Emma Rous's Blog
January 12, 2021
Publication Day for The Perfect Guests
I’m so thrilled that The Perfect Guests is now out in the world. It’s set very close to where I live, in the flat, marshy Fens in the east of England, and I had a lot of fun writing it. I really hope you enjoy it!
The Perfect Guests
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ8Vm14gX...
The Perfect Guests
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ8Vm14gX...
June 18, 2018
An introduction to THE AU PAIR, and my inspiration for writing it.
THE AU PAIR tells the story of two women.
Seraphine Mayes lives in her ancestral family home, Summerbourne, on the English Norfolk coast. Her mother died there hours after Seraphine and her twin brother were born, and for years Seraphine was taunted at the village school for not looking and behaving like her brothers. The story begins when she’s twenty-five, sorting through paperwork after her father’s death, and she finds a photograph from the day she and her twin were born. The photo shows her parents and her older brother posing quite formally with a baby. Just one baby.
Laura Silveira was a teenager with a difficult homelife twenty-six years ago, and was employed at Summerbourne to look after Seraphine’s older brother in the eleven months leading up to the birth of the twins. Seraphine sets out to find Laura, wanting to ask her why one baby was missed out of the photo, hoping to ease her gnawing fear that she's somehow grown up in the wrong family.
But Laura has her own reasons for refusing to talk about Summerbourne. The events of that year had far-reaching consequences for everyone involved, and when Seraphine does begin to uncover some of her family’s secrets, she discovers there’s more at stake than just her own identity.
THE AU PAIR is my first novel, and the spark for the story came when I was mulling over two separate concepts: the idea of growing up unsure of who you are, and the idea of having an emotional attachment to a physical place.
I’ve always loved stories involving uncertain identities – changelings, disguises, trading places. When I was a child, I loved The Prince and the Pauper, and Freaky Friday, and, as I grew older, The Talented Mr. Ripley. But really – how would you feel if you began to suspect you weren’t the person you'd always believed you were? And if that was the case – are you even sure you'd really want to know?
I’m intrigued, as well, by the concept of having emotional roots in a place. I have no experience of this – I lived in several different countries as a child, and have moved home every few years as an adult. I've always had a close family, so I have no particular sense of missing out. But I’m fascinated by how it might feel to live your whole life in the same house you were born in - especially if this happened to be a grand old house with a murky past!
It was the bringing together of these two lines of thought that sparked the idea for this story. I hope this has given you a flavour of what THE AU PAIR is about, and of what inspired me to write it, and I very much hope you enjoy reading it.
Seraphine Mayes lives in her ancestral family home, Summerbourne, on the English Norfolk coast. Her mother died there hours after Seraphine and her twin brother were born, and for years Seraphine was taunted at the village school for not looking and behaving like her brothers. The story begins when she’s twenty-five, sorting through paperwork after her father’s death, and she finds a photograph from the day she and her twin were born. The photo shows her parents and her older brother posing quite formally with a baby. Just one baby.
Laura Silveira was a teenager with a difficult homelife twenty-six years ago, and was employed at Summerbourne to look after Seraphine’s older brother in the eleven months leading up to the birth of the twins. Seraphine sets out to find Laura, wanting to ask her why one baby was missed out of the photo, hoping to ease her gnawing fear that she's somehow grown up in the wrong family.
But Laura has her own reasons for refusing to talk about Summerbourne. The events of that year had far-reaching consequences for everyone involved, and when Seraphine does begin to uncover some of her family’s secrets, she discovers there’s more at stake than just her own identity.
THE AU PAIR is my first novel, and the spark for the story came when I was mulling over two separate concepts: the idea of growing up unsure of who you are, and the idea of having an emotional attachment to a physical place.
I’ve always loved stories involving uncertain identities – changelings, disguises, trading places. When I was a child, I loved The Prince and the Pauper, and Freaky Friday, and, as I grew older, The Talented Mr. Ripley. But really – how would you feel if you began to suspect you weren’t the person you'd always believed you were? And if that was the case – are you even sure you'd really want to know?
I’m intrigued, as well, by the concept of having emotional roots in a place. I have no experience of this – I lived in several different countries as a child, and have moved home every few years as an adult. I've always had a close family, so I have no particular sense of missing out. But I’m fascinated by how it might feel to live your whole life in the same house you were born in - especially if this happened to be a grand old house with a murky past!
It was the bringing together of these two lines of thought that sparked the idea for this story. I hope this has given you a flavour of what THE AU PAIR is about, and of what inspired me to write it, and I very much hope you enjoy reading it.
