We chat with author Agatha Zaza about The Pretenders, which is a tightly wound domestic drama: six adults gather to celebrate an engagement, but old relationships, buried truths and carefully maintained illusions begin to unravel. When an unexpected figure from the past appears, what should be a joyful occasion becomes a claustrophobic reckoning — and no one leaves unchanged.
Hi, Agatha! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’m a writer, international development specialist and mother living in Helsinki. I wrote The Pretenders while living in Singapore and my first print publication was a short story in an Irish Magazine while I was living and studying in Dublin.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I can’t say it’s something I’ve always done. We wrote stories at school and I have always been an avid reader, I played with writing little stories but I rarely gave them to anyone to read or even completed them. It crept up on my.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Peter and Jane books were still used to teach reading when I was at pre-school, I have vague memories of the one where they go going to the beach.
- The one that made you want to become an author: I used to read Mills and Boon love stories as a teenager and I remember thinking – I can do that. In terms of real motivation, finding out that Sadie Jones was in her late thirties or forties when she wrote her first novel is what made me realise that it wasn’t ‘too late’.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Promise by Damon Galgut tied with Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo.
Your latest novel, The Pretenders, is out April 28th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Edmund, Ovidia, Jasper, John, Anne.
I’d have to add Holly to make it six.
What can readers expect?
A story that cuts close to the bone. It’s about ordinary people who make mistakes, for some of them these mistakes are because they have created their own little fictional universe and can’t really see what’s going on in their real lives.
It’s about a day when each of them (Edmund, Ovidia, Jasper, John, Anne and Holly) finds they have to make a decision about the rest of their lives.
One important theme is how we don’t really see or know the people closest to us. For various reasons we miss vital clues and this is how we get to a day of reckoning – the ‘How did I not know that’ day.
Where did the inspiration for The Pretenders come from?
I’m not sure. The original concept is far removed from what the books became – it involved a mad scientist who wanted to take over the world, that’s about all I can remember. The story started to come to life as I wrote it, even though I had an outline, it changed almost daily. The more I knew about each character the more the trajectory they were on become clearer.
The motivation to write a novel was about self-discovery, setting myself a challenge and realising an idea that I’d played with for years – it was a now or never drive.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I enjoyed every character, every scene and every moment. Exploring is a part of writing for me, I wrote many scenes that didn’t make it into the book but that helped me create the world that my characters live in. Even the auxiliary characters, some of whom only appear briefly were fun to write.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
The first would be that I’ve never seen the part of London that The Pretenders is set in and I don’t know any wealthy Londoners – and I was living in Singapore at the time so I couldn’t just pop over to have a look. I had to rely on the internet for a lot of my research, I used Google Maps to see where the various locations are set. I saw the house itself in a magazine and that’s what actually cemented the location as being somewhere in London.
Overcoming them was part of the fun of writing, I had a Pinterest board and notebooks with all sorts of details. I had to imagine walking into rooms, restaurants and clubs, I had to imagine what these places sounded smelt and felt like while I was in was in the sweltering heat halfway across the world.
Another key is to not overdo the detail. It’s important to strike a balance between what the reader needs in order to have a complete world and extraneous details that could be wrong and lead to confusion or simply make the world less plausible.
What’s next for you?
My next book will be out in July. It’s set in Helsinki (where I live) and I am working on some short stories which may turn into a novel – or not.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I don’t generally look ahead, I walk into a bookshop and I look through what’s there. I’ve lined up Alia Trabucco Zerán’s Clean and Donna Leon’s latest Guido Brunetti.
