What is your book about?
The Eternal Return of Clara Hart is a contemporary time-loop novel about Spence, an eighteen-year-old boy who finds himself forced to repeatedly relive one tragic Friday. It starts with his prised vintage car being hit by his classmate and ends when that same classmate, Clara Hart, runs out from a house party and dies in an accident.
When Spence wakes up to the same day over again and to Clara alive and well, he knows he has a chance to save her. But as Spence repeatedly tries and fails to stop the events of the day, he begins to realise he’s perhaps not the hero he thought he couldbe.
To break the spell he has to re-evaluate everything he previously took for granted and find the courage to call out his own and others complicity in events that marked the life and death of Clara Hart.
It’s a book about toxic masculinity, gendered violence and grief, but there’s hope in there too as it’s also about learning from mistakes, opening up and moving forward.
-What is the weirdest or most interesting thing you had to research for your book?
I did do quite a lot of background reading and research for this novel and the part that I enjoyed the most was learning a bitmore about philosophy. On the Friday Spence gets stuck in, his A level philosophy class are studying Eternal Return, which is Nietzsche’s thought experiment that asks you to imagine having to live your life over and over again in an identical way.
It’s obviously very relevant to what is happening to Spence and gives him an opportunity to gently quiz his philosophy teacher about his predicament without giving too much away. It’s a pretty small element of the book, but I read much more than made it into the final novel.
-Where did the idea for your book come from?
It’s a very personal book in a lot of ways, drawing on real life experiences that have shaped my life and made me passionate about tackling sexism and shining a light on misconceptions about sexual assault. I used to work in women’s rights too, so these are issues that are never far from my mind. That said, I didn’t originally intend to write about them as I wasn’t sure I had a story to tell that would add to what was already out there for YA audiences.
In 2018 I was actually writing another novel that also revolved around a boy living one day over and over again, but was very different to this one. When the inspiration for The Eternal Return of Clara Hart struck later that year, I abandoned the previous book, but some key elements stuck. I could immediately see how interesting it would be to explore the central questions of the novel using a time-loop structure.
What I find so fascinating about the idea of a repeating day is that it allows you to explore the ways different paths and even seemingly minor choices can lead to very different outcomes.
-What are your book or movie recommendations for people who have read and enjoyed your book?
Ooh a tough question! There are a number of great YA books that tackle similar themes from a different perspective, so perhaps You Can Trust Me by Gina Blaxill, which is a fast-paced thriller looking at privilege and bias. I’ve also recently loved Things I Know by Helena Close, which focuses on grief and mental health.
For more time-loops, I would thoroughly recommend watching Russian Doll.
-If you were stranded on a desert island what 2 books, 2 movies and 2 animals would you bring?
I would take The Priory of the Orange Tree because it’s at the top of my TBR and quite a chunky read, so it would keep me going for a while. And Rebecca because it’s one of my old favourites.
My movies would probably be Moana and Heathers, because they are comfort watches and I think that would mean I’d have a book or film for just about every possible mood.
My two animals is easy – it would have to be my two tiny dogs, Yuffie and Newt. At least, assuming the desert island also had a reasonable supply of food for us all to live happily!