When we published Mainlander last year, we knew that we had something special in our hands, written by an author who had always made us laugh both off and onscreen in The Thick of It and VEEP (to name but two of the brilliant shows Will writes for). When we heard word that Jesse Armstrong, a fellow screenwriter (on The Thick of It and VEEP) we knew that we had to get them into a studio together.
‘My novel Mainlander is set in Jersey over twelve days in October 1987. It features some very tangled relationships, so here I have tried to imagine how the characters would have approached Valentine’s Day, had it fallen within the timeframe of the book.’ Read more…
‘The music of Dire Straits features a few times in my novel Mainlander. This is pleasing to me because Mark Knopfler is a songwriter whom I find both fantastic and underrated (sample rhyme – “baker’s boy” and “Iroquois”). However I included the references less from my personal mission to see him receive the acclaim he deserves (not that he needs my help, I’m sure his friendship with Bob Dylan is all the approval he needs), and more because his songs are synonymous with the eighties (the book is set in 1987), and particularly with the types of characters featured in the book. Read more…
Introducing RE4DINGS: a new regular video series from 4th Estate, in which our authors read 1 to 4 pages of their choice from their latest book. You heard it here first.
This month our blog theme is ‘Love in All its Forms’ – we’re celebrating the diverse ways in which love is depicted in literature – so we asked our authors to tell us who their dream fictional date would be. Will Smith would like to cheer up Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Brontë’s ‘Villette’…
‘Write Here’ takes us into our authors’ writing spaces across the globe, where they tell us about how they go about their craft. We mark each location on the map at the bottom of each post. This time, we visit the home of Will Smith, writer of ‘Veep’ and ‘The Thick of It’, who used a laptop on a tower and a saddleseat to work on his debut novel Mainlander…
Name: Will Smith 
Twitter: @willsmithuk
Occupation: Screenwriter
Book: Mainlander
What’s it about: ‘Jersey 1987, and the storm clouds are gathering over Colin Bygate. Sitting on a headland stewing over the discovery that his wife used to date Rob de la Haye, a brash hotelier who is everything that Colin is not, he spots a pupil near the edge of the cliff. Worried that the boy may have intended to jump, he drives him home, hoping that his gloomy imagination was playing tricks. But when the boy fails to turn up to school the next day, Colin feels duty bound to track him down, pitting him against the Island establishment who would rather there was a little less noise around this particular absence. A web of characters is spun around this mystery, each with their own secrets. For living in Jersey, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, you must become your own island.’ Read more…
