Writers On Reading: Phillipa Fioretti Talks All Things Books

Interviews With WritersThe Writing World

23 Jul

This week its a pleasure to welcome to the blog Phillipa Fioretti.

Phillipa is an award-winning artist and Australian author and a graduate of the Hachette Australia/Queensland writer's Centre Manuscript Development Program.

Phillipa is the author of The Book Of Love, The Fragment of Dreams and her latest release is For One Night Only.

When Ornella vacations in Sicily, she meets Hugh, an archaeologist working on a dig in the beautiful town of Taormina. Hugh convinces Ornella to join him on a trip to the island of Stromboli, where they hike up a live volcano at dusk.

After a passionate night together Ornella, an actress usually focused on her career, suspects she's in love. But after breakfast the next morning, Hugh vanishes.

Ornella is left with Hugh's phone, sunglasses and a sudden end to the love affair she thought she didn't want. Desperate to know if Hugh ran out on her or if he's met with disaster, she wants to search for him. But with an important screen test in Rome and her agent impatiently waiting for her, Ornella faces a dilemma.

Little does she know the danger Hugh is in – and that she is the key to his survival.

Thanks so much for visiting Flying pony Phillipa and good luck with the new release.

1. Which books do you most vividly remember from your childhood?

Dot and the Kangaroo and Harry the Dirty Dog

2. Who are your three most favourite fictional book characters? Tell us what you love about each of them.

Merival from Restoration by Rose Tremain, because he’s charming, naive, likeable, unintentionally destructive and brilliant at self- deception. And because he adores his King in a way I imagine people used to adore their monarchs. Arkady Renko from Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith because he’s stubborn, self annihilating, smart, witty and doomed to misery because he just seems to be more comfortable when miserable.Sal from The Beach by Alex Garland. She’s got the island community under control, she knows the price of their little Utopia and she knows the others have to be shielded from the terrible truth. She’s a realist, a ruthless leader and I rather liked her clear sighted understanding of what it takes for a small group of elites to survive as carefree hippies. 3. Who is your favourite literary villain? Why?Soames Forsyte from the Forsyte Saga, because he just does not get it and never will. 4. If you could invite any five writers to a cosy dinner party who would you ask and why?Tough question, as some writers can write brilliantly but be poor company at a dinner party. I like to dine with people who know how to tell a good anecdote, are witty and smart and have an original view on life. So I don’t know what these five are like as a dinner party guest, but I’m going to mix and match and say Dostoyevsky, Irvine Welsh, Margaret Drabble, Dorothy Parker and Patrick White. That should be a good night, although it could end in tears. 5. What book has made you laugh out loud?I adored Glen Duncan’s The Last Werewolf. I don’t read this sort of genre as a rule and I don’t know how I came across it but I laughed and laughed and then read it again. 6. What book, or scene from a book, has made you cry? Maggie O’Farrell’s After You’d Gone had me weeping into my pillow. 7. Where and when do you do most of your reading? In and on my bed and in an armchair in my study. 8. Is there a genre of book you’d never read? Why? Horror, True Crime, Paranormal, Fantasy. Why? True Crime repels me and the others just don’t interest me – that said, a well written book in ANY genre can always seduce me. Say Robert Hughs wrote a paranormal fantasy, I’d read it in the drop of a hat, but otherwise, no, not my thing. 9. Can you give us a mini-review of a book you’ve recently read and enjoyed?All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Written in 1929 it’s still fresh and eminently readable. In this centenary year I decided to have a closer look at the war. It’s powerful stuff, almost too terrible in parts to read. It’s a shocking account of a soldier’s psychological experience as well as his actions. 10. What are the top three books in your TBR pile?The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark, a book about the causes of WW1. (I love good history books as much as I love good fiction)Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (because I have never and now’s the time)The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (one of my favourite writers)