Meet Julia Donaldson Summer reading Books of my life - RNIB

Booker bonanza
Booker bonanza: AD Miller
Author AD Miller was shortlisted for the Booker prize in
2011 for Snowdrops, a novel that explores an Englishman’s
experiences during one particularly harsh winter in Moscow.
He spoke to Clare Carson about the book.
How did it feel to be on the shortlist
for the Booker prize?
It’s a wonderful thrill for it to end up on
the shortlist for the Booker prize. I’ve
always wanted to write fiction and this
is my first novel. When I was writing it I
wasn’t altogether sure that it would be
published so it’s not something that you
anticipate happening.
Was the story going on in your
head while you were the Moscow
correspondent for the Economist?
The idea for the book germinated in
Moscow but I wrote the book mostly
after I returned to London. The term
“snowdrops” is a Russian slang word
for a corpse that is buried in the snow
during the winter and emerges in the
thaw in the spring. I guess it grabbed
me both as a stark encapsulation of
the harshness of life in Russia for some
people but also as a kind of novelistic
image with potential metaphorical value.
It suggested to me things that we try
to oppress in our lives that eventually
catch up with us. My book is a first
person book and the narrator is a thirty
something slightly drifting English
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lawyer. I hit upon his voice and the main
image in the book and they were the two
main ingredients.
In the story he gets drawn into a
tangled web of mystery and danger.
Is it based on true fact or is that the
novelist in you coming out?
It is based on true fact in the sense
that the kinds of crime and corruption
that my book describes and the sorts
of vulnerabilities that ordinary Russian
people have, if they don’t have powerful
connections, are real. The other
important part of the story, which is the
suggestible susceptible ex-pat narrator,
is also drawn from real life too.
This book is set specifically in the years
of the mid-noughties before the credit
crunch in the Russian oil boom in which
there was a kind of reciprocal corruption
between some new Russian businessman
and western accountants and lawyers
and bankers who were in town to sort of
service their needs and didn’t always ask
too many questions about the kind of
people they were dealing with and where
the money came from.