We chat with author Liza North about The Weekend Guests, which is a compulsive, psychological thriller about a group of old university friends whose seaside reunion will end in betrayal and murder.
Hi, Liza! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi, I live in Edinburgh, UK (conveniently the perfect setting for crime fiction!). When I’m not writing psychological thrillers I’m doing my day job as an academic, chasing after my two daughters, running, climbing, or drinking fancy gin.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Stories have always been a part of my life. From when my sister and I were very little, my mum told us tales of her own childhood, her brother and three little sisters and (especially!) her two kittens. My dad read to us every night: adventure stories like the Famous Five, Arthur Ransome, The Narnia Chronicles, and The Hobbit. I started scribbling my own stories in notebooks when I was around nine, but it was a long journey from there to becoming a published novelist.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: I can’t recall the first book I read to myself but I have a very specific memory of reading Anne of Green Gables when I was ten, holed up with my mum and sister at our then-home in London, with the great storm of 1987 raging outside. It’s still incredibly vivid to me, not only because it’s such a beautiful story but because the big cherry tree in our garden came down in the wind, and the two memories are entwined.
- The one that made you want to become an author: To write at all? Any one of those adventure stories that Dad read us when we were kids. To write thrillers? Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: I couldn’t pick just one! Middlemarch, A S Byatt’s Possession, or – thriller-wise – Wilkie Collins’s
Your latest novel, The Weekend Guests, is out January 28th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Friendship; obsession; locked-room drama
What can readers expect?
A dual-timeline location thriller, combining a closed-cast mystery on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast with creepy dark academia in Edinburgh. Aline has summoned her old university friends, Rob, Sienna and Michael, plus partners and families, to her gorgeous house on the edge of a cliff. It should be a perfect reunion: champagne, fancy dinners and windblown beach walks. Only, this being a thriller, it doesn’t turn out like that! Aline has an agenda, they all have memories they would rather forget, and things get very dark as the weekend progresses. The explanation goes back to their time as Edinburgh undergraduates and their increasingly disturbing friendship with PhD student Darryl, who had secrets of his own. Oh, and there’s a big twist…
Where did the inspiration for The Weekend Guests come from?
I was away in the North of England with a group of my husband’s university friends and our kids, standing outside this big old building we’d hired, on a chilly January night. I was just thinking how all our dearest objects in life (our kids) were tucked up safely inside, when my warped thriller-writer mind kicked into gear with a ‘What if…?’ idea. I can’t say what it was without spoilers, but a year or so later, it became a pivotal plot moment in The Weekend Guests.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
There’s a scene in the 2024 strand when the main characters do a night hike up the Pirate’s Path, a twisted, cliff-edge route up from sea to coast path, which is based on a real path in that part of Dorset. I walked it at night myself to get the atmosphere right. That was fairly memorable (although not as eventful as their walk!). In terms of characters, I loved writing Aline and Rob, with their combination of charm and selfishness, and creating the strained interactions between the group of friends. But my favourite part was creating Darryl: getting under the skin of a disturbed character like that, trying to create the necessary blend of sympathy and revulsion.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
The usual challenges of balancing a day job, childcare, life admin, and finishing a book to deadline. I ate a lot of chocolate, went slightly mad, and got very good at getting up early. Other than that, the main challenge was that this had a much more prolonged editing process than my debut, perhaps because it’s written from several different points of view. I did two or three extensive rewrites, but ultimately the book was so much better for it.
What are some of the key lessons you learned between writing and publishing your debut that helped with The Weekend Guests?
That good editing is as important as good writing! I am also constantly developing the planning/writing/replanning/rewriting process to get it right for me. Place was very important in writing my debut, Obsessed (also set in Edinburgh) and I developed that further in the editing process. I had very much the same idea – wanting the location to be a character in its own right – when I started The Weekend Guests, so the unreliable, unique geology of that part of the world became part and parcel of the story. I spent hours walking the coast path and making voice notes, usually with my ever-patient Dad as driver, guide and answerer of questions!
What’s next for you?
I’m just finishing off a draft of my next psychological thriller, a family-based drama set between 1964 and 2024, mostly on the wild northwest coast of Scotland. I’m also experimenting with a murder mystery for the 9 to 13 age group. My 11-year-old daughter reads each chapter as I finish it, and gives me editorial notes!
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up in 2025?
Lisa Jewell’s Don’t Let Him In. Her None of this is True is one of the best thrillers I’ve ever read. I’m also excited about the the next Tilly and Poe book, The Final Vow, by M W Craven. They’re such an incredible double act. I love Janice Hallett’s quirky emails-and-voice-notes narration, so I’m excited for her next book, The Killer Question.
