This week’s guest is Nicola Raynor. Nicola is a novelist and dance writer. Her debut The Girl Before You was picked by the Observer as a debut to look out for in 2019. It was optioned for TV and translated into multiple languages. The Paris Dancer is published on February 13th 2025.
The books Nicola chose:
Read Nicola’s blog on Rebecca: https://www.nicolarayner.com/blog/rebecca-and-me
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
‘In 2021, already a very difficult year for us, with a lot of illness in the family, our 16-year-old Jack Russell, an incredibly important member of our family, became ill and died not long after our time in Pembrokeshire. That time of grief and loss that happened in this beautiful wild place has really stayed with me, and it’s an idea that recurs in The Paper Palace too. It’s somehow summed up in the epigraph by Shelley to the novel:
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.’
Watch or listen here:
Deborah Klee 