Fiona Barton - Hot Thrillers

Fiona Barton’s first crime thriller The Widow was a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and she hasn’t dropped her pace in the few years since.  Her third novel – The Suspect –newly released in the US – continues to show her a crime thriller breakout star – with a tale of two teens who go to Thailand for Gap year partying and find themselves in all sorts of trouble. Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and Fiona describes what it was like living in the rural reaches of Myanmar while publishing houses bid at a hot auction for book rights, and how her remarkable career in journalism has feed into her fiction. And we’ve got three paperback copies of The Suspect to giveaway to three lucky readers.  Enter theThriller Giveaway draw at the Joys of Binge Reading website or on our Binge Reading Facebook page. Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode: How 30 years in journalism helped her fictionThe pain of a 'lost child' a personal themeBecoming an international best-seller on debut On creating a controversial protagonistWorking with exiled journalists What's next in Book four Where to find Fiona Barton:  Website:  https://fionabartonauthor.com/ Facebook: @fionabartonauthor Twitter and Instagram: @figbarton What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions. Jenny Wheeler: But now here's Fiona. Hello, there Fiona, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us. Fiona Barton: Hi. Thanks so much for inviting me. Fiona Barton - award winning journalist and breakthrough thriller author Jenny Wheeler: Fiona, you've had a remarkable career in journalism, and we will refer to that a little bit later on, but what was it that made you want to make that switch from nonfiction to fiction? I know some people say that journalists, what they write is fiction, but we both know that that's not true. Was there a catalyst for that change? Finding time to write fiction Fiona Barton: Well, I suppose the catalyst was suddenly having the time to do it. I've written professionally for 30 odd years as a journalist, and so I'd written every day. So, but as a journalist, you’re so busy, it's a full on job. I had a family. I've got two children. I commuted, so there was no space in my life for anything more. It was cracking at the seams as it was. So, it was when I stopped being a reporter, in, Oh gosh, 2008. I stepped away from journalism from being a reporter, I carried on in journalism, but I was training journalists then, and we moved to Sri Lanka as volunteers, and I suddenly had time.  I could lift my head - I don't want to say from the daily grind, because I loved my job, but from that full on immersion in my job and my family and all of that. And so suddenly there were hours of the day that were not accounted for. It was wonderful. A debut best-seller I could walk to work, so I wasn't commuting and I'd had an idea buzzing around in my head for a while. A voice, really, the voice of Jean in The Widow. And, I just sat down and one evening I thought, well, why don't I give it a go? I'm not doing anything else. And so, I did. And that was the moment, the Eureka moment, I suppose, when I thought,