Book after Book

Hi Charles! First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the publication of Prodigal ! Can you please briefly tell us what it is about? A: Thank you, Silvia! Very briefly, it’s about what happens when Jeremy, a hapless gay middle-aged writer of soft core pornography for women, is summoned home from his tiny flat in Paris to his father’s deathbed in Whitstable. His elder sister, Rachel, divorced and frustrated, constantly disappointed by what she sees as her brother’s fecklessness and unwilling to come to terms with his sexuality, is waiting for him. The novel accompanies them through the ensuing weeks but also digs back into their past to see what made them what they are and also, perhaps, to offer them the chance to remake themselves and achieve a sort of reconciliation as individuals and as siblings. Are there any autobiographical elements woven into the fictional lives of your characters? A: First of all, let me say that I am not Jeremy, Rachel is not my sister and thei...

By Charles Lambert Published by Gallic Books Synopsis: The phone rings, in that short-tempered peremptory way machines have. He almost doesn’t answer; he’s been fending off unwanted offers of insurance, unlimited broadband, crates of discount wine for months now. His name must be on some list somewhere – Jeremy Eldritch, sucker...’ Meet the hapless Jeremy: a man in his late 50s, he scrapes together a living in Paris by writing soft-core pornography under the saucy guise of ‘Nathalie Cray’. When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is on his deathbed, Jeremy reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the depths of the English countryside. Confronted with a life that he had always been eager to escape, his return marks the start of an emotionally fraught journey into the family’s chequered past. The journey takes him back to the unexpected death of his mother in a provincial Greek hospital years earlier and, further back, to the moment at which the Eldritch fam...

Hello Charles! First of all, thank you for agreeing to answer my questions and congratulations on the publication of a new paperback edition of Any Human Face , whose cover I absolutely love! Can you please tell us what it is about? A: It’s about a down-at-heel second-hand bookseller in Rome called Andrew Caruso, half-Italian, half-Scottish, who finds himself in trouble when he decides to organise an exhibition of photographs found among his dead lover’s belongings. It’s about how the photographs found their way into Andrew’s lover’s hands in the first place. It’s about the kidnap and imprisonment of a teenage girl. It’s about the way these three stories, and the people involved in them, connect. It’s also, although I didn’t fully realise this as I wrote it, about loneliness. I’m glad you like the cover, by the way! Did you have the plot entirely figured out when you started writing or did it develop before your eyes as the characters grew on the page? A: All I had was the central idea...