What is it like to write and publish your first ever novel? We find out by asking the authors William Rayfet Hunter (Sunstruck), Catherine Airey (Confessions), and Fiza Saeed McLynn (The Midnight Carousel).
Speaking to host Rhianna Dhillon, they discuss their different experiences writing their debut books, where they found their inspiration, and personal book recommendations ranging from fantasy to working-class fiction.
Click the button below to listen to this episode or continue scrolling to explore the books discussed.
Alongside the Penguin titles you can explore below, William, Catherine, Fiza and Rhianna also mentioned:
Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin
In Other Worlds by Margaret Atwood
An Olive Grove In Ends by Moses McKenzie
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Explore the books discussed in this episode
Episode 3 transcript
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hello, I'm Rhianna Dhillon and you're listening to Ask Penguin, the podcast series from Penguin Books. As regular listeners know, every episode we tackle a different books-based subject, from prize-winning novels to page turning reads we want to introduce our book clubs to. And we try and answer your listener questions as well. So, if you're looking for your next read or if you have a question about any aspect of publishing, this is the place to send it. We love a challenge. So visit our Instagram page @PenguinUKBooks and subscribe to our broadcast channel for the chance to participate in the show.
Penguin's a place where you can find some of the world's best-known and best-loved authors, not to mention the iconic Penguin classics. But even those world-famous titles had to start somewhere. Penguin is an absolute champion of new writing talent, helping authors in all genres take their first wobbly steps into the publishing world, and their books into the hands of readers. Unsurprisingly, it's a subject that we're asked about a lot. So today, I'm delighted to welcome three very exciting debut authors of 2025 to the Penguin podcast to find out more about how they got to this point and their fantastic must-read novels.
Catherine Airey's novel Confessions is a captivating exploration of family dynamics and coming-of-age. Opening with Cora Brady, a 16-year-old in New York who finds herself orphaned in the aftermath of 9/11, we're drawn into a sweeping account of Cora's family and the life-changing events that have shaped their lives from the early 60s to the present day.After quitting what she describes as a sensible job, Catherine moved from London to Cork, Ireland, and began writing her novel in between volunteering and repairing a boat.
Fiza Saeed McLynn read history at Oxford University and had a brief career in finance before spending the next 12 years helping the bereaved as part of her work as a complementary therapist. The Midnight Carousel is a spellbinding mystery taking us from 1914 Paris to Jazz Age Chicago in a tale of obsession, revenge, and enduring love.
William Rayfet Hunter was an NHS junior doctor of six years before they scooped the Merky Books New Writer's Prize in 2022, writing their first draft between hospital shifts. The result of that industrious time is the novel Sunstruck, a complex and sultry love story which takes an unflinching look at how the power dynamics of class, wealth, and race bear out in our intimate relationships.
Will, Catherine and Fiza, congratulations on all of your debuts and a very warm welcome to the podcast.
All:
Thank you so much.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So lovely to have you here. So your books are in front of us. How does it feel seeing them in the wild?
William Rayfet Hunter:
Pretty wild. This is the first time I've seen my book in its final form in hardback. Yeah, they arrived yesterday to the Penguin offices and I'm seeing it for the first time. If I can say so myself, I think it looks great.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It looks amazing, yeah.
Do you still get that sort of like flip of excitement seeing, you know, people holding it or seeing it out in bookshops or…
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
…I saw mine for the first time last week and oh it was just an amazing, amazing um, it was the foil. I didn't know it was gonna have so much foil on it and it's all. Intricate and it's just stunning. I love it. Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
What about you?
Catherine Airey:
I've had a few months now getting used to it, but I will say I just love going past bookshops and then like going to find it and I do this thing where I sort of don't announce that I'm coming and I kind of, I'm gonna say go in disguise, but I like going in as if I'm just a normal person and seeing it and then occasionally I'll go in and be like, oh, I'll sign the copies. It's really nice just to look at it without, you know, without it being like an event and just sort of just just see it there and say hello.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes. So I've already given you all a really brief introduction, but I'd really love to hear more about your journeys to becoming published authors because all really diverse, different, you know, you were all working in other areas before you started writing. So tell us about, you know, was being a writer always the ambition? Catherine, let's start with you.
Catherine Airey:
It was something I always wanted to do, and then I went away to uni and I just hugely lost my confidence and just thought like, oh, this is not, not something I'm gonna be able to achieve. Um, I worked in publishing for a tiny, tiny, tiny bit and then I worked in the civil service doing sort of like writing adjacent jobs, so I was working as a copywriter. And then I was sort of, lockdown had happened and I was approaching 30 and I was just thinking like maybe now, maybe now is the time to do it. And I was doing volunteer work in Ireland on an old boat and then writing at the same time. I was just talking to Fiza earlier about that sort of book one time where I was very lucky that I didn't really have very many responsibilities at the time, you know, I'd kind of given myself like a late gap year. And yeah, it was really nice to be doing work with my hands that was different to work when you're typing, I guess. Um, yeah, so it was a really nice time for me and I'm really glad that I sort of committed to doing that thing that I wanted to do.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Fiza what about you?
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Yeah, well, it was a long hard slog, many, many years, but I've always daydreamed. So, I thought, OK, I will, I'll start to write when I, you know, it was very easy because I had dogs and they would, you know, be asleep and I'd just write a little bit in the afternoons. I'd have a dog on my lap and just write.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That sounds so dreamy!
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Yeah, it was, it was, it was, but it was quite hard. Around a job, I had two kids. I was on my own, so it wasn't basically until lockdown, which I think is the classic. The first time in my life, everything stopped and I could just sit and I could write and that and that is when it really got going. Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And Will, what about you?
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, I kind of. In a way, I always wanted to be a writer, and I've always written. I used to write plays for my brothers and my cousins when I was a kid, and loads of really, really bad poetry, uh, some of which I found recently and I was like, oh my, oh my God!
Rhianna Dhillon:
Have you got a line?!
William Rayfet Hunter:
Absolutely not! Yeah, just like very heavy clunky 16-year-old imagery, which will never see in the light of day. And then, yeah, I kind of, I was at school and I was just like, that's probably just not something I can do, so I then went and studied medicine and qualified as a doctor and then did that and then the pandemic hit, which was busy and my brain was like, I'm so busy and I can't escape this, I'm going to make myself way more busy and write a novel, , but it really helped actually, like starting that. So I, I started it while I was working and finished it while I was still working. I've, I've left that job now, but I then heard about the Merky New Writer's Prize on the radio, actually they were reading some of Hafsa Zayyan’s amazing novel, We Are All Birds of Uganda, and I was like, oh, that's cool, and then I read a bit more about the prize, entered, and really didn't expect to win. And then I did and I was like, oh. Someone's taken an interest in this, someone thinks it's good, and now I actually have to finish it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Kind of like a real leap.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, a huge leap of faith and definitely into the void for a little bit, but we have landed, on our feet just about, which is nice.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So Will, you just mentioned the Merky Prize. So, tell us what that is.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, so the, the Merky Prize was kind of my way into the publishing world. It’s an annual prize run by Merky Books, which is an imprint of Penguin. And it's an open submission, for writers from underrepresented backgrounds, and yeah, you submit 1000 words and they go from there. And I was lucky enough to win the prize in 2022, and get my book deal through it. So it's been a kind of wild journey since then, and yeah, I couldn't be more grateful for it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
How did you pick your 1000 words?
William Rayfet Hunter:
I had about 2000 done before I submitted and I asked some very dear friends to give me some quite harsh feedback which some of them took very literally and they are in the acknowledgements, but it's begrudging, and I will never forget, Charlie... But yeah, I kind of trimmed it down from what I had. Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Who out of your books, who was kind of like the character that came to you first or who was the first character to be fully formed and then how did that impact the rest of your writing?
William Rayfet Hunter:
I think for me it's Felix who is I guess the love interest slash main antagonist of Sunstruck. He's an actor, he's very handsome, he's very privileged and kind of tortured and our narrator kind of falls for him as soon as he sees him at the start of the novel. But he was just such a strong figure in my mind when I conceived the idea and I just like had an image of him burst into my head and I was like, OK, that's an interesting character, maybe like cobbled together from people that I know, but there was just this draw to him and I was like, OK, the book kind of revolves around him and his bad decisions, but it's kind of all the other characters are kind of pulled in to him and his orbit.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Interesting. Fiza?
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Yeah, so you would have thought that the first one would be Maisie, who is the main character who we see the whole way through the book basically. She didn't actually come in until 3 years into writing the book, draft probably number 8 or 9. Yeah, I know, amazing. I know. So the first one was actually Gilbert, who we first hear about. I wanted a character who was deeply into his grief. Just it consumed him. It's him, you know, that is all he is. He doesn't do anything except grieve, and it spirals him. And I was struggling to write because I had never been on a course. I didn't even know they existed. I was too broke to even afford one, to be honest. And so, I was like, I don't know how to write, so I struggled and struggled and struggled and I was about to stop and I suddenly heard this voice and it was like there was this man on the right-hand side of me and he told me and he was like telling me what to write. I heard them in my head, so I heard Maisie has like a very like Essex accent at the start, and then we have the like police officer, he’s French.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Laurent. Who is the new love of my life by the way.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Oh, I have to be honest, my gosh, I like him. I actually wrote him for me and so hot. I know he is, he is Poirot but hot
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh grey eyes, yes please.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Yeah, so it just, it evolved like that and so as I write, I hear them in my head. So I hear the character and I hear the accent.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Catherine, what about you? Because yours is, what's so brilliant about Confessions is the cross-generational stories and the kind of ties that brings, the ties that bring them all together. And they're all really strong personalities, and we hear from all of them. So, who was kind of like the most fully formed first?
Catherine Airey:
It was Cora, who's the character at the beginning in 2001 who came to me first, but I don't think I had it like a voice in my head. I'm so envious of that, of the people who say that these like voices come to them fully formed. Although that one probably out of all of them, I did find the easiest. I think it was, I was sort of probably not consciously at the time, but was like exploring the idea of feeling like a bit like you're sort of a passive observer in your life, but then you're making active decisions, but there, even that is just in sort of response to stuff that is happening to you and I think that that is something that I think most of the narrators in Confessions sort of deal with, and it took a really long time for me to kind of realise with some of the parts who was telling which bit of the story and kind of figuring out what each character had to tell.
Rhianna Dhillon:
The big question, which I'm sure every single debut writer gets asked, every writer ever, where do you draw your inspiration from and why this story for your first story? Will?
William Rayfet Hunter:
You asked like if I've always wanted to be a writer, I think I've always thought like a writer. Like I've always, I was a very solitary kid, like I had friends and I had fun. But I was like I was in my own world a lot and kind of observing. I used to like have loads of cousins and we like we would all hang out and then when I got a bit tired of like socialising, I would like sneak into the room that all the adults were in and like hide under the table cause I thought like there was some like secret adult world that I was missing out on. I was just like watching a lot and observing and looking and I think I've like carried that through into adulthood and I just like I just find people really interesting and like I was talking to some writer friends yesterday and we were saying like what makes the writing that we like good is the complexity between the situation people are in and what they're feeling about it. People are so complicated and strange. And so for me, I try and write to understand that better or to just explore it and like look at the complexity. So for Sunstruck, it's kind of musing on some experiences I've had, some kind of relationships I've had and like what if I set this in this really high stakes environment and let these people play out the drama because that's, yeah, it's just what I find interesting.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And do you kind of draw inspiration as well from some of your favourite books or authors or even TV?
William Rayfet Hunter:
Sunstruck, it's got like, yeah, there's a lineage and a history of kind of the stranger arrives to this world that they're not part of. Like it's a, it's one of the classic, stories really, but it's definitely got a through line to books like Brideshead Revisited. That was a big inspiration. I remember I read that when I was like 11, which I think is probably too young to be reading like a homoerotic book about Catholicism. I mean, it probably made me the writer that I am.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I think the younger that you are when these stories, even if you don't understand all of them, it does, they help to form you, whereas they wouldn't have shaped you in a way that if you'd read them a few years later…
William Rayfet Hunter:
…I was like grappling with these big things and yeah, I remember just being like, whoa, people are so complicated.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Fiza?
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
I, in my book was really keen to create a fairy tale-like feel that sort of, is it real? Is it not real? Dark and light, magic, perhaps not. So, I think that is how I have come to that place, of the book. But also I think, every experience I've had has like led to it. So for me, having clients who, as I was saying, who I held in grief was a massive influence on the book because, you know, there are all kinds of ways to cope with it. And then when my father died, the way I coped with it was the, in my mind, made myself think that he was just away on a trip and he would come back and that's how I cope with it. And I thought it was so fascinating that we all deal with it in our own way. So every character in the book has grief and they're all dealing with it in their own way. And then in terms of the books and well films actually, Moulin Rouge. I absolutely love that movie. So when I was writing my book, I basically had that soundtrack on repeat.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Incredible.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
There, there is a darkness, but there's also love, but you know, it's quite edgy as well. In terms of books, well, when I was a child, my favourite book was Tom's Midnight Garden. So I was determined to have a book which had ‘midnight’ in it. And to make that make sense in the book. I won't give away anything, but yeah, I love that book. Oh my God, you know, I must have read it 10,15, 20 times. And I think this is why, you know, kids' books are so important. They form us, they shape us as, you know, Will was saying.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Catherine, I know you've talked about I Capture the Castle as being one of your all-time faves - for me as well. It’s such a gorgeous book. So how do you think that or other books influenced your writing?
Catherine Airey:
Yeah, I Capture the Castle. I think I first read it when I was supposed to be revising for my GCSEs but I was so addicted to reading this book and just had to keep reading it and I was like hiding it behind my school folder, and sort of stayed up really, really late reading it. So that was, I think that was a really a good one for me I think because it was because it's written in the voice of like a 16 year old girl, and they're in diary entries and she's just talking about her family and I think I kind of thought, you know, like, oh, she has quite an eccentric bohemian family that I didn't have, but it was nice to just sort of realise that you can just write about things that are really close to you and it can still be really interesting and it can still be really well drawn. I don't know if you have this Will? One thing I really struggle with now as an adult is if you're like in a big group, say like at a dinner party, and you're in the middle and there's like a conversation here and there's a conversation here and my writer brain so struggles with not being able to keep abreast of both and it just like puts me into this like I wouldn't say it's anxiety but I'm just like uncomfortable with not being able to do both.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, I want to be in every single room at a party because I know there’s an interesting story. One of my best friends, she's clocked me now, and she'll, we'll be like at dinner or something, and someone will say something or we'll be telling a story and I get this look in my eyes and she'll be like “stop it” like she knows, she's like, “I know that you are recording this in your head, you're gonna go to the bathroom and you're gonna write”.
Catherine Airey:
Yeah, I always go to the bathroom too just being like if it's not doing that, you don't find someone who has this like story thing you're like, I'm just gonna go to the toilet now and then you like go into another room.
Rhianna Dhillon:
How much do you genuinely just record from real life because you know, what's that term? It's come up in another book about, you know, like when it's about your own life and it's your first book and it's not quite autobiographical.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Auto fiction
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes, exactly. And also people always talk about your first book is, you know, so much of you and how, do you think that's true or do you think that's a myth?
Catherine Airey:
I think for me, I was trying to do something that wasn't that because I'd always like written my diary and I would write short stories and I would put I guess like a lot of myself in them and I was really, I felt like I'd put a lot of practise into like how I wrote and what my voice was like and all of that, but the idea for me of writing a novel and writing fiction and not being about me felt like quite a hurdle. So, I think with Confessions I was sort of trying to prove that I could do that, but definitely bits of myself seep into it like I do feel connected to the characters I think because they sometimes think like I would or they would notice things like I would. So I think yeah, it's a blend of the two and it is really fun to see how bits of yourself go into something even when it is fiction.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Yeah, I would say, I'd say every one of my characters is certain aspects of myself or just mixed up in their own way. So I can see me in all of them actually. And when I was writing, especially early drafts, I was really surprised at what was coming out. I was like, oh, I didn't know I liked that, or, you know, it was like, oh, I didn't know this. So there was one draft which I don't think has actually made the cut, but there was a lot of stuff about cars and I was like, I didn't know I liked cars so much.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Do you like cars that much?
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Apparently, apparently I do somewhere.
William Rayfet Hunter:
In your subconscious somewhere!
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
And I honestly, I think especially the early drafts were a form of therapy where you're really digging into yourself and thinking, well, this is who I am, this is who I am. So I think if you write a book, there are aspects, I mean, I have to say that my family and friends now are wary about what they say in front of me. They say “that is going in the book, isn't it?” And I'm like maybe.
William Rayfet Hunter:
That's not good enough. That’s not interesting enough to go in the book!
Catherine Airey:
People are always telling me to do it because I don't do it in the way like if you have those conversations with people they'll then be like, oh, “do you want to put that in your book?” and I'm sort of like, no, you're not actually that interesting.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, totally.
I'm a little bit wary about people seeing the narrator as me.I think like you were saying, like all of the characters in the book are versions of me. They all came from my head and my subconscious and even the antagonist and the there's no villains, well, there's maybe there's maybe
Rhianna Dhillon:
There is a villain! I was basically booing.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, there is some booing to be done, and maybe some hissing too. But even then, they're like extensions of kind of the worst parts of me and like when someone says something really unkind, that's like the unkind thought in my head, you know, so I do see it kind of like this, this like pantheon of versions of me, yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And tell us, so your narrator, we deliberately haven't talked about him much, but he doesn't have a name. So tell us about that decision and also how you refer to him in your head then.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, so no, he's not named, he's called variously Darling, white boy, mate, son and boy sometimes for the ruder and more ominous characters. And yeah, it was a deliberate decision because a lot of the novel is about him trying to find out who he is. He's trying to escape from a past version of himself and run towards a future that he thinks he's found in the Blake family. So by not naming him, it allows the other characters to project an identity on him when they name him. So Jazz, who is a Nigerian character, her name for him is white boy because he's mixed race and he doesn't get the cultural references. He's not grown up in this like super black environment, so she like characterises him as that. And I also I kind of didn't want to name him just because no name that I found seemed to suit. And yeah, some people who've read it have said they kind of realised towards the end they're like “Wait, what’s his name?” and then it's not there, so I think hopefully it works.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I think that is really interesting because I don't trust people who use my name too much either.
Catherine Airey:
Oh my God, it's so weird. Like some of like your best friends and you say their name in your voice and you're like that is weird yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Or like your partner or like whoever and your parents. Speaking about projections, how explicit are you in your descriptions of your characters and how much do you want readers to bring their own interpretations? How much do you want to be like, I want you to have my fully formed character in your head?
Catherin Airey:
Mine are very rarely described physically in terms of like hair colour or eye colour or like, I'm actually not somebody who like sees very visually in my head at all. I'm very, it's very wordy in there I guess. But I think kind of similar to the no name thing I'm not sure it's like what I'm the most interested in terms of what I do with my writing. I'm much more interested in like how people feel or what they're thinking.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
I am the same really. Trying to think, most of my characters actually, I think there might even be maybe one or two lines about what they look like, because again, I don't really care, and it's only if it's a plot point,
Rhianna Dhillon:
For example, Maisie, your main character is ethnically ambiguous for quite a long time. Until yeah, we do find out a little bit more information. But that, I thought, was kind of really powerful because especially as somebody who often, like people don't often know where I'm from, and so yeah, I imagine that yeah exactly, exactly.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
So it's the thing I always get, “Where are you from?” So I did want a character who we don't really quite know, she has no idea. We don't know. So there are little clues in there throughout and we find out towards the end, you know, but by that point she's already in our heads. Yeah, it's not.
William Rayfet Hunter:
For me, in this novel specifically, appearance is really important.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes, I could picture your characters so, so clearly.
William Rayfet Hunter:
I go quite heavy on the description of them for a number of reasons. One because the book essentially is about how whiteness constructs itself as a structure and how it maintains that structure. And so it's predicated on difference and on appearance and on keeping up appearances. So, the narrator, one you're in his head the entire time, and it's from his point of view. And two, he's being constantly reminded about how things might look and how he might come across, and he's quite self-conscious. The book really leans into the signifiers of difference and the signifiers of status and class and a lot of that is at first appearance, and it's about taking things on face value and then the novel tries to peel back the layers and it's about what is hidden and what people are trying to hide. So yeah, in this novel appearance is really important.
Rhianna Dhillon:
If kind of like writing a book seems just insurmountable for somebody out there who has kind of got ideas but just the thought of sitting down to write just seems a bit much, do you have any advice of how you could break it down? Also, you guys, you especially have different perspectives coming in and out, you have different timelines. I imagine that might be almost easier to approach than just kind of coming at it from one character telling an entire story. I might be completely wrong having never written a book but…
Catherine Airey:
I'm trying to write a single perspective novel at the moment, and I think I'm finding it hard because of that, and I think there was something nice about having different ones to go to when you got stuck and they would sort of like not speak to each other like directly, but they would shed light on what was going on in the other perspectives I think. And I think that was easier for me to approach. But at the same time, I will say there are a lot of challenges with trying to create a multi perspective sort of, piecing together narrative. But yeah, if any of you guys have any advice on the single, more of a single perspective because I'm really struggling.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
In terms of feeling that it's a big, long slog, I would say yes, it was for me. It took me 10 years from when I got the first idea to when it will be out. So it's almost exactly 10 years. What I did was that I just wrote the first draught. I had an aim at each stage, right? Write the first draught, write the second draught, write the thirrd draught. Yeah, and just like have it in like bite size chunks. Otherwise it's too much. It's a lot. It is a lot, you know, and then after you do get an agent, you have to edit it maybe 3 or 4 times. So it's just doing it in stages, I think it's otherwise the mind cannot cope, I think.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I think that's really good advice. Will, as, as the only one on the panel with a single voice narrative…
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, something that I found really helpful was just changing which bit I was writing. There’s like a bit towards the end where something quite dramatic happens and that came to me really early on and I've been writing this, I'd written the first chapter ten times, and I kept going back to the start of it, and editing it loads and I was driving myself to distraction. And then this like image from the end, like near the end, just flashed into my head and I was like, OK, I'm gonna write that and then I did that with a few different bits that I just knew what they were, I knew what they happened, there were these little set pieces and they had to happen for the plot and they were really clear in my mind, so I was like, OK, I'm just gonna write that. And so by writing bits at the end, I was like, OK, this person has to become this person so where in the middle, where in the weeds does this process happen? So I found that really helpful. And yeah, in terms of trying to finish something. Do not make the mistake that I made. Plan your novel. Write just a brief plan, even if it's just a page. I just, I was freewriting, and it was, it was hellish. I was like, oh, I'm just gonna be organic, I'm gonna let these characters make decisions, and I ended up writing myself down a rabbit hole for like 15,000 words, and then was like, this isn't the story I was trying to write, this is getting way out of the world I wanted to create, and I just had to take it all out. I like sat for like 4 weeks with complete writer's block and was like, I don't know how this novel finishes. And then I was like oh, it branched off and I just have to put this 15,000 words in a folder saying maybe use this for something else and just get rid of it. So plan your novel because that might not happen. It still might.
Catherine Airey:
I was gonna ask you actually like that going over the first chapter bit loads of times, like do you think there's value in that anyway? Like I really don't know where I stand between the sort of struggle and the planning and like what what's good and what's bad.
William Rayfet Hunter:
I like, I self-edit a lot as I'm going, and every time I sit down, and it's a bad habit that I'm trying to move out of, but I start at the start and I read up to where I am, and when you've written like 100,000 words, I'm like I maybe don't want to read this ever again. So I'm not gonna do that next time around. But it did mean that I had two edits, basically, and then, and then the final draught,
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Yeah, sorry, I was actually gonna say, yeah, I mean my like first book I didn't plan, which is why I think there were so many edits. So I just went into it going, yay, let's just write. What I don’t do is, I make myself not write the end because it means that I've got a treat. So I'm like racing to get to the end, like racing towards it going, I want to write the end, I want to write the end, but yeah, I think with my book two, I've planned it a bit more, so hopefully fewer edits.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you so much. This has been so insightful and really helpful, and will you be able to hang around for some listener questions?
All:
Yeah!
Rhianna Dhillon:
Excellent. We’ve had so many.
OK, so we've got one from Paper and Word which says - love this question - I'm about to open an independent fantasy bookshop, and I would love some fantasy recommendations.
William Rayfet Hunter:
OK, I actually, I really, really love Juno Dawson's series, Her Majesty's Royal Coven. It’s kind of YA, a little bit older than YA maybe, and it's about this secret society of witches who run the magical wing of the government and they're based in Manchester and a lot of them live in Hebden Bridge, which is like quite famously like queer witchy town, just north of Manchester. And yeah, there's lesbian witches, there's turfs, there’s like magical threats to the sanctity of the UK and the third one is out and it goes back in time to Anne Boleyn. They're amazing. If you haven't read them, get onto it. HMRC, uh, by, by Juno Dawson. HMRC is great.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
I think there are two that I would say. There is one that's out now, which is, Frances White's Voyage of the Damned. That is a, it is written in a very clever, funny way, and it, it's got a murder in it and I don't want to give away too much, but it is one of those books where when you read it, you're just like thrown into this world and you laugh out loud. And then there's another book which is actually coming out towards the end of this year, which is by Marvellous Michael Anson and it is called First Born of the Sun. And I started to read the first page last night, and it's just, oh, it's just, it's got, everything that I think should be in that type of book. So there's like, you know, lots of magical things and lots of things going on.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wonderful.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
So I say that that is one to look out for, I think in October.
Rhianna Dhillon:
OK, perfect. Thank you, Catherine?
Catherine Airey:
I admittedly am not a huge fantasy reader, and the sort of like more speculative novels that I do enjoy probably I would say would like be more on the sci-fi end than the fantasy end, but I was very, very inspired by when I first read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, I think just because I do really love a sweeping narrative as you can probably see from Confessions where the stories are not sort of directly influenced by each other, but that they do like speak to each other and where they kind of exist as these like separate stories, but you as the reader are picking up on more than the characters in each section can know, so yeah, I think that that's just a really, a really good example where he's playing with form and different times and like magical elements, that's also just, yeah, really good storytelling.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Definitely one to read the book and not watch the film!
William Rayfet Hunter:
On that similar sci-fi fantasy crossover, just anything by Ursula K. Le Guin. Ursula K. Le Guin also has an amazing book on writing called Steering the Craft, and yeah, it's become my bible over the six months, so for anyone who is new to writing or trying to develop their craft or host writing workshops, it's all in there like it is incredible.
Catherin Airey:
There's one I read as well by Margaret Atwood, which is called, In Other Worlds, I think that is also really, really good while we're on the writing about writers about writing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes, brilliant. Thank you. Duncan Robert Illing would like some recommendations for gritty, relatable, and enlightening stories from underrepresented working-class writers.
Catherine Airey:
I've read both of his novels now. It's a novelist called Moses McKenzie, who lives in Bristol, and his first book was called An Olive Grove in Ends, and his second book is called Fast by the Horns, I think. Anyway, I just think he's so brilliant and he's so young and he was like 23 when his first book came out. He just does voice and character so well where you feel like so you're really there and they are like really gritty and a little bit messy and he like writes in dialect quite a lot and yeah I just want to tell everybody about him because I feel like I never really hear his name about but yeah, he's really, really good.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Perfect.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
The opposite end, which is someone who is a classic is Thomas Hardy who, Jude the Obscure. I absolutely love that book. I think I first read it when I was 15 and it's basically about how horrible the rich are. So yeah, Jude the Obscure.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I have to admit, I took, my mum is such a big Hardy fan, but especially Jude the Obscure, and I took that book travelling with me, and it remained unopened and I brought it home with me. It just was not the book to read.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
It's quite hard
William Rayfet Hunter:
I find Hardy really hard. I read that. I was forced to read Far From the Madding Crowd when I was at, for GCSE and I actually love that one. Far From the Madding Crowd. I just remember reading it and like to get me to actually finish it, my mum was like, right, make a game out of it, just underline every time he says the word ‘dark’ and there was like a passage, like a three page passage, and basically the whole thing was underlined. I was like, find another word Thomas! But like on that I think there's a, there's a gorgeous novel called Open Water by Caleb Azuma Nelson, who just writes about like Black British masculinity, like urban masculinity in this like such a tender way that is incredible. And I'll plug one of my Merky Prize winner colleagues, Sufiyan Salaam, whose book is coming out next year. It's called Wimmy Road Boyz, and I have read bits of it and it's absolutely fantastic, and his prose is just like so electric and so fast paced, and yeah, it's one to watch, so like, add that to your to be read for when it's out next year.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Nice. Virginia Wälde would like to know of more books about unconditional types of love against all odds across time, universes, worlds. Like This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar.
William Rayfet Hunter:
Yeah, Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. It is, yeah, a very queer retelling of the siege of Troy, through the eyes of Patroclus and Achilles telling their love story, and it's just, I mean, the story itself is a timeless classic. But the way that she tells it and the way that she rewrites it, it's just like drenched in this eternal love. Yeah, it's really beautiful.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's so interesting because I was like, well, I know that I feel like I know that story inside out and I've heard it from told from so many perspectives, but there is something about going back to a story that you know but just having a completely new spin on it.
William Rayfet Hunter:
It's beautiful and because it focuses on kind of the, I guess the secondary character's perspective and you see them from being a child and you see their love transform from this like childlike platonic love to this fierce romantic love. It's yeah, it's really gorgeous, yeah.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
If you like a little bit of spice,
Rhianna Dhillon:
Always
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
The Outlander books, yeah, yeah, classic.
Rhianna Dhillion:
I've actually never read an Outlander book.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Have you not?
Rhianna Dhillon:
But I get recommended it so often that I feel like I really do need to.
Fiza Saeed McLynn:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it's just such a clever idea as well, and you know, you have the like Scottish history and then you've got French history. It's just how it's mixed up. Yeah, and the love story. I mean, who doesn't love that? It's just great. It really, really lovely.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Catherine?
Catherine Airey:
It's probably a little bit similar to my recommendation on this, which is one of my favourite books of all time. And every time I think I'm gonna return to it and be like, oh no this is a bit naff but I love it, which is The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. And it's just like every time I read it, there's I think the first time I was like, cool, this is time travel, it's a love story, this is so fun. And then the second time when I was thinking more about my own writing I was like how on earth did she do this? And then now when I read it, I'm just like the details here are so good. I've never read such sort of natural like vivid descriptions of a city, so like Chicago and it is so real, just like the textural details, the granular details of these characters and the places that they live in and what's going on like little pieces of like what's going on at the different time points that make it temporally specific. Yeah, I just think it's one of the most impressive novels I've ever read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
You want like you want to see her like workings, don't you? You want to see like where the graph and the bits of thread connect.
William Rayfet Hunter:
If I can do a movie, I know you you're asking for books, but one that just like, yeah, I mean it was really big when it came out, but, Everything Everywhere All At Once, it just deals with that, with love as a force that transcends everything else so well. I sob every time I watch it. It's just so massively done. And yeah, all the acting is amazing and the writing the script is just perfect. It's just perfect.
Catherine Airey:
The opening is so good as well you don't know what's coming and you're just like..
William Rayfet Hunter:
There's like a 5 minute scene where it's just two rocks with subtitles and it moved me to sobs in the cinema, so yeah, if you want a break from all the reading, it's a fave.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Thank you so much to everyone who submitted a question for us this episode and to our brilliant authors, Catherine, Fiza and Will. Confessions, The Midnight Carousel, and Sunstruck are all available now and can be ordered directly through the link in the show notes or picked up from all good bookstores.
I hope if you're thinking of getting writing that this episode has given you the nudge to start and you can find so many more resources for new writers on the Penguin website, as well as our recommendations for the most exciting debut releases in 2025. That's all for this episode and as ever, thank you so much for listening.