Hello and welcome to the website. Thanks to all of you who have taken the trouble to get in touch, saying how much you enjoy my books – and to tell me to hurry up with the next one. I wish I could give you a publication date, but I haven’t quite finished and so it’s a little hard for my publishers to be precise about it. I’ll post the news here on the website as soon as I know.

The new book is going well but is taking longer than usual. I have always liked to do a lot of research – it’s less solitary and more fun than writing and a good excuse for avoiding the dreaded moment when you have to sit down and confront that first blank page. The story I am writing is (partly) set around 1960 and that means the need for research multiplies enormously. I always like to give the reader a good impression of what a place looks like and feels like and sounds like. And, of course, with contemporary stories, you more or less know these things already. If you can’t always get to a particular place, you can usually make a quick phone call and find someone who can tell you. 

With a period story, however, it’s a bit more tricky. You have to dig deeper and spend more time trying to find things out. And the questions can sometimes be difficult to answer – what did people wear that particular spring? What did they eat? What did they watch on TV and buy in the stores? What was the latest slang? How did they feel about the bigger and even the smaller issues in the world at that time? The answers are always out there somewhere, you just have to find out where to look. All I can say is thank heaven for the internet. How did writers ever manage without it? But it does take time. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

One recent piece of good news is that we’ve just agreed an option to make a movie out of my third book, The Smoke Jumper. More about that soon. Meanwhile, if you haven’t already done so, you might like to sign up for the Nicholas Evans newsletter. The feedback from the ones I’ve written so far has been terrific. I hereby swear to do them more frequently...

Happy whispers!
Nicholas