Our host Vick Hope is joined by Holly Jackson.
A superstar of crime fiction, Holly has sold over 10 million copies of her books worldwide, with translations in 45 different languages. She’s often described as the “Taylor Swift of books”, and has cultivated a loyal following and highly engaged global fanbase. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder has spent over three years on the New York Times bestseller list and the series is now a major BBC and Netflix production, with Season 2 due for release on the 27th of May. Holly’s other novels include Five Survive and The Reappearance of Rachel Price, and the paperback of her adult fiction debut, Not Quite Dead Yet, is out on the 7th of May.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Holly’s five most influential books by women.
“For me it was the first time I read something that felt like real life – she says with inverted commas as it’s about time travel – and I remember it so vividly and being like ‘oh you don’t have to set a story in a completely different world where there are lots of different rules and stories can be about real people’, and even though this book is about time travel and paradoxes, essentially it’s about a relationship and marriage and it’s relatable in that way and it feels like real life and that’s why I cling to it as an example of just because a book feels like real life and might be more “boring” doesn’t mean that it has to be.”
“Beloved is quite hard to describe because I guess you would call it literary fiction, but it is also kind of speculative – subtly and groudedly so. There’s a ghost, and I do love ghosts, and I just remember this was the first time I read a book and was just bowled over by the prose, by how much of a master Toni Morrison was with words, like read a paragraph and have to sit back and be like ‘wow’, and not in a way that took you out of the book.”
“I find thieves really fun and I remember reading Fingersmith and there was the biggest plot twist ever, I think I was probably reading this when I was a teenager and I hadn’t quite started so obsessively studying story, and reading so widely, and watching so much – I was probably a bit more of a novice. It would be fun to know if it would get me now, but back then the plot twist GOT me, I couldn’t breath, and I thought ‘oh you wily minx, you got me with that’, and I think this book actually had two major plot twists and it pulled them off expertly.”
“I just loved the drama, I don’t know how you would classify this, I guess it’s a satire. I love books that are about murder and are also funny. There’s something that feels almost like a melodrama about it to me, and you know elements would be introduced and I would be like ‘oh I know where this is going’, and then it would happen and I would be still be like ‘SEE, I told you’, I was really invested.”
“The Hunger Games is perfectly structured and novels don’t necessarily have to be as tightly structured as a TV show or a movie, but I very much approach my writing like a screenwriter, and I think in terms of a four act structure. I make sure my midpoint twist hits around the 50% mark – I’m very strict that way – and I think The Hunger Games is such a great example of what a tightly plotted four act structure can do in a story.”
