think women these days do so many things at one time and have to be all things to all people, so I wanted to write about six different types of women who were all linked by something.

Did you know how Birthday Girls would end when you started?
I did but I couldn't believe that I would actually go through with it and sadly I did go through with it. I like to know what the beginning and the end is, the fascinating bit to write is the middle. The best bit is sitting there thinking 'oh, I wonder what they're going to do today'. For example, in Birthday Girls Jessica knocks on her mother's front door. Her mother lives in a huge house in Holland Park and I thought, she's not going to open her own front door, if she's got a house like that she's going to have staff and I just made up this character who opens the door who then becomes completely instrumental to everything.

Where do you escape to do your writing?
I've got a shed in the bottom of my garden and it's great because in the house I've got a teenager who's fourteen and goes 'huh' all the time and a screaming three-year-old who's just discovered tantrums, all the doors are off their hinges and there's mess everywhere. There is very little self-discipline involved, it's more of an escape for me. It's great fun to have your own space where they're not allowed in!

What is your favourite birthday memory?
I have to admit I have not had very many good birthdays. I think that one of the last birthdays I arranged was paint balling. I thought right, we're all going to go paint balling and it's going to be fun. It was great except that we were walking up to the place and someone was right behind me and their gun went off by accident, point blank range right onto my bum. I have never experienced anything so painful in that area before. So that's my abiding birthday memory, being shot in the arse at point blank range by someone with a paint-balling gun.

What type of fiction do you like to read and do you have any favourite authors?
I have a huge reading confession to make, which appals everybody including my editor at Penguin. I never ever, ever, read books. I just don't get the time; I've read about five books in the last two years and one of them I had to read because I was meeting the author on a Penguin road show. You have to put time aside for book reading, I've got a pile beside my bed and I love going into bookshops and buying books but reading them is another thing entirely.

What's next for Annabel Giles?
Well I'm writing book two. My view in my writing shed for the last six months has been Birthday Girls and I've put up a new view, which is of my new book. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say much yet, but it's about being on holiday. I'm half way through working it all out now and I'm just beginning to get a little bit fired up by it, you know when you get that, 'Oh it's actually quite good', because I thought I can't do anything else, that's it, but as we know I haven't got a short-winded bone in my body and there's about ninety books in me. I'm going to be the second Barbara Cartland. I'm just loving it and I hope I can keep it up and fingers crossed that people like this one and will like the next one too.

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