Author Andrea Mara talks to us about her latest novel Hide and Seek and gives us a sneak peek at her next project.
Andrea Mara is a Sunday Times and Irish Times top ten bestselling author, and has been shortlisted for a number of awards, including Irish Crime Novel of the Year. She lives in Dublin, Ireland, with her husband and three young children, and also runs multi-award-winning parent and lifestyle blog, OfficeMum.ie.
Andrea's latest book, Hide and Seek, was published by Bantam Press in August 2022. You can find Hide and Seek and all Andrea's books on our catalogue.
I feel like I should have a literary or historical figure here, but the first answer that comes to mind is the A-Team… I’m an 80s child and grew up in a small village in Co. Cork in Ireland – we had two TV channels, so if there was anything watchable on, we were VERY invested in it, and the A-Team was one of my favourites. They were the people I wanted in my corner if things went very wrong, with McGuyver and The Fall Guy as backup.
If I look closer to home and at real-life heroes, my grandmother was someone I’m still in awe of – at just thirty, as a mother of five children under eight, she was widowed when her husband died suddenly. She went on to take over and run his tree-farm business while raising her five children, something I imagine would be horrifically difficult at any time, but perhaps even more so in 1950s Ireland, when it wasn’t so common for women to run businesses.
It felt very scary at the time, but my gut kept telling me that if I didn’t give it a go, I’d always wonder. Having said that, my husband and I spent a lot of time doing the maths to see if we could make it work. We basically needed to know that if I earned absolutely nothing, we’d be OK for a while, and we agreed that if it didn’t work out, I would go back to look for a full-time job.
Happily it worked out but I think it’s so important to really do the sums and see if you can manage for x amount of time without a steady salary. Writing is unpredictable in terms of earnings so you have to have a plan B or at least, a way to pay the rent until you become established. Ideally, try writing while still working in a day-job, so that you have a sense of whether or not you can make it work as a career. Test the water before taking the leap.
It was inspired by real life! I went to pick up my daughter from a playdate, when she was about five-years-old, and when I arrived, there was no answer at the door. I tried the bell a second time, then peered through the glass at the side and realised that the house had no furniture; it looked completely unoccupied. Then a neighbour stuck her head out a window next door and said, ‘Oh, nobody lives there’ and I nearly collapsed. Happily she followed up by telling me the family had moved house a few weeks earlier and were three streets away – all was fine in the end, and it also inspired a book!
As a reader, I love twists and surprising reveals, so as a writer, my instinct is to surprise the reader. If there are three suspects, I want the reveal to show it was someone else entirely, but someone that makes perfect sense, an ‘aha’ moment where everything falls into place, and suddenly it’s so obvious. It might be one big twist or a series of smaller twists or a reveal that’s unexpected but satisfying. The twist has to fit the story – I don’t want to add something just for the sake of having a big twist if it doesn’t actually make sense.
It’s about a group of children who are playing a game of Hide and Seek, and at the end of the game, one child can’t be found. A search ensues but there’s no sign of three-year-old Lily Murphy anywhere. Thirty years later, Joanna and her family move into the house Lily Murphy’s family used to own and Joanna is curious and a little unsettled when she discovers the history. But then, at the end of the first chapter. she realises that she may know what happened to Lily Murphy…
Right now I’m busy editing next year’s book, No One Saw A Thing. It’s about a family on holidays in London, rushing through a Tube station one Monday morning. Two children, age six and two, get on the Tube but the doors close before their mother can get on. When she arrives at the next station, only one of her children is there. (This book is also based on a real experience, about a time when I was a child on holidays in London and my sister and I got on the Tube without our parents!)
A book I love is We Begin At The End by Chris Whitaker. It’s got everything – an incredible protagonist in thirteen-year-old Duchess Day Radley, a mystery, past secrets, family drama, tragedy, comedy, and a satisfying ending.
I get messages from people saying they recognise a town or a reference and many more from people who found themselves checking doors and windows or banning playdates, but one of my favourites was when a reader messaged me after reading Hide And Seek to say she was so surprised to see the phrase ‘had another think coming’ and to realize it’s ‘think’ not ‘thing’ that she had to wake her partner to tell him. She and I have made a plan now to put one commonly misheard phrase Easter egg into each of my future books. So if any Suffolk Libraries readers have some ideas, please send them my way!
They always need more books.
It’s true. Sometimes, when you’re starting out, it’s tempting to look at the full bookshelves in the shops and think there’s no point, there’s no chance. But they do need new books. Bookshops need them, publishers need them, readers need them. So if you feel you’d like to write a book, go for it.
I’m terrified of driving on big roundabouts and motorways. I use a mouse upside down because I taught myself to use a computer when I was a teen and got it wrong. I have a weird but really useless ability to accurately guess what time it is even when I haven’t seen a clock for hours. I have Synaesthesia so see letters, numbers, days of the week and months of the year in colour. For some inexplicable reason, I am exceptionally bad at typing on my phone.
