J’AIME JULY/AUGUST 2023

AUTHOR KATIE BISHOP AT HER
NOVEL’S OFFICIAL LAUNCH PARTY
friends are everything to me and as the novel goes
on Rachel increasingly realises how important her
female friends are to her.
“I did a lot of travelling and backpacking when I was
a similar age to Rachel, and what always stands out
to me about how that time felt is this enormous sense
of possibility, with the world feeling so open and
exciting to you. I think inevitably, whatever direction
your life goes in, you’re going to get that sense of
possibility narrowing down because you’re making
choices, settling down.
“And what I really wanted to capture for Rachel is
that feeling that, as an adult, she feels quite trapped,
she’s worried that she’s made some wrong choices
and she’s looking back and idealising this time where
she felt so free and getting very nostalgic about that.
“That’s also tied in with those elements of trauma
that’s such a big theme in the novel. It’s not just that
she’s nostalgic for this amazing, magical experience
of youth, it’s also about the fact that she hasn’t been
able to move on from that summer as a result of the
trauma she experienced.”
The novel splits its time between London and a
remote Greek island, which serves as the setting
for Rachel’s formative, tragic teenage summer.
Beautifully drawn and richly evocative, Katie builds
up a vivid picture of the island itself, transporting
readers to pristine beaches and azure seas with ease.
“Setting, for me when I’m reading, is just the
most important thing; I love a really powerful
setting,” says Katie. “The island is a beautiful,
escapist place but it’s very small and very
isolated; you can only get there by boat so it
feels very claustrophobic at the same time as it
feels like this exciting new world that Rachel is
exploring.
“I was writing the novel in lockdown so I
couldn’t go on a lovely research trip to Greece;
I was stuck in my living room like everyone
else, really wanting to go on a holiday! So I
think that’s one of the reasons why I ended
up setting the novel in this beautiful, escapist
location because that’s where I wanted to be at
the time!”
Now a full-time author, Katie is working on the
follow-up to The Girls of Summer. But it hasn’t
been all smooth sailing.
“It’s been quite a difficult process, which I was a
bit surprised by,” admits Katie. “When you get
a book deal you feel more confident about your
writing and you’ve got the security of knowing
you’ve got a second book as part of the book
deal.
“You have to come up with an idea for a second book
really quickly, because before anyone makes an offer
they want to know what your second book is going to
be. So I worked on this idea for about a year, but my
heart wasn’t in it; I knew it wasn’t the book for me.”
After sending her first attempt at novel number two
to her publishers, Katie went back to the drawing
board.
“It seems like I need to be working on something
else to actually have my best ideas,” she says. “The
novel I’m working on now has got a lot of similar
themes to The Girls of Summer, it’s going to be set
in a beautiful, escapist location again, it covers a lot
of psychological elements and it’s going to have that
dark undertone to it that people seemed to enjoy
with The Girls of Summer.”
And there are more books in the pipeline.
“I’ve got loads more ideas - although you don’t know
until you start writing if they’re good ideas,” laughs
Katie. “But being able to write novels full-time is just
so far beyond anything I ever expected, and such a
dream for me.
“I just want to be able to keep doing this forever.”
The Girls of Summer, by Katie Bishop, is out
now in hardback, published by Transworld,
Penguin Random House. RRP £14.99. Visit
Katie’s website at www.katiebishopwrites.com
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