The Joys of Binge Reading

Harry Whittaker inherited a heartbreaking task when his mother, the international best-selling author, Lucinda Riley, died in 2021.

Millions of readers around the world were eagerly awaiting the last book in her acclaimed Seven Sisters series and Harry accepted the challenge of being the one to finish it.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler and on Binge Reading today, we have a special treat. Harry talks about how he tackled the final book in the series, Atlas, The Pa salt story, as the labour of love for his cherished mother.

And how he’s now moving on finding his author voice with books that are very much his own.

BookSweeps Draw This Week

We’ve got a BookSweeps Draw of Literary, Historical and Book Club Fiction. which includes Sadie’s Vow, #1 in my Home At Last trilogy.

If you haven’t read Sadie’s Vow, you can enter to win it on BookSweeps today, plus 25+ extra books, exciting literary, historical and book club fiction from a great collection of authors, as well as the brand new E reader.

Details for where to enter the draw are on the show notes for this episode on The Joys Of Binge Reading website. (www.thejoysofbingereading.com)

And remember if you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

ENTER BOOKSWEEPS DRAW Links for Information in this episode

Lucinda Riley –Video on conceiving The Seven Sisters:

https://youtu.be/KvjD3cxZDwA

Lucinda Edmonds/Riley: https://lucindariley.co.uk/about-lucinda/

Bonnie Garmus: https://www.bonniegarmus.com/lessons-in-chemistry

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58065033-lessons-in-chemistry

Brie Larson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brie_Larson

Nick Hornby: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/21856/nick-hornby

High Fidelity: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/285092

Slam: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/411527.Slam

About A Boy: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4271.About_a_Boy

David Nicholls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nicholls_(writer)

One Day: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6280118-one-day

The Understudy: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/366842

Starter For Ten: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107896.Starter_for_Ten

Where to find Harry Whittaker online

Website: www.harrywhittaker.co.uk

Instagram: @HarryWhittakerAuthor

Twitter: @HarryTwittaker

Introducing author Harry Whittaker Author Harry Whittaker – completing his mother’s legacy and starting his own

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Harry. Hello there, Harry, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Harry Whittaker: Hi Jenny, thanks so much for having me. I’m so excited to be talking to you in New Zealand from the UK. We’ve somehow made it work.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. After a little hiccup this morning. that’s right. We’re talking about Book Eight of The Seven Sisters.

Atlas; The Story Of Pa Salt for the one or two people left in the world who don’t know that you inherited one of the most difficult tasks in the world, with this job to complete an internationally beloved series while also dealing with the personal loss of the author of it all.

What force do you think has carried you through all of it.

Harry Whittaker: That’s a good question. In a way there was so much pressure on me that in fact there was no pressure at all.

If 50 million readers, a decade worth of mysteries, the fact that I’d only ever written children’s books and never a novel, and I knew that this was going to have to be a very beefy novel because it’s what Seven Sisters readers expect…

The pressure was so ridiculous, and you combine everything I’ve just said with a really tight deadline.

I had one year to do this and there could be no ifs or buts about that. I didn’t think about it because if you thought about it for more than 10 seconds you’d want to curl up into a ball and cry and never write another word.

I wrote this book for one person and one person alone and that was my Mum.

A final task, now completed

It was a final task that I could complete for her and I really hope I did it justice. I suppose the force that carried me through was the thought of doing it for Mum.

Jenny Wheeler: And having obviously read the book, there’s a seamless transition.

Reviewers comment that they can’t tell the bits that Lucinda wrote and the bits that you wrote. The voice is carried through very evenly all the way. How did you do that? It seems almost miraculous.

Harry Whittaker: That is a very generous thing that reviewers have said. I’m very proud if that is the case.

I am thrilled to know that the majority of readers, I would say, feel like they’ve read a Lucinda Riley Seven Sisters book.

The truth of the matter is, for the first 100 pages of Atlas, I tried very, very hard to imitate my mother’s style.

I would second guess every other word, I would question the decisions I was having her characters make within the context of the book and it caused me great moral stress and panic, and long story short, Jenny, it was taking me far too long.

I got to 100 pages, and I thought, I’m not gonna worry about that anymore, I’m just gonna write Atlas, the story…

Because I was already a hundred pages in, and it had got its own voice. And I think that voice was the voice of The Seven Sisters, or the voice of Lucinda Riley.

It wouldn’t have made sense to write it in any other way. And it just became an unconscious thing. And I’m really thrilled that people have thought that the transition was seamless.

I’m very proud of that.

The night it all began – Harry remembers it well

Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful. Lucinda has got a wonderful video on your website talking about when she first conceived of this idea.

And in that video, she relates how it was New Year’s Eve, I think 2013, if I recall correctly. And she says that she called the children out and pointed up at the stars. Do you remember that occurring and if it had any impact on you at the time?

Harry Whittaker: I remember it very vividly, and a lot of people like to ask me about this story.

And it is as charming as it has been recorded, I think, on the website. although I would alter one detail. So, say it was New Year’s Eve 2013. And I think mum said she went out to sit on the bench in our garden to look at the sky and find a bit of peace because the house was rather chaotic.

Jenny, I’ll be honest, I think she went out for a cheeky cigarette. but nonetheless, she found herself looking up at the sky.

And where I grew up, in the UK, in a county called Norfolk we’re famous for having very big skies, with very low light pollution and very flat land. The skies are always twinkling at night, and she had inspiration in that moment, whether you want to call it divine or creative or passionate.

She knew she wanted to write about the mythology of The Seven Sisters stars. She’d always been interested in astrology and just like you will have read, she came into the house immediately, summoned everyone from their various bedrooms and the kitchen and wherever they were in the house.

I remember, my youngest brother and sister were quite small at the time. I think they probably would have been below the age of 10. So they weren’t thrilled that they’d been pulled away from whatever it was, their X Box or their book.

Beginning a seven book series a step of faith Lucinda Riley – launched an international phenomenon…

She sat us all down in the sitting room, around the fire and said I’ve just had this idea. I want to write about The Seven Sisters I want to make them contemporary women.

The little ones obviously were not very interested and my stepfather who had recently become her agent, I remember him looking very worried because the seven book series is very difficult to sell to anyone, and at that time She wasn’t like a global megastar like she is now.

She did well, but you know, there was no guarantee that any of her publishers would say yes, of course, we’re gonna sign up seven books.

But I just remember seeing how excited she was in that moment, and that is what has always stuck with me.

And I thought, oh yeah, this will work, and this is going to be huge, because when Mum was passionate about something, she made things happen.

I do remember it very clearly, and thank goodness she had that idea, because it has brought so much meaning and pleasure to people around the world.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. And it anticipates the obvious next question I was going to ask you, which was when you realized what a major success this book series was, but it sounds like right from the beginning you did grasp its significance.

Harry Whittaker: I knew it would be big. I don’t think anyone could have predicted it would be this big. Certainly not Mum herself. The thing is with the Seven Sisters, my experience of it, is that the growth has been gradual. It hasn’t been an overnight sensation, as it were. You sometimes find that with books.

Seven Sisters big moment came in Covid lockdown

I suppose the huge moment for The Seven Sisters where I really felt it growing exponentially, was during the COVID pandemic in 2020, where we all had to stay at home, and we couldn’t travel.

And suddenly people were picking up The Seven Sisters series, and even though they were sat in their chairs in their living rooms at home, they were going around the globe.

One of the things that I think is so remarkable about The Seven Sisters is that you do feel as if you’ve visited these countries that mum was writing about. You feel like you’ve got a connection.

That’s probably because the research was so important for her. She would visit the country she was going to write about, immerse herself in the culture, meet the local people, hear the local stories, and it was through that research that she was so accurately able to transfer a sense of place to the page.

I think, 2020, ironically, that terrible time, was probably the moment where we all knew that The Seven Sisters was going viral, I think is probably the term you’d use these days.

Jenny Wheeler: Because it’s obviously the classic armchair travel series, isn’t it, when you think about it?

Harry Whittaker: Oh yeah, absolutely. And we were all sat in armchairs in our living rooms, not allowed to leave in 2020, so it makes sense that it exploded at that time.

Jenny Wheeler: When did you first read any of the Seven Sisters books yourself?

Harry Whittaker: I had a very close relationship with my Mum, it’s maybe a little cliché to say, but we were best friends.

We had very similar brains and we really understood each other, and so one of the great joys for us both, I think, was whenever Mum was writing something, she’d give me the pages that she’d written over the last few days.

It was very much the case with The Seven Sisters that I have been reading them since, I think it would be 2013.

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It would be the case that she would go off, write 20 pages, 30 pages, and then I would get those pages, and we’d talk about them, and the plot, and what she envisaged happening, and they were some of the most special conversations I ever had with her.

Jenny Wheeler: Indeed, you were there on the ground level right from the beginning, and all the little intricacies of the earlier books were somewhere planted away in your brain.

Harry Whittaker: Yes, probably the thing that was most helpful in terms of me being ready to write Atlas was the rights for the Seven Sisters for the screen have bounced around so many production companies and producers and yadda yadda yadda.

The company that owned them in 2020, and no longer owns them, they had employed me to work on the books to get them ready to transition to the screen.

And as part of that work, I re-read every single Seven Sisters book and made copious notes on all of them for potential screenwriters and producers.

I was in a really good place to begin things in 2021. If I hadn’t been in that position, there’s no doubt in my mind I wouldn’t have been able to get Atlas out so quickly.

I would have had to reread all the books. I would have had to make meticulous notes, worked out the questions that readers wanted answering. So yes, that was very lucky, Jenny.

Jenny Wheeler: Amidst all this, you also established a career as a BBC radio presenter and you took part in a renowned improv group as well. You obviously inherited Lucinda’s gift for the dramatic arts as well.

Ill health forced Lucinda into fiction

Harry Whittaker: Mum started out as an actor and became an author through necessity actually. She got ill. She got a form of glandular fever, I believe, the Epstein Bar virus.

And it meant that she couldn’t get outta bed for the best part of a year. And Mum being Mum, she just thought, oh I’ll pass the time, I’ll write a book.

And it was a handwritten manuscript and she sent it off to an agent. And Mum being Mum got a three book deal immediately.

So that was her story of her transition there. My father was also an actor turned novelist, Owen Whittaker, is his name. Before that my grandmother was an actor. My great uncle was the lighting designer at the Royal Opera House.

My great aunt was a singer. So, I think, there’s probably an element of genetics in it all.

If you grow up and that’s the world that you know – performing, creativity – that is almost definitely going to feature quite heavily in your future life, I imagine.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you also have a dream to be a fiction writer?

Harry Whittaker: That is a great question. Throughout my entire existence, my mum would say to me, Harry, you have to be a writer. You’ve got to be, you’re a writer, Harry. Harry, you’re a writer.

And I… Being a sort of petulant child and teenager went ‘no, I’m not going to do what you do.’

And that’s how I ended up becoming a radio presenter because I thought I’ll go and do something that is in no way connected to my lineage and that no one could accuse me of nepotism.

What will ‘Harry Whittaker’ books be?

And of course, Mum has had the last laugh there because I have now become a fiction writer and I love it. I really love it.

I was very scared of novels before I wrote Atlas. I’d written four children’s books with Mum beforehand, but they’re very short.

And now, having finished Pa Salt, the prospect of novels excite me, rather than intimidate me.

Yeah, I guess it was a final gift from Mum.

Jenny Wheeler: That’s fascinating. I’m going to ask you that question about whether you’ve now got her voice very well ingrained in you, but your next books, which are going to be Harry Whittaker books, are they going to have a Lucinda type of voice? Or are they going to be a completely different genre? And are you looking to discover Harry’s voice more?

Harry Whittaker: I know what my voice is, I’m very clear on that. When I was writing Atlas, I was writing in Lucinda’s voice. And it’s not my natural voice.

My natural voice is more humorous, more contemporary, probably quite British as well. And those are… the sort of novels I’m going to end up writing. I hope in the style of David Nicholls, Nick Hornby, that’s the sort of world I feel comfortable in.

But it’s not the end of Lucinda Riley either, which is very exciting.

I’m not sure whether you’re aware, but in the 1990s, she wrote under the name Lucinda Edmonds and published, I think, eight novels, perhaps nine under that name, and was moderately successful in the UK, but only the UK.

And the plan was always that Mum would re-write and re-release some of the 90s novels under the name Lucinda Riley, so she would totally refresh them, rejuvenate storylines, add new plot threads.

Lucinda Riley’s legacy beyond Seven Sisters

And that’s already been done, that was the case for the novels The Italian Girl The Love Letter…

I’m struggling to remember. Oh, The Angel Tree was another one. And I have three of those novels from the 1990s which I am going to re-edit and they will be released as new Lucinda Riley texts, which is very exciting.

So her story continues.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, yes. No, I didn’t know that. So that’s amazing.

Taking us back to Pa Salt, the writing process, just wonder how much planning Lucinda left in your hands.

How much was totally up to you to decide and how you went about working through all of that. Did you sit at your desk from dawn till dusk, day after day, or did you continue with some of your BBC work? How did it all fit together?

Harry Whittaker: I’ve mentioned the screen rights of The Seven Sisters during this chat, and in 2016 Mum was flown out to LA by a Hollywood production company who said, listen, we’re interested in buying The Seven Sisters from you. And I think at that stage, she was only halfway through book three, so this was very early on.

And the production company said to her ‘if you want a deal, you’ve got to give us an ending. You’ve got to tell us where you think this thing is going, where you’re going to end up.’

And Mum didn’t have a clue. Did not have a clue. But she went into a room in LA and spent an afternoon penning a direction for the Seven Sisters to follow, and envisage where things might end up.

It was 30 pages of script dialogue between two characters.

A life changing five hour conversation

I can mention the characters here. You’ve all read the novel between Atlas and Kreeg taking place on the Titan and the Olympus and within that dialogue, there was a suggestion of where she saw the plot going.

The important thing about that was Mum never wrote anything down. The way she wrote her novels was she was dictated them, because she had a shoulder injury and she couldn’t type anymore.

So, she dictated novels. As a consequence, nothing was ever written down, but by some miracle, these 30 pages existed. I had those 30 pages.

I had my endless conversations with Mum over the years about where things might go.

And then in Christmas 2019… Mum had been very sick. She was quite remarkable, Mum, because she went through periods of being devastatingly ill, but then would bounce back. Miraculously, quite literally miraculously.

And we just thought that would be a pattern that would continue forever. But she had been very ill at this time, Christmas 2019, and we’d just finished writing our four children’s books.

She asked me up to her bedroom, and we had a conversation about five hours long, probably the most important conversation I’ll ever have where she asked me to finish the Seven Sisters series if she were to die.

And so that’s what I had. We didn’t talk about it again, after Christmas 2019, because we both knew what would happen if she were to die, but we both had to believe that she would survive, and she would get to finish the series.

We only ever, ever, had one conversation about it.

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Harry Whittaker - Atlas: The Pa Salt Story