Saskia Sarginson, author of The Twins, has revealed the inspiration behind her latest book, Without You, in an article for the Irish Times…

…published on Friday.

In the article, Saskia says, “Writing this fictional tragedy created dramatic tension, but also brought out the question of what family is. I wanted to explore where our sense of self comes from and how a family forms the identities of the people within it. I drew inspiration from my own patchwork family, made up of stepsiblings and half-siblings.”

On Without You’s rural Suffolk coastal setting, Saskia writes, “The island where Billy is holding Eva captive is itself an important character in the book. It is based on Orford Ness, a fascinating spit of land that intersects the North Sea and a river. I imagined the real spit wearing away to create my fictional island.”

“Islands in fiction are often magical places. Just think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. They provide intense environments where life is lived in a heighted and distilled way, as in Golding’s Lord of The Flies. This is true of the island in my novel. It’s a place where the rules and timings of normal life cease to exist, and where the unexpected can happen.”

Read the full article here.

Pre-order Without You here.