Novelist and short story writer.
Sarah Bower’s first novel, “The Needle in the Blood” won the Susan Hill Award in 2007. Her second, “The Book of
Love” (published in the US as “Sins of the House of Borgia”) was translated into nine languages and was a Toronto Globe and Mail bestseller in 2009. Her third novel, “Erosion” writing as S. A. Hemmings, came out in 2014. Her short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in a number of publications including MsLexia, Words Without Borders and Asian Cha and has been broadcast on BBC Radio.
Extract From An Interview
“…I’m currently working on a novel entitled Love Can Kill
People, Can’t It? which has three story lines covering life
in England and Palestine from 1948 to 2008. Its principals
are an Englishwoman with a mysterious past which is revealed
to her when she inherits a house on the North
Yorkshire coast, and a Palestinian terrorist. The woman’s
mother and an artisan baker also play key roles. The
chronology is complicated and none of the relationships
works out quite the way you think it will. I am trying, with
this book, to walk the tightrope of reproducing a sense of
the randomness of life’s connections and coincidences
while still constructing a coherent narrative.
There are many challenges for me in writing this book.
Perhaps, to date, I’ve had the most fun overcoming my ignorance
about commercial bread-baking, when the Pump
Street Bakery in Orford www.pumpstreetbakery.com
kindly allowed me to work a shift alongside their bakers.
(And fresh-baked doughnuts for breakfast at 4am after a
long night kneading dough is possibly the closest to
heaven I shall ever get!) My next challenge will be a visit
to Palestine in October when I shall be working on the
olive harvest as part of the Zaytoun Project www.zaytoun.
org.
Of course, the history of modern Palestine is so well documented
one hardly knows where to begin - and in the
news again as we speak, with the Hamas-Fatah agreement
- but a chance to visit the country, to stay with local
villagers and share their lives, if only for a couple of
weeks, will be invaluable to me as a writer in helping me
to grasp what is pretty much ineffable about the atmosphere
of a place - its smells and tastes, sounds and
colours…”