Diane Setterfield is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Thirteenth Tale and Bellman & Black. Her third novel, Once Upon a River, out this month, is about the mysterious disappearance of three young girls in a riverside town, and the wide-reaching effect it has on their community.  

With a strong juxtaposition between faith and science and heavy undertones of folklore, Once Upon a River time and time again reflects Setterfield’s passion for reading and admiration for fairy tales.

“When I was writing Once Upon a River, I had classical mythology on my mind: Orpheus goes to the underworld to bring back his beloved Eurydice, and the goddess Demeter sends Hermes there to retrieve her daughter Persephone,” she says. “I was fascinated with these ancient tales of returns from the land of the dead, but knew that my characters – ordinary working people with only a few years of education – would be unlikely to have a familiarity with the classics. So I transposed the themes to a brand new folk tale and invented the story of Quietly. Writing it was one of the greatest pleasures of my career to date.”

This excerpt was originally published on Book Reporter. Read the full interview here.

On Process

It has been 12 years since her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Here, Setterfield shares how her writing process has evolved over the years.

“The writing of this book was actually very like the process of writing The Thirteenth Tale.  I began with a hazy sense of a couple of characters, a distinct idea of an atmosphere, one or two concrete ideas,” she shares. “There was a false start, a new beginning, a lengthy period of wondering whether I had been madly over-ambitious, a distinct falling out of love with my material, followed eventually – thank goodness – by a reconciliation!  I was often in despair, frequently feared I couldn’t do it, but often enough came the good days, when my early excitement about the child who came back to life returned to me and reinvigorated the writing.”

This excerpt was originally published on Book Riot. Read the full interview here.

On Reading

If you visit the author’s website, blog post after blog post is about her love for reading. She writes about her childhood favorites, current favorite novels of the week, book covers, arranging books, and what books she’d like to read next. Some authors say they cannot read while they write, but for Setterfield, that is not an option.

“If being a writer meant I couldn’t read, I would stop writing! Writing is the best job I’ve ever had, but I could survive without it. Reading on the other hand is essential.” she says. “I read hundreds of books while writing Once Upon a River, but it takes years (decades even) for what I read to percolate into my writing brain, so it’s more likely to be the books I was reading ages ago (and have mostly forgotten consciously) that influenced it.”   

This excerpt was originally published on Book Riot. Read the full interview here.

"I could write a whole book about my relationship with books! I suppose in a way I already have. You know my home town is called Reading? (It's pronounced Redding). My husband says if I ever wrote an autobiography I should call it A Reading Girl, for the play on words."

This excerpt was originally published on Book Browse. Read the full interview here.

On Inspiration for Once Upon a River

Once Upon a River takes place along the Thames, a river close to where Setterfield resides in England. She writes below about how the river served as inspiration for her latest novel.  

“Walking encourages creativity, and walking along a river magnifies that a hundredfold,” she says. “The river is beautiful and dangerous and mysterious, and as I walked with the current, following its meanders, I found myself thinking of a story I had encountered for the first time when I was a child. It was the supposedly true account of a little American boy who drowned in a lake and then came back to life.”

She spent two weeks following a river – one that begins as a dry indentation in the ground, and over time becomes a torrent.

“I won’t pretend that by the end of my river journey I had the entire project worked out. Far from it! First there was another book to write: Bellman & Black. Then years of work to develop my characters: Rita, the midwife and scientific investigator; Armstrong, the farmer whose kindness disarms all but who can do nothing to mend the breach with his eldest son; the Vaughans whose grief for their kidnapped daughter is destroying their marriage; Lily, who mourns for her sister and sees ghosts in her riverside cottage; Margot, whose female ancestors have run the Swan Inn for generations; Joe, her husband, a born story-teller. And more than anything else, the Swan Inn, a place where stories are told, mistold, retold. A place where on one winter solstice night, a stranger bursts in with a drowned child in his arms – a child who returns to life.”

Photo Credit: DianeSetterfield.com