Natasha Pulley

Natasha Pulley is the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street and The Bedlam Stacks. An international bestseller, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street won a Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Author's Club Best First Novel Award, the Locus Awards, and remained on the Sunday Times bestseller list for much of Summer 2016. The Bedlam Stacks was longlisted for the Walter Scott Award and shortlisted for the Encore Award.

Natasha's latest novel, The Half Life of Valery K is published by Bloomsbury on 23 June and is also available on our catalogue.

Who were your heroes as you were growing up and when did you first start to write?

I think I really wanted to be Bruce Willis. I grew up watching Die Hard and for a long time I solved problems by saying to myself, 'What would John McClane do?' I have to say, it's been working okay so far. Starting to write is an odd one; it's more that I never stopped. I think all kids write themselves little stories and at some point they leave it behind, but I just never did.

How did your time in Japan shape your writing?

Probably in ways I can't even trace. Being a foreigner is a very, very useful thing to have experienced. It made me much, much better at recognising what's universally human, versus what's culture.

Your first novel The Watchmaker of Filigree Street was a huge success. How did it feel to suddenly be a bestselling author?

Really strange, and often not brilliant. I was very young, I had no idea how publishing worked, and it's one of those industries where nobody explains anything to you or what the process is, so I floated around a lot of the time with no idea what was going on, or if the sales were good, because I had nothing to compare them to, or what I should and shouldn't say at events, or if people were telling me the truth when they were saying I was doing well. You also know it could all vanish with the next book, so it's not as though you've made it, full stop; you've just made it for now. It was quite an intense process and it took me until about Book 3 to really understand what my job was!

Your latest novel The Half Life of Valery K is a bit of a change of scene for you as there are no clairvoyants and no magical realism. How did you pick the Cold War theme and research it and how did the characters develop? Were there some sections that did not make the final cut or could have gone off in other directions?

I was honestly waiting for the supernatural element to present itself all the way through the first draft, so I'm as surprised as you! But it's not here because it doesn't need to be. Radiation is utterly, counterintuitively nuts. It works like horrifying magic, and the more I learned about it, the more blown over by it I was. I did a course on nuclear physics to try and get to grips with it better. I'm no mathematician, but there was a lot I could understand; enough that when I read papers coming from the Kyshtym region around City 40, I could see more or less what they were dealing with.

For once, I also know exactly why I started writing about it; I saw Chernobyl, the TV show, thought it was amazing, and then read Serhii Plokhy's book of the same name. In it, he mentioned a place where a disaster of this sort of magnitude had happened before: Ozersk, or City 40. I couldn't believe I'd never heard of it. Off to Wikipedia I went, and from there... online courses on physics, the Soviet Union, Stalin, Lenin; I made myself a crash course in 19th and 20th century Russian literature, I read loads of Alexander Solzhenitsyn to try to understand the Gulag system. Valery developed out of lots of first hand prison camp accounts. But, I couldn't go to Russia because it was lockdown and then the war began, so I'm very aware there will be things I haven't got right.

You have spoken about blurring the lines between real events and speculative fiction. As an author, do you feel the need to protect the reputation of the real life characters you include, or make sure all the facts are as accurate as they can be as this might be the only book your reader ever reads in their lifetime on that subject?

For me, the place of speculative fiction is between the facts, not instead of them. But facts can't tell you everything, even for quite well-known figures. We know there was a person called Henry V and that he invaded France and he lived in the fifteenth century; but we can't know what he said to his wife on one particular Tuesday morning near Easter. That's lost. If you want to write that dialogue in a novel, you have to make it up.

The tacit understanding of historical fiction is that the guess you make is as close to likely as you can get. So, he didn't talk about iPads. But speculative fiction doesn't operate in the same way. Speculative fiction says, well, what if it was the impossible thing; what if he talked about dragons?

Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?

I have two, but I don't know what's going to be published next! So no, alas.

One book, piece of music or work of art that everyone should experience?

Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett. I think it's the wisest book I've ever read. Whenever I get stuck, especially about how to write about something knotty and ugly in a way that isn't paralysing, I always go back to Small Gods.

What is the funniest or strangest reaction to your books from a reader?

It was a slightly indignant review of The Bedlam Stacks from The Times. The reviewer was a bit cross that there was no sex. I still puzzle over that sometimes. I mean, it was clearly never going to be Fifty Shades...

What is the best piece of advice you were ever given?

It's my godmother's catchphrase. She always says, 'It's not beyond the wit of man.' That's seen me through M25 interchanges, weird airport layouts in Beijing, fixing a washing machine, and writing books. She's dead right.

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

I have an actual GCSE in astronomy.