You know a Tana French book: The vivid parameters.
The tightly coiled plot.
The rich, haunting atmosphere.
Credit: Jessica Ryan
and focusing deeply on interiority.
It’s a book that found French some new fans and thrilled her old ones.
Now, she’s shaking things up again.
Viking
French’s next novel, publishing in the fall, isThe Searcher.
It’s another standalone, and she describes it as her take on a Western.
EW can debut the cover forThe Searcher, and caught up with French in a wide-ranging interview.
[Laughs] I don’t think I need anything depressing right now."
Read our conversation and see the exclusive cover below.The Searcherpublishes Oct. 6, and isavailable for pre-order.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So why isThe Searcherless depressing than the last one?
So much of it was about what was going on inside the narrator’s head.
So that’s where it came from: Somebody who thinks through doing, who’s much more action-based.
That’s where the fact of the book being very different came from.
It’s shorter, because there’s very little introspection.
And it’s less depressing.
Because my God, that was a really depressing book!
The character inThe Witch Elmjust goes through this arc from being the golden boy to being a wreck.
I didn’t want to write that again.
So what did you write instead?
But his arc is much more about putting things back together, rather than falling apart.
[Laughs] Well so is this!
Yeah, it’s third-person, which I don’t normally write.
And Cal, the main character, is an American!
That’s a departure.
And then it’s not Dublin-set.
It’s the west of Ireland.
It is very different.
That’s so interesting.
Did you find getting into that structure a challenge?
But I’ve read a lot of Westerns, and I like a challenge.
I don’t want to end up writing the same book over and over again.
I really don’t want to do that.
I want to keep stepping out of my comfort zone and doing something slightly different.
This was very scary!
I know I’m enjoying it, but I don’t know how to do this!"
But I think you have to do that.
You have to keep jumping into the deep end and seeing if you swim.
[Laughs] ButThe Witch Elmwas scary as well because it was a standalone.
You don’t have any of the preset structures in place.
That was a big switch for me.
Looking at the whole procedure from the reverse angle.
And I love doing that!
I’m coming to this from acting.
I like getting into different mindsets.
I’m more at ease with that.
And also knowing you’re reaching a very firm endpoint, I imagine, was new.
There’s not going to be an opportunity to examine it from another angle."
WithWitch Elm, it’s done.
This is what counts, then it’s over.
And it’s the same with this one.
Did you pick up on that in the reception?
What did you make of it?
The reception of it was very much shaped by the moment when it came out.
There’s an element of that in the book.
He’s got all the things that make life easier.
I was a bit sad about that.
You put the book out in the world and suddenly the narrative is not yours alone anymore.
Do you think about that, then, going into the next one?
I did not see that coming!
[Laughs] There’s no way to plan ahead.
you might’t see what’s going to rise to the surface in society at any given moment.
If people find something in it, that’s great, that’s fine.
It may not be what you put in there, but at least they’re finding something.
That’s all you’re able to hope for.
it’s possible for you to’t try and control that.
Otherwise I’d be second-guessing the whole time: Hang on, am I spelling this out enough?
I don’t like books that spell things out too hard.
Find what you find.
It’s all good.
It used to be, I get the sense, quite easy.
It was a very solid thing.
Nowadays it’s much more complex.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.
But it’s also constantly shifting.
What the complexity of morality would do to him.
And how that defines his right and wrong in the midst of all that.
Not incoherent at all!
For a first explanation, that’s pretty good.
I’m surprised I can form full sentences.
I’m in lockdown with my husband and two small kids.
I’m just gibbering.
Creatively, how have you found this period?
A lot of authors I’ve spoken to just aren’t writing right now.
I handed in my manuscript on Feb. 28.
This is just before everything went boom.
Mid-March is when we went into full lockdown.
But I’d handed it in and already started on the edits by the time everything went crazy.
When you’re writing a book, a lot of it depends on your subconscious working away in there.
I don’t think I have a subconscious at the moment.
I just have a smoking crater that smells vaguely of burning at this stage.
I think we all do.
