I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of The New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast. We're back from our brief Labor Day hiatus. I hope you had some time off. I hope you use some of that time to maybe read a book or two. The fall season is finally upon us, and I can tell you it's about to get very crowded, book-wise. So, if you need a bit of guidance, in terms of what to look forward to, you should definitely check out our
full previews at nytimes.com. We'll tell you about the fiction, poetry, the non-fiction that should definitely be on your radar over the next few months. And one of those books, if you're a mystery fan, will likely be death at the sign of the rook by Kate Atkinson. This is the sixth novel, starring Atkinson's beloved private eye, Jackson Brodie, and on this week's episode, Sarah Lyle, who's fresh off many weeks covering the Paris Olympics, speaks with Atkinson about her new novel.
I'm Sarah Lyle with the New York Times Book Review, and I'm delighted to have on the podcast today the British writer Kate Atkinson, the author of numerous novels and short story collections. Her debut novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitreds Book of the Year Award in 1996. In the 2010s, two of her other novels, Life After Life and Its
Sequel, A God in Ruins, won the Costa Award for Best in the Year in Britain. She's written six books in a series featuring a much-tested private investigator named Jackson Brodie. The earlier books were made into a TV series starring Jason Isaacs. Life After Life also was made into a television series two years ago. Or here to talk about her new Jackson Brodie book, it's out now. It's a cause for celebration for Atkinsons and for Jackson's many fans. It's called Death at the Sign of the Rook.
Kate Atkinson, welcome to the Book Review Podcast. Oh, thank you very much to me. What brought you back to Jackson Brodie after all these years? You wrote four, the first four books in the series, kind of one after the other. And then there was a nine-year gap. I wrote it in lockdown. And it was just a good book to write to me lockdown because at the end I was collecting the characters so they in turn would all be locked down in
the south at the end. So, and I think I wanted to write a book, it was so funny. I wanted to write something amusing. I just did want to amuse myself in lockdown. And for years and years, I've said that I was going to write a motor industry. I think every time I've ever done an event, people say, what's it writing that? So I go, well, I'm writing this man's dream. I never did. So I go, right, that was a good time.
And it had been percolating for a long time. I'd even heard the title at least ten years ago, you'd mentioned it. And so was this a case of you had the title and then you figured out what to to put in it or how did it all unfold? I always have a title, long time before I write a book. And I knew that this was the motor industry title. So, yeah, so it's really just a case of letting it ferment a bit in your brain, I think, before it's ready to be, I don't know, cooked.
The book features elements that are truly farcical and also has a knowingness about its own farce, makes fun of itself for what it's doing as it does it. There's a vicar who's lost his voice, a soldier who's lost his leg, a spot of art theft, some aristocrats, a large mansion and a snowstorm. Did you want to put in stock characters and then make them unstocked characters at the same time? What was going on?
That was the intention. So if you have a classic Christie, you're going to have the bluffal major and the often the militiaman, often the vicar's, normal vicar's in
Christie and that detective, of course. So I did, I wanted to take all of those stock characters and then do something different with them and make them human, I suppose, make them much more like real people than just those ciphers because I think that those classic golden age cram dollars, they just use characters as very flat things to move around. So for the purpose of the plot, and I really love characters, so I really wanted to invest some of real meaning, I think, real feeling as those.
And also you have several characters in the book who are reading a golden age mystery novelist who you've invented, who to my mind sounds like a sub-harr agatha Christie. And they know exactly what she's doing while they're doing it themselves in some way. Where did this fake, not quite, agatha Christie come from? And I wonder also if you read a lot
of agatha Christie as a young person? I read a huge amount of agatha Christie when I was young, because I read everything when I was young, so I wanted those, one of those children. And I still occasionally read agatha Christie, because I do admire her ability to plot. I'm just in awe of anyone who can plot quite honestly, I find plotting so hard. And I think Nancy Stiles, that's her name, which is after Stiles, which is the house and wanted her books.
And the mysterious affair at Stiles, right? Isn't that her first book? Yeah. And Sophie, the housekeeper, art thief in the book, he's called Sophie Greenway after her house down in Devon, Agatha Christie's house in Devon, and the two Labrador, Lady Melda's Labrador, the Tommy and Tom Saffer to your purpose. So I thought I was to think that it's a very self-referential book, much more than I would normally do, because I just started.
It was a slightly unhinged book, and it could carry that kind of, not exactly irony, but just knowing this, I think. I think that's the generally used. I think it knows what is trying to do itself. It's almost like the novel is a character in the book. I'm surprised to hear you say that you find plotting difficult. I think one of the things. It's so exciting. Well, as a reader, I'm so impressed often by how complicated your plots are, how multi-stranded
they are, how you set something aside and always come back to it at the end. And I wonder when you think of your most complicated books, how did you come, how did you manage to keep the plot going and all these things going at the same time? Do you map it down in advance? Do you do it as you're going along? I don't have anything out in advance. Like, the only things I write down really are timelines, but that's after the fact. Really, that's when I'm stuck in a timeline.
And I just, truthfully, I keep it all in my head because, as soon as something is plotted or written down, it doesn't move forward for me and think it's hard. It's a really hard way of doing it, because you are constantly thinking about it and trying to make it work and getting stuck in it. I get very stuck. I get very frustrated by that method of plotting, because I would so like to have this huge chance on the wall where everything makes sense and you move the things around on it.
You know, yes, that belongs out there. It really is in my head. And I used to do some, I used to call it the big piece of paper, so it would be a big piece of paper. And I would just put everything on and see how it looked. But I'm actually waiting on it. I've some joint replacement and I can't end. So not only can I not sign books at the moment, but I can't do any kind of note-taking at all. And it has made me realize that before I've got, oh, now I never take notes,
everything is in my head. It has made me realize I do take notes, but they're a very specific kind of note. And not being able to do it has been really difficult actually, because I've not for this, not for the root, but as we call it. But for the book I'm writing at the moment, it's been really hard because I've had to move things around a little lot, and I've never been able to really keep track of it. So I just feel at the moment. And I often feel this,
I have to say, that all I'm doing is cutting and pasting and moving things around. And I think that's to me why I kind of shiver at the idea of plotting, because it is quite manual in fact. Every book is different. Every book is completely different. Every book is a learning experience. So there wasn't that sense of the great intricacy of it. And at the same time in lockdown, I was writing Shrine of Gaity as well. So that was a way of just stopping and doing something
else and having the relief of a completely different book. And I did take on more than I could handle on things. I felt like you were having so much fun in this book. I wondered if it was a new era of funness for you. Maybe that's the wrong thing to say. But I was so heartened. I mean, when you go back to Jackson Brody, who I have followed religiously ever since he emerged, you've put him through so much. He's had every woman he's ever met is angry to him. They steal
from him. He's been in a coma. He's had one bad thing happen to him after another. And your books are really characterized by a mix of humor and tragedy. And this book, to me, was the one with the least amount of tragedy. And obviously there are a few people die. But I do think it was to do with lockdown. Because I knew this would, as a concept that this book would be fun. And I did. Yeah, I did have fun. It was fun. That doesn't mean there's a new whole fun act. It's one
of the ways. But I think I invested it with a bit more of that kind of thing. And I'm also nothing bad. I don't think anything bad, how's to Jackson in this, does it? I can't do anything. He gets stuck in an attic. But that's only very brief. I think he manages without being knocked unconscious or having a fight with anyone. Well, that poor other man, you introduced who is so handsome and attractive, but cautious on the head. And of course, he lost
his leg earlier in the war. And he seems to have had a couple of concussions and maybe doesn't end up as bright intellectually as he had been before. What's going to happen to him, do you think? I think he's absolutely fine. I think he recovered completely. Because I did like him a lot because he's kind of rugged hero type, but he doesn't really manage this to become heroic. He does get knocked on the head. I think he's absolutely fine.
I just never quite wrote that. Going back all the way to 1996, when you had published your first novel behind the scenes at the museum and won this amazing British literary award in 1996 for the best book of the year, I went back and read some of the press around there at the time. Of course,
the thing, it was your first book. No, and it heard of you before. It was shocking how much of the press hit on a theme of who is this person that we've never heard of and why does she deserve an award and why did she beat some in Rushdie's The Moors last side in a biography of Gladstone by Roy Jenkins. I know you've spoken a lot about that time, but I wonder when you look back on it, how do you see what happened then and how has it affected the course of your career since then?
I am really surprised in retrospect how much attention was given to it. I just think, was this a particularly slow news week that they needed to make the whip-read into a bigger news item? Because now you can win the book and it passes by everybody entirely. It's the literary prizes here are not news, but that was, I suppose, the Salmon Rushdie element of it caught their attention. I do remember beforehand, because there are five books in contention in different
categories of poetry and biography. I remember someone saying, oh, what do you think your chances are, your chances are so slim, basically. I remember there's five books that were all one of them going to win. I never really saw it like that because I was very naive about publishing. It was very quickly from it coming out in hard back to it, going into paperback and going on to win. So I hadn't done any events. I had done no publicity because nobody wanted to know because it
was an on-no-rice. So it was, I hadn't had that kind of baptism of fire. We did post the prize. We did for some reason, I never understand a lot of interviews. Now we would be infinitely more selective about it. We did. I think the publisher wanted publicity. I mean, they were so excited that you'd won. Yeah. They never won an elementary prize before. They're a commercial publisher. I'm still with them. They're like commercial plumbers. They never won an elementary prize. There was
used to say we sell books. We don't win prizes. Suddenly they won a prize. I think that was a bit short. I think it was as much a short to them as it was to me, actually. Probably less of a short to me, you know what? Hillary Mental wrote a piece about it in the London review of books that felt to me like a rousing defense of you and a scolding of all the things that had happened. And she said, your book made most English fiction look chloretic, green sick, and exhausted
swooner, fanning herself in the twilight of a tradition. Just when you think you've begun to understand how her book works, she will undecieve you. She's not so much standing on the shoulders of giants as darting between their legs and waving their own agenda. Did you ever meet her and talk to her about her piece? I met her incredibly briefly after the whip, but because she was one of the judges. We had a kind of a slight relationship. I always admired her, capacity to put things in words,
and not just in books. I'd look at that now and I think she was almost up for a fight. But you've seen you have made a real decision to remain apart from the London literary world. You live in Edinburgh. You don't really participate in lots of festivals or do reviews and things like that. Was that partly a response to what happened to you with that initial book? I do. Thanks, so. I mean, that's too fact. The fact that I don't live there is a huge factor,
so that my navigation invited the things. So maybe if I live there, I would get invited to think. And everyone's told me how old I was when I won the Wittner. I was 43. In a way, although I don't think a bit of starting length, I kind of did. And I think I just have priorised writing, because there's a lot of books I want to write. And if I'm doing all that social stuff, which I don't really enjoy, then it cuts into your writing in all sorts of different ways.
You did the BBC Radio Program Desert Island Discs a few years back. And I was so struck by the fact that you said, do you thought you'd be quite happy on a desert island in part because you quite like being alone? I think I'm a very solitary person and I just don't enjoy all that kind of chat, chat, chat. Sometimes when I do go out and do it, I'm like, well, the whole world out, there are people just speaking to each other all the time. But I'm happier
being my own nest and thinking about my own writing. I'm an only child, so you learn very young, either to go mad or to embrace it. And I was a very early reader, so I was, yeah, I'm still pretty happy not having too much traffic with the outside world. In Desert Island Discs, for people here who haven't heard it, you're invited to choose the pieces of music you would most like to have with you, were you ever to be on a desert island by
yourself for eternity. And I wondered, is it, I mean, I feel like it's something that many British people have been hoping all their lives. They would get to make that choice. Had you thought of your pieces of music beforehand, had changed it around? I had my eight records of four years, but they changed all the time. You can now, I'm thinking, John, I would have
computer for the list now if I did it again. And they give you on that program, the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible, and they ask you, if you'd like another book, they let you bring another book. And you said you wanted the complete works of Emily Dickinson,
her poems and her letters. And I remember, I chose the computer works of the Metac physical poets, so it just, it was you, clearly, I just thought either the Metac physicals or Emily Dickinson would take so much unraveling mentally that we would keep you occupied, whereas if you take a novel, that's it. It's a, you really once, you know it, but I mean, with Emily Dickinson, I don't know, my, my agent recently gave me the really good three-falling set of the complete poems. And I
had realized that I thought I had the complete poems, but I didn't. These were all annotated. I thought I'll read a poem a day, but that's gone by the wayside. And I was thinking, God, those early poems are rough. I haven't yet got to, I mean, I do, I love Emily Dickinson's poetry. I think she's an amazing poet, but she's obviously quite, I mean, she was an extraordinary interior person. She got off doing any housework. She stayed in her room. She never answered the door.
She was, this was like my work is serious. And I think I really, I think that's one of the things I had my most about her isn't so much a poetry. It's her lifestyle, her determination to write poetry, to be in the reflection of her inner life, not a lot of extraneous stuff. And of course, one of the titles of your, one of your Jackson Brody books comes from a poem of hers. A long time. I wanted to write a novel that had an Emily Dickinson first night line as a title
for no good reason to put out into a museum myself. And that's the reason of that book that Jackson gets a door. Because the title is started early, took my dog, right? So you had that title first, and then you had to find a book to fit into it. I heard a fly buzz when I don't know, and I thought that's not going to really want, make people want to read that book. But dogs, I started early to
my dog. It says, very intriguing. He gets a dog. He also has a very uncharacteristic liking for Emily Dickinson poetry in that book just to make some reason for the title, which she sees. Never read an Emily Dickinson poem since, as you said, or even mentioned it, but by titles, don't always look as if they belong with the books that they're with. I have to say a lot of your books do feature dogs. I wonder, do you have a dog? No, I don't. We have a dog in the family. My
eldest daughter has a dog. So I get some dog time. A long time since I've had a dog, always had cats no longer. That's gone to you. Really like dogs. A dog's really like me. Then I wonder this instance. I think I have dogs, pheromones. You mentioned that you were an only child. And I know you grew up in in Yorkshire, in the north of England. And your parents weren't literary. They were working classes at the right way to describe them. It was shortkeepers,
different. They came from the working class as a English lovely classist. But shortkeepers are all aspirational. Shortkeepers are transitional. They change class. They become middle class. So a working class parent is going to end up with a class child. Because you make sure they're educated. Did they keep books at home that you started with? Oh, they had books. They had things like the readers digest, come to a snowball, which I'm very fond of. I really used to enjoy reading
those. And you had the class six, but you didn't have, you look at the books that children have. Now it's just unbelievable, corny copier, but you didn't have that when I was a child. So I did read textbooks, can and a care. So Alice in Wonderland, you know, you didn't invite in that sort of thing? No, I didn't. No, I never looked at it. I didn't. I read one, not deep book, and I thought, this isn't for me. But when did the willows and what if it all the fairy stories? I really loved
fairy stories. I think they had a very deep influence on my writing in some way. In what way? I think because they made me appreciate fantasy, that peace of writing, a text does not have to reflect the actual world as it is, because that would be something else, that would be a documentary type of writing, so that you are given freedom for crazy things to happen. And you can modify the world in any way you want. I think that was an important lesson. So I mean, all chapter,
literature, just like that is all crazy. It's just mad. The animals that are talking and the people that are doing well, it's interesting how much certainly classic, which also does literature, just ranks up the imagination of a child in a way that I wonder if it's entitled to see,
because it's all other world there that you don't know, even have it. I think it gives you an understanding, there's a possibility of other worlds, and there's a kind of quantum mechanics about children's fiction, there are other realities there are other worlds, and you can make them if you write, I think that's the thing, because what a writer does, a writer creates a little world, a book is a world, and I think you get to be garbage for the space of a book, and I think that's
really a powerful motivator. We'll be right back. Welcome back to the book review podcast. I'm Sarah Lyle, and I'm speaking with a British
writer Kate Ackinson. In 2013, you published Life After Life, which some people think of as your masterpiece, and it's a book in which the main character repeatedly dies is born again, isn't fully aware of her previous lives, although she has a sort of intuition often of something weird going on, and it's really a book in many ways about trying to improve on the past and change
the future. The year it was published, it was on The New York Times's 10 Best Books of the Year List, and we recently did a best novels of the 21st century so far, and it appeared as number 51, and I wonder when you look back on it, do you feel like that was a big leap forward for you in your progression of books? I always was wanting to write Life After Life, I wasn't
sure about what structure it was, but I wanted to write about the book. I wasn't ready to win away Jackson, it was just a way of passing time until I was ready to tackle a really big topic. This is World War II, we're talking about, yeah. I think I'm really interested to write, was the one that came after which is a god in ruins, and in a way Life After Life is my way of rehearsing for that. In a way that as a reader, you probably couldn't see or understand
books. Can you explain that a little bit? What do you mean by that? Well, Life After Life, I felt I had to be ready to write about the war and to be able to tackle it seriously, so, and to give it its heft, it deserved, but what I really wanted to write about was the bomber campaign, which is in the book after a god in ruins. It's not true. I want to thread both of them.
They go together for me. One is the one is the campaign on the land, if you like, it's the blitz, and the other one is really the people who are also creating the blitz between the other country. And I think I was in my mind, so a god in ruins was a better book, where I still do, nobody else does, but that's what it's a much better book as far as writing is concerned, I think. People love the structure of Life After Life. Well, it's so cleverly, as going back to plot,
plot again, it's so cleverly plotted. I mean, you really are disciplined and how you pick up things and change them a little bit, but not entirely from version after version. I have to say something here that will shock you because every single time I say it, people go, no, it's really easy to write. There was no plotting. She lives, she dies, she lives, she dies ahead. This wonderful rhythm that just went on because I knew where I was going. I was going to the blitz,
which is the heart of the book, and that's kind of the horror. And then I was moving away from it, and I knew every life she would learn because all fiction is about coming to self-knowledge, everything, and so about that. And I think it was easy, it was one of the easiest books I've ever
written. I know the shocking. I've always thought that your title behind, the title of your first book, Behind the Scenes of the Museum, was a sort of perfect encapsulation of what you're talking about, which is the outside image that is being shown to everyone and what's really going on inside. And underneath, can you talk a little bit about how that title came about, what you were doing with that?
I'm trying to think, I wrote a story, but I can't think it was called Slow Fethers, and that was the chapter where Gillian dies. And I knew that I needed, I wanted to write a novel, but I wasn't in a place in my life where that's impossible. So I was writing bits and pieces and stories, and I had the whole archipelago. I knew I wanted it to be a bad family. And originally, I wanted to start with the Stone Age and end at the end of the world. And I thought, no, it involved into
there being an object in every chapter that then had another meaning. It was about individual, small, individual histories against a much bigger background, but I didn't think of it like that. I just thought of it as like something I was, I wanted to write, maybe I needed to write. And I think in that original one, Slow Fethers, that chapter, that was when, you know, how writing groups and people always say, oh, you have to find your voice. Oh my god, just
they had cloaks to the entire time. And I never thinking, oh, that's my voice. And I think that gave me the confidence to think of it as a novel, but it was still stories. And I went to that prize giving for, I want a different prize giving when I'm around a different story, which is nothing to do with behind the scenes. And I took my friend, Maureen, and I said, I need to find an agent,
right? And there were agents at this prize giving and Judith Mordok, who was my first agent, came up to be and said, do you have a novel in the drawer, which is, I'm like, well, it's not in the drawers in my head. I can give you three chapters, I can give you the first three chapters. And she had an auction and transfer of water. And that was that. And it went from being
incredibly long slow process to being very fast at the end. And there was a bit of a, oh, okay, and the whole journey for behind the scenes was strangely fast and winning the wet bread and all of that. It just happened very quickly at the end. But I'd thought about that book for a very long time. But I had a dream about it was a great museum in York, one of those times. There's two great museums. There's the best museum in the world, which is the National World
Museum and talked to me about trains and I'm all over. And the other one is a throat museum. And I knew that museum really well because my father used to take me from a very young age. We used to go there. And I had this dream that was walking on my own in the dark through that museum. And every time I passed through one of the rooms, everything came to life. And I woke up and I thought, that dream was called behind the scenes at the museum. I've never had a dream whether to either.
I've never had such a helpful dream. And I thought, oh, that's a title of the novel. So obviously came from a very deep place. And then my good old trans world said, oh, it sounds like it's a, I'm going to belongs in a library. Maybe you could think of a different title. And I was like, well, if you can think of one, because I was so not in control from my writing career at that point. But they went with it in the end. Isn't that interesting? I had always thought there was a real
museum exhibit that you'd seen. I didn't realize you dreamed it. That's so wonderful. I know. I was just a little bit like, I don't know if you ever saw those kids movies night at the museum where it's not quite the same as you're novel. We have, if you have the children's ride to Jan Pankovsky, but he used to do these when my children was more, these pop-up books. And it was very much like that suddenly the fire came to life. They all started moving that kind of thing. So
it was very very interesting. It feels very Alice in Wonderland, doesn't it? I mean, that came, that's all about a dream and things, cards, for example, coming to life. Yes, what is surreal behind reality, I think? It's because it's useful. It's a useful dream. Your detective Jackson Brody has a saying, coincidence is an explanation waiting to happen. And I wonder if that is something you've come across in your own life.
Oh, I do think there's a lot of coincidence in life. Writing is about coincidences. There'd be no nozzles if it wasn't coincidence. And I think there really would be no friction without coincidence. And I think I just quite like taking it to the limit in a way. But I do think there's probably things that happen in life that are much more outrageous that you would never believe that are actually true when it comes to coincidence and anything that you find in a novel.
So, and maybe it's not always quite coincidence, but it's things that happen where you hadn't been walking in that place at the time or if you hadn't been met this one person, you wouldn't have met the other person who you ended up marrying or whatever. Maybe that's a little bit of it as well. There's past not taken. If you're starting that, then you go mad, I think. So, I think these things also just gather around each other anyway. You've said also that you often have a number of books
going through your head at the same time. How does that work for you? And how do you give in that you're not writing things down, especially not now? I'm very sorry about your thumb. Painful thumb is terrible. How do you keep them all straight in your head and what sort of mulling around in your head now? Well, anything that's the back of my head is not troubling me, because I'm not actively thinking about it. I'm just passively letting it do whatever it wants
to do. Just be brought into the light when it's appropriate, I think. So, I mean, at the moment, I write you a book set in 1951. It's interesting, I'm 50, one, on a new each time I spend on it. Because I'm obviously obsessed by the year of my birth. I think transcription was set in 1951. We had in this country, not this country, I mean, Scotland, but in England, in Britain,
they would be annoyed with me, the people who did this festival for saying that. In Britain, we had the festival of Britain in 1951, which was a kind of a post-war, let's move forward kind of thing. There's a lot of design, a lot of geology went into it. Newspaper design exhibit. So it was immensely popular and it's completely very ephemeral. Got taken down the date finished and there's only one building left that was the festival hall, there's only building left from that.
And I started, I don't know how I started thinking this would make a good novel, because that's where novels start. You just think, I mean, it would be a great novel. And you have to really hang on to that thought, because this time, months and months down the line, when you're thinking, why did I think this would not be great? But with this, I must have had that thought at some point,
and thought this would make a great novel. And I just read a lot about it. And I just thought it was, there was so much eccentricity attached to it that I just attached to the festival. And you had something called the eccentric corner in the line and unicorns, the elements in curly patriotic sort of festival. And I wish they had a call out for people to send things in that those thought would fit well in the eccentric corner. So everyone in Britain
was sending in these ludicrous ideas. There was a rubber bus. It was a smoke grinding machine. I was so obsessed with the smoke grinding machine. How, what, why? There were things like that, ridiculous things. And I think I just caught onto the ridiculous element of it, because the book I'm writing is, I think it doesn't have a murder in it, but it's not a really serious book.
And I think I just wanted to write about those ridiculous things. So I haven't written about all the way to topics that the festival of Britain was really about, which was about Britain starting again, after the war was showing Britain to itself very much. This is our industry. And it's hanging onto something, because there's a huge number of exhibitions about things like factoring and all of these things that were just about to go. So it was, there was an element of
kind of nostalgia about it, but also maybe just not seeing the future. We'd just been through a war that was very technological, but we'd had, bletchly, we'd had a computer. We invented a computer that could do amazing things. And we sold it to the Americans after the war. We did, we decided there was no future in computers. Obviously it's future in searching and showing cows milking powder. And it was just, I just got a bit obsessed by it. So that's actually what I'm
working on. And then I'm going to write a book called The Great Wonder of the North, which is the very beginnings of the railway in 18, oh, something probably won't go beyond 1820. So I've never gone that far back. It gives you a lot of freedom. I've written the first chat that put it away. I don't feel like, I feel like the as far as dialogue goes or plot or anything, I have real freedom by going back that far. I don't have to, I know how people spoke in 1951 and I feel I have to put
dialogue in and it reflects that. I think I can just have people speaking anyway I want and I think that the first day, this railway line was introduced to in Britain. There was a great big celebration and then somebody was killed, was hit by the train. In Huskerson, he was a minister in the government, was just stepped out and was killed by the train
that was going, I think, about five miles an hour. But it's not that, it's a very, very first passenger carrying train that I'm interested in, which happened near Middlesbrit in the North and nobody was killed. It's interesting to me because I love trains, but having to know that I've got research ahead of me, this is going to be very difficult because I'm really going to have to come to terms with steam and end. Well, what was the festival of Britain as steam invention machine?
What was that thing you said? Smoke grinding. Smoke grinding. It really sounds like a parody, doesn't it? All your books are characterized. I'm always struck by the incredible juxtubosition of tragedy and humor in them. A lot of parentheticals, a lot of people being in a situation and having a little dialogue with themselves where they comment on it at the same time. I wonder if that's how your mind works as well. Are you commenting all the time to yourself? I'm actually trying to cut
down on the parentheticals. I think there's too many of them. But I'm going for more open direct speech, but I think it's because I write from inside a carriage as head. So, this bound to be commentary in physics because you do your comment on yourself. Well, I comment on myself to myself all the time. So I think that's how most people's brains were. It's also when it may be an effort to see the sort of humor or absurdity in things that can be
very hard. There isn't commenting on that. I think yes, there's a lot of kind of awareness of the blackness of a situation. I think the irony of a situation. So I think I don't know how that whole comedy tragedy thing works. I once tried to write something that didn't have that contrast, that light and shade, and just a serious. And I couldn't do it. So I mean, I tried. So I need that to and fro. I don't know how it works. It's very unintentional. I don't go, oh, well,
that was a serious bit. We need a funny bit now, or we're in the middle of something serious. Let's have a funny call. I mean, it's just not like that. I think it comes from within the character. So that it flows more naturally than something that's planned. Did your parents live to see your first bit to writing published? My mother did. I won, I buried my father the week that I won the whip right, but he'd been ill for a very long time,
and his mind wasn't really there for a long time. So he, no, I don't think he understood that. I also, because it had very quick at the end. So he was already just buried in and not really conscious, meant to so only my mother. And what did your mum think of your work? No, I don't like it. I just don't think she understood. She wasn't a reader. She always felt I'd had a lot more education than her, so that I was, I took after my father,
I was clever. And I think she was scared on that, I think. So having a book published, I mean, I'm sure she did amongst her friends and her peer group kind of, she didn't have some publishing, she didn't have some writing, she didn't have some books. It was all a bit like after the side there of like, why are you doing that? I mean, she did it at one point. After the whip, and say, why don't you get proper job? It was, it didn't, it wasn't in her worldview, I don't think.
I'm sure she was proud of me. She just had no language to say it in. You've talked before about secrets in your family. And one of the most resonant secrets was that you didn't even know really the story of your parents and your birth. And that you learned, I think in your 30s, that your parents had not been married when you were born.
You can have a, well, I don't know what it's like now. You can have a short, birth certificate, or you can have a long one in the short one, it's pretty much where you were born and what you name is. And then the long one has your parents on and their, their profession as well. And a lot more detail. And you know, I needed a long one to get the passport. I must have had a passport, I needed a long one. And I didn't understand it. I was working for a lawyer at the time and I took
it to him and I said, what does this mean? It says, like my mother's got to sell the name like it's formally, whatever. And he said it means she was married before. And then I went to the register. You can request certificate. So I requested my parents married certificate. And then that's what I discovered that they were married long way, a while after I was born. And then I requested my mother's original marriage certificate. So I was too honest to check to work around her
because I was just, I thought, I think my mentor was, it's my father, actually, my father. It seemed it looked more like something marriage after the fact. And why, and obviously they hadn't got like, because she was already married to this man that she married to in the war. He was never been mentioned once ever in my mother's family ever. And she refused to talk about them. And that was very famously, we were watching childs and die getting married. And I had my youngest daughter on
my knee. And she was very small. And I said to my mother, until it says a good opportunity, she was mean, my mother never said she'd been married before. And she's just, that's the great classic line of all time, which was I was going to tell you, but you left the room.
Also, in many ways, some to my mother up with some strange way. I don't know, I mean, obviously it's been a horror to her that first marriage, I think, and probably even more of a horror to her, to be pretending to be married to my father when she had me because you didn't have you, she would have been, I think they would pretend you to be married. And you had to be because you would be so looked down on by your neighbors if you were unmarried and had a child. It's not what you did in
1951. There must have been a lot of shame and fear of being, I mean, their friends, they had shopkeeping friends, different class, who were more sophisticated than them, most visitors, and I think somebody, at least one or two of them was like mentors to my father. And I think he had an infinitely more sophisticated worldview of that kind of thing that my mother did, I think. I don't know, she would, it's not a period of love she would talk about. And if someone doesn't
want to talk about something, you're not going to really just needle them into it. So, I don't really know what went down. You and I spoke after, right before life after life was published in the United States. And I remember really talking to you about one thing that you do to your readers, which is to make us really care about what happens to your characters almost as if they're people. And I know they're not real people, but maybe that's the bind. I mean, as a reader, as I care too much,
maybe the way someone a child cares, reading a child's story. And you said at the time, something like well, to me, they're mostly, you didn't say ponds, but they're mostly ways to talk about things I want to talk about. And I don't really see them as people. And I don't, and you seem to be saying you didn't really care about Jackson Brody either. That sounds very cool. I don't see that's the case because I think if I want to, if I want to me, yes, to care about character, then I will have to
care about that character. You can't just make someone care by being the puppeteer. I don't think. So I think that might have changed writing life after life because I knew that Teddy was going to be very important character in his own book. And everybody loves Teddy. And I love Teddy. And I think it was very important that he was, have that emotional weight to him. And I think I do sound very glib. Don't know because I know from my own reading, I think I have never yet
caught over the death of Ginger in Black Beauty. And I'd be able to move a reader like that. He's a gift, I think, and lots of people say to me, when they got to the end, the Gordon Ruins, they were just in pieces and bits of crying. People were crying. Well, I was only wet as he really did a number on me with that. And I think, yes, that's, yes, as a cruel writer, that is exactly what I want you to feel. But at the same time, I also feel that. So it is a
two-way process. I think I learned very early on when I was writing magazine stories. If you put yourself in there somehow, even if it's the most commercial trivial light-hearted romance, if you don't have that voice, your voice in there somehow, then it's, I don't know, it's kind of a pointless, it's just, it's not serious, even if it's trivial. I think you have to care. And yes, there are characters like Cam over there. And I have very careless with Jackson.
I'm aware of that because I'm just like, oh, won't you go to your thing? I know that you're going to do whatever. So will we be seeing him again at some point? Do you think? Well, I have no media plans. It really upsets people when I say that I would like to send him on a cruise ship. I think that would be a very good thing for Jackson to do. You know, someone's overboard, he's got to go and find out. I love that idea because it's always so hard when people go
overboard to investigate that, isn't it? I know. It's an incredibly common problem because it happens in international waters. And people have got overboard all the time. So I was a guest on board to read Mary doing an Atlantic crossing and it was an eye-opener because I hadn't realized they're just floating old people's homes. And they're just, I think the florist had filled up with bodies
because they'd, the mortuary run out. You could see the widow's lining up at the end. It was so many old people and I think, well, would you throw it so it's staying a set just throws off off in the middle of the earth? That's all. It's been such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for filling me with delight again. I love this book so much. I should make an effort to make you cry. Kate Atkinson, it's been a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you.
That was Sarah Lyle in conversation with Kate Atkinson about her new book, Death at the Sign of the Rock. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the near-times book review. Thanks for listening.