We wanted to know more, so we caught up with Stovell to find out more her unconventional book and the writer behind it.

How did you come to write Mothernight?
I'd always wanted to write a novel, but it was hard to focus on it while working full time. So I decided to take a year off from paid work and did and MA in creative writing at Lancaster University. That was where I started Mothernight, although I didn't finish for another year after the course finished.

How do you describe it to people?
I'm quite bad at talking about it, actually. I hate talking about my writing. Usually, I just shuffle my feet a bit and look at the ground and say, "It's about lesbians and murder." But in interviews, I say something like, "It's set over one summer and it follows the story of Leila, a young woman who was sent away from home as a child and has never returned, because her stepmother is convinced she murdered her baby. Now on the brink of adulthood, Leila is going home for the first time to confront her family and her past."

How come Leila and Olivia are lovers rather than friends?
I wanted the novel to be claustrophobic and so I wanted the girls to have an obsessive relationship. It would be less dramatic if they were simply friends instead of lovers.

I felt that the book played with genres, specifically tragedy and melodrama, but also the idea of romantic friendships between girls, and of course girl's boarding school crush stories.
I don't want to say too much about what I intended when I created the relationship between Olivia and Leila, because it's down to the reader to decide what they think. I do think lots of girls develop romantic friendships and then may or may not go on to form homosexual relationships later in life, but to me, the most important thing was simply that the reader felt how intensely these young women felt about each other, and that it was real. I wanted to write tragedy, yes, and it is harder to create tragedy without love.

Olivia mentions that the school "wanted us destroyed by men" but this line really haunted me as I was reading because it occurred to me that Leila and Katherine are characters who themselves are destroyed by men (well, a baby boy in Leila's case). What do you think?
I hadn't thought of that before, but yes, it's a valid viewpoint.

What's your favourite part of the book?
The title.

What's next for you?
I'm not sure yet. I'm currently coming to the end of my second novel, so I'm hopeful and anxious. My second novel is set between 1849 and 1853 and tells the story of a young girl who is kidnapped from her native Africa and sold to a Missouri farmer. The novel begins at the end of the story - she is in prison, waiting to be hanged, because she's been convicted of killing her master.

What else would you like to say?
Lots of people have asked if Mothernight is autobiographical. It's not. I have never killed a baby.

Find out more at www.sarahstovell.com and read our review of Mothernight.

Mothernight, by Sarah Stovell
Publisher: Snowbooks
Released: 3 March 2008
ISBN: 1905005806

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