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Joining us today is Linda Newbery, the award-winning author of THE SHELL HOUSE, SISTERLANDJoining us today is Linda Newbery, the award-winning author of THE SHELL HOUSE, SISTERLAND, SET IN STONE and AT THE FIREFLY GATE. Below, she tackles some popular Frequently Asked Questions about her latest release, FLIGHTSEND.


"Where do you get your ideas from?" must be the question authors are confronted with most frequently. Many of my novels have begun with a particular place --- real or imaginary --- and FLIGHTSEND is one of them. The village in the story, and Flightsend, the cottage Charlie goes to live in with her mother Kathy, aren't real, but I had in mind the countryside in Northamptonshire, England, where I live --- gently rolling countryside, woodland, stone cottages, sheep-farming. It was the rather tumbledown cottage that first came into my mind, and its position close to a church, and I wanted the main character in my story to be moving there with great reluctance. The circumstances of Charlie's move --- the loss of baby Rose, her mother's split with Sean and resignation from her job --- gradually formed themselves around this setting.

Charlie has no choice but to support her mother, though she feels that Kathy is making a series of disastrous mistakes. At sixteen, Charlie doesn't want to be marooned in a remote village --- how will she have any kind of social life? But what upsets her far more is the rift with Sean, her mother's partner, the father of the stillborn baby. Sean isn't Charlie's dad; her own father left when she was a baby. He isn't her stepfather, either, since he and Kathy weren't married. Now he's gone, and there's no name for Charlie's relationship with him. But Sean has been part of her life for five years; she misses him very badly, and wants him back in her life. I decided to make this painful for Charlie by casting Sean as a PE teacher at her school, and by making him several years younger than her mother; so every day she sees him around the school in a way that feels awkward and uncomfortable for both of them. Of necessity, she's rather mature and capable for her age (as many girls are) but finds herself in turmoil as her feelings for Sean become hard to contain.

Another question authors are often asked is whether their characters are based on real people. Usually mine aren't, but there are two exceptions in FLIGHTSEND. One is Caspar, the lurcher dog, who turns up at Flightsend; he's based on a real-life lurcher (a cross between greyhound and wolfhound, traditionally a gypsy dog) called Jake, with a comically expressive face and lolloping limbs. The other is Angus, who is loosely based on a funny, popular boy I taught years ago as an English teacher; I don't know if this boy has ever tried Morris-dancing, but he certainly did play Bottom, in green tights, with huge success.

FLIGHTSEND must be one of my most English stories, with its village setting, wartime airfields and village fete. I always enjoy the flavour of American rural life in novels I've read by authors such as Jane Smiley, Barbara Kingsolver and Cynthia Voigt, so I hope US readers in turn will enjoy FLIGHTSEND.


-- Linda Newbery