Part Magic: A Guest Post by Emma Stonex
One woman sets out to avenge her sister’s murder, but the killer has his own ghosts to confront in this haunting maze of a mystery. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Emma Stonex on writing The Sunshine Man.
Hardcover
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The Sunshine Man: A Novel
The Sunshine Man: A Novel
By Emma Stonex
In Stock Online
Hardcover
$15.00
$30.00
“The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other . . .”
A taut, electrifying thriller about a woman determined to avenge her sister’s murder—and the killer who must confront his own ghosts
“The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other . . .”
A taut, electrifying thriller about a woman determined to avenge her sister’s murder—and the killer who must confront his own ghosts
Where do book ideas come from? I love being asked this question, because for me the answer is part magic. After my last published novel, The Lamplighters, I wrote a book that didn’t work – it took me three years and a million abandoned words to figure out it was the wrong idea. In the same week I finally decided to set that project aside, the first line of my new suspense thriller, The Sunshine Man, dropped into my mind like a star: ‘The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other.’ I knew who was speaking and who she was speaking about; I knew how their story would unfold. I felt that the idea had been given to me, though from where or by whom I couldn’t say.
This is the wonderful mystery of creativity. What makes the venture valuable and worthwhile, and, in my view, inimitable by AI, is that the heart and soul of a novel originates in the heart and soul of a human. The Sunshine Man was born from the ashes of a fallen story, and from it I built characters I’ll love all my life.
When a book is on an author’s side, the characters hit the page breathing. It’s something all authors tend to say because it’s true. The characters in my abandoned book required constant resuscitation, but not so for Birdie and Jimmy in The Sunshine Man. Birdie is a woman on a radical mission – to destroy the man who killed her beloved sister – and her revenge drive relates in some ways to my own against the book that didn’t work; I chased this story down as relentlessly and passionately as Birdie chases her prey. But Jimmy, the hunted, has his own version to tell. Did he really kill an innocent girl years ago? Can he escape the dead-set shadow of Birdie’s gun? And should we, as readers, believe all we are told from these two unreliable narrators? I want The Sunshine Man to complicate our ideas about good and bad, right and wrong, and ask if a villain can also be a victim.
Thrillers have always been a big part of my reading diet – The Secret History, The Wych Elm, Emma Donoghue’s Room are among my favourites because they’re intelligent, complex, emotionally rich mysteries as well as being midnight-oil-burning page-turners. I hope readers will be gripped by the revenge plotline in The Sunshine Man but also that they will feel moved by it, and at points surprised at who they’re rooting for. From that very first line, we side with Birdie; but as the story progresses, layers deepen and allegiances shift, and we start to lose sight of the line between evil and innocent…
Wherever the idea for The Sunshine Man came from, it’s what it leaves behind in readers that matters to me most. A book’s life should extend, ideally, beyond its last page: to keep its heart beating in a reader’s mind is my greatest hope of all.
