New2theScene
The House on Rye Lane
Susan Allott
The House on Rye Lane
Synopsis
They thought they’d found their dream home. They were wrong.
2008. The house Maxine and Seb have just bought was a bargain – a huge Georgian townhouse on the edge of Peckham Rye, it needs a lot of work but Max couldn’t resist it. Now they are in, though, nothing seems to be going right – and as the problems mount up, Max starts to doubt her relationship as well as her decision. Is Seb all he seems to be? And why are the neighbours so evasive about the house’s previous owner?
1994. Cookie and his parents have been forced by his dad’s gambling debts to move into the attic room of a big old house, as lodgers. Tensions run high between them and their elderly landlady, and there’s something odd about the place that Cookie can’t quite put his finger on…
1843. Horatio built this house for his beloved wife, who then died in mysterious circumstances. After a second death on the premises, both his servants and the locals are starting to talk. Horatio’s grief is tinged with shame and guilt. What is he hiding? And will the house ever be free of his legacy?
THE HOUSE ON RYE LANE is a tense, taut, beautifully crafted novel about the treachery of secrets and the many ways the past can echo into the present, from the acclaimed author of THE SILENCE.
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About the author
Susan Allott
I'm one of those people who always wanted to be an author, from the time at primary school when an encouraging teacher praised my work (a poem, as I recall) and showed it to the headmaster, who framed it and hung it on the wall of his office. I must have been seven years old, and I have been riding on that particular high ever since.
I didn't tell anyone of my ambition until I was applying to University. I asked a family friend (an English Literature lecturer) what course I should do if I wanted to be a writer. He suggested a journalism course. I explained that I didn't want to be a journalist. I wanted to write books. Novels. He looked embarrassed for me. This was 1989, before the proliferation of creative writing courses at degree and post-graduate level. He advised me to study English, and to write in my spare time. I was unconvinced, but followed his advice anyway. I didn't tell anyone else I wanted to be a writer for a decade or two.
So I studied for a BA in English at Leeds University and then for an MA in Media & Communication Studies at Goldsmiths College. During those years of academia, not one word of creative writing was produced in my spare time.
I was in my late twenties, back in London after a spell living in Australia, when I decided I couldn't put it off anymore. I enrolled on a 'starting to write' correspondence course, which culminated in a short story about a woman called Louisa and her daughter, Isla. It was written from Isla's point of view, as she watched her mother packing a suitcase and wondered where she was going, and if she was going to leave her behind. I remember my tutor suggesting it would benefit from a stronger sense of place ...
It was another ten years before that scene was integrated into the novel that became The Silence. Several more years before the novel was bought by Harper Collins. Which brings me to today, living in London with my Australian husband and our children. I’m writing full-time these days, working on my second book and promoting my debut. It was all worth waiting for.
