Break Up or Shack Up: Catherine Ryan Howard on 56 Days

You probably won’t want to but cast your mind back to spring 2020. I was living in Dublin and working on my fifth thriller. It wasn’t going well. It wasn’t even going. I might have been panicking about that if we weren’t also in the opening act of a global pandemic.  

Our government’s response was swift and severe. On March 27, Ireland went into lockdown. Unless you were an essential worker, you had to stay at home. You could only leave to shop for groceries or to take brief, individual exercise within a 2km (1.25 mile) radius of your front door. You couldn’t mix with anyone who didn’t live with you, even outside. Bars and restaurants, schools and colleges, non-grocery stores – they were all already closed and would stay that way. We were told this would be for two weeks, but it stretched long into summer and would ultimately become lockdown one of three.  

Our nearest neighbours across the Irish Sea were having similar experiences. One evening, I happened upon a statement from England’s deputy chief medical officer, advising new couples to, essentially, break up or shack up in order to comply with lockdown rules. Somewhere deep in the part of my brain that hadn’t forgotten we still had a book to deliver, a lightbulb flicked on.  

For years, I’d had a vague idea for a novel about a couple who meet and fall in love, but all is not what it seems. I knew what the reveal would be, and I knew it would start with their meeting, but I never had anything to go in between. Now I did: lockdown. Having only known each other for a few weeks, my couple would move in together for its duration, setting their relationship on an accelerated and – hey, I am a thriller writer – deadly course.  

According to a photo on my phone, on April 17 I sat down at my desk, opened a new Word document and typed UNTITLED LOCKDOWN NOVEL across the first page. I felt confident I’d meet my deadline, but feared I was making a huge mistake. Social media was filled with writers vehemently swearing that they’d never write about this, and readers profusely thanking them for that. We didn’t even know what ‘this’ was yet. A couple of weird weeks? A lost year? The end of our lives as we knew them?  

But I always set my books in the present day and try to keep them realistic. Dublin city centre was within my 2km radius, and I was seeing it in a way I never had before; recording that felt important. At the end of the day, I knew what mattered most to readers was a good story well told, and I loved this idea and didn’t want to waste it. 

56 Days became my most successful book to date, both at home and abroad. The most common reader reaction is the same one my editor had when I finally came clean: I didn’t think I wanted to read a novel set in lockdown, but it turned out I really wanted to read this one. I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to write one either, but I’m so very glad I did.