Rosy Thornton on The Tapestry of Love

July 5, 2010

The 400th birthday party was fantastic – I’ll post a pic later in the week but today, I’m celebrating another event. Rosy Thornton, friend, fellow C19er and member of the RNA has a brilliant new book out. I’ve been lucky enough to get an early copy and it’s a must-read: warm, romantic and it will make you want to emigrate to the Cevennes in France, immediately!

Here’s Rosy to tell you about it.

Sane and normal people, when they come back from a particularly enjoyable holiday, pester their friends with their holiday snaps. ‘Look where I went,’ they say. ‘It was so beautiful. If only you’d been there – honestly, you’d just love it.’ But novelists, I’m afraid, are not sane and normal people.

Twenty years ago now, I spent a fortnight’s family holiday in the Cévennes mountains of the French Massif Central. We rented a funny little stone-built cottage, dark and almost windowless, high up in the hills in a tiny hamlet, reached by the twists and turns of endless winding hairpins. It was the most glorious, remote and peaceful place on earth. We took pictures – here is one of them. See how beautiful?

But my novelist’s version of pressing photographs on longsuffering friends was something bigger, a more sustained assault. I wrote a 120,000-word novel about it.

As with most ideas for books, I’m not quite sure of the process by which it came about. I suppose the landscapes of that holiday must have femented quietly inside me for two decades, until they hardened into the image of a house, a village, some characters, a story. The eventual outcome was The Tapestry of Love, which traces the steps of Englishwoman Catherine Parkstone as she moves to start a new life in my imagined hills.

To the uninformed observer, it might appear to be a perfectly ordinary novel. It has a setting, a cast, a plot. Catherine faces the usual challenges and conflicts required of fiction: she makes friends, she makes curtains, she faces doubts, she falls in love.

Only I know the secret truth: that the book is actually the literary equivalent of my holiday snaps.

Comments

1. On July 6th, 2010 at 4:43 am
   Sam Says:
   

   Hmm, it’s so inconsiderate of you, Rosy, inflicting this on us…:):)

   Good luck with your book and its gorgeous cover. I always swear i’m moving to France, after i’ve visited. Provence or the Cote D’Azur is for me. Just need to win the lottery first…

   Sam x

2. On July 6th, 2010 at 7:24 am
   Rosy Thornton Says:
   

   You MUST go there, Sam!

   Thanks very much for giving me the airspace to blather about the book, Phillipa – it’s much appreciated.

   And sorry about that ‘uniformed observer’! I am a completely hopeless typist. I meant ‘uninformed’, of course…!

   Rosy x

3. On July 6th, 2010 at 7:45 am
   Phillipa Says:
   

   I just edited the uniformed 🙂

4. On July 6th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
   Debs Says:
   

   Gorgeous photo and I love the sound of this book too.