The idea for this book came from three ideas
that intersected.
The first idea presented itself via me a young
man who had been disowned by his family. I had recently started a new job and I
had immediately felt a connection with this guy – let’s call him Ashley –
because he, like me, was originally from South Africa and he had come to Canada
in 2000, as had I.
When I asked him about his family, he told me
that he didn’t see them any more, that they had disowned him, he was
excommunicated.
I was incredibly shocked. I come from a very
close-knit family and I can’t imagine something like that.
“But why on earth would they do that?” I asked.
“Because I’m gay,” he said to which I replied
that wasn’t any reason at all to kick him out.
“They’re Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he said as if
that explained everything but I still didn’t understand and he explained their
way of thinking, that homosexuality is a sin and he needed to repent, or he
would not go to heaven along with his family.
“But surely they speak to you in secret?” I
asked, simply unable to grasp the concept of one’s family just abandoning a
member like that. “How old are you?” I asked him.
“I’m twenty-two,” he said, “and they don’t
speak to me. Not even my twin sister. My Mom meets me for coffee every six
months or so, to see if I have repented, or if she can persuade me to.”
“Not even your twin sister,” I echoed. “I just
can’t get my head around that. How long ago did this happen?”
“Two years ago. I’ve been fine really. I
couldn’t live a lie. The funny thing was, or maybe it’s not so funny, I was
actually going to propose to my long-time girlfriend, ask her to marry me but
then instead, I ended up telling her I am gay.” He grinned. “Not exactly what
she was expecting. But I needed to do it. I didn’t have a choice. Or, I did
have a choice, I could live my whole life a lie or I could be myself.”
I just knew that I would find a way to write
about his story. He was so lovely, so gentle and so kind, a talented artist and
we soon became good friends. I asked him if I could use him as a muse in a
story that was forming in my head and he agreed.
The second idea came from urban exploration. I
love being an urban explorer and I have set off alarms more than once, I can
tell you! I do live by the code; go in if you can find a way, don’t break
things, don’t destroy, don’t steal, leave everything as you found it.
I often search websites looking for places that
other explorers have posted and I found a mention of an old school a couple of
hours outside of Toronto and I persuaded my husband to take a trip.
The first time we went was in the middle of
winter and there was definitely enough there to pique our interest in returning
in the spring.
In the meantime, I did some research and found
that the school had been many things in its time; a prisoner-of-war camp for
German officers in the Second World War, an English school for Chinese
immigrants and an Islamic school, the last of which had fallen into bankruptcy
and the local government was trying to figure out what should be done with it.
When we returned to the school, it was very
easy to get into all the buildings (of which there were many). In one room, I
found some scraps of paper written by a former student; some ramblings, a poem
and some homework and that made me wonder about the kids who had boarded there.
So I had three things which converged into a
single book idea… firstly, Ashley being disfellowshipped. Then the school with
the Islamic kid’s jottings (Islam, a religion with which I was unfamiliar, a
religion which is clearly having a powerful impact on the world and about which
I wanted to learn more), and then, the school itself.
The history of the buildings was so remarkable,
and so was the destruction that had been wrecked upon them; violent damage that
had taken concentration and work and focus and I found myself wondering about
the perpetrators of all that ruin.
What kind of kids (or young adults) would have
that much anger, and that much time to invest in the almost-systematic
destruction of a place?
I knew I had good ideas for an overall story
but I still needed a protagonist and I found her fairly easily.
A friend of mine had been talking about her
primary reason for marrying her husband and it was because she could trace his
genealogy back to the first settlers of Canada – he came from a solid bloodline
and she wanted that for her children.
“Imagine,” she said, “not knowing the genetic
pool from which you’ve sprung. It’s unthinkable!”
At least, it was unthinkable to her. Her
comments immediately made me want to develop a character obsessed with her
ancestry because this was something that couldn’t have interested (or worried)
me less in my real life.
I think that’s why I write books – I try to
explore themes about things that I really am unperturbed by but which seem to
cause others a lot of distress, and religion is surely one of them, along with
family trees.
But then I stopped myself short — who would be
interested in reading a book about religion and fragmented families? But once
an idea is had, it cannot be ignored, for it raises many questions which I
personally needed answers to. Sometimes I think I also write books to answer
the questions in my head about things that are bothering me in the world.
I had decided that my main character, a young immigrant
woman from England, would take a summer to live off the grid in the old school
and somehow become involved with the young Islamic student and a fellow who
echoed my disfellowshipped friend.
Homelessness and religion… surely the kiss of
death for a novel? I had other aspects for sure, the young kids who had destroyed
the school headed up by Lenny, one of my favourite fictional bad boys ever, and
there was also the ex-boyfriend of my protagonist; he was the main reason she
ended up homeless and alone. And there would be crime, of course there would,
Ashley’s boyfriend was a shady realtor, Imran (the Islamic student) seemed
intent on jihad (or was that just an idle threat?) and Lenny’s crime-driven
lifestyle would result in a young girl being murdered – all crimes which Joscelyn
(the protagonist) solves. All she wants is some time to be left alone, to
regroup and think, but she ends up sorting out a whole bunch of crimes and
finding resolution to the things that had happened to her.
She also believed that her mother killed her
father by hitting him over the head with a cast-iron frying pan and she gets to
the bottom of that once and for all.
To
answer the question of how I got this published, I
have previously published four novels with Inanna Publications (a literary
women’s fiction publisher based with York University) and they accepted this
book as well.
I am incredibly fortunate that Inanna, and
Luciana Ricciutelli in particular, has great faith in my writing and in my
voice. For a writer to have that is like a bunch of Christmasses and birthdays
all rolled into one, every day of the year. I have another book lined up with
them for 2016, The Nearly Girl, which
is a very different sort of work, one involving psychotherapy, poetry, mental
instability and family love (of a very different nature to the kind in Between The Cracks She Fell).
I’d just like to add that I started Between The Cracks She Fell close to
seven years ago. I wrote the first forty thousand words and then I got
distracted by A Glittering Chaos, a
book that truly came of out nowhere, demanding to be written and so Chaos jumped the queue. Then another
book I had been working on for eight years, The
Witchdoctor’s Bones, was preparing for publication and it was only once the
Chaos and Bones were taken care of, that Cracks
could get the attention it deserved.
But a bit of time away from it served me well.
I hadn’t stopped thinking about it, or the twists and turns the plot could
take, or the idiosyncrasies that each character could have and how to weave all
those aspects together.
And now, it’s a real book! I cannot express the
joy of holding the book, a solid beautiful thing, where all the ideas merged
and were worked hard and then worked even further.
At the end of the day, the book is a good crime
novel, a literary psychological thriller with a solid and likeable protagonist
and fascinating side characters, including an extremely loveable big
Newfoundland dog called Sam and I really hope readers will enjoy it.
Thank you for having me as a guest on this blog
and I very much hope the readers have enjoyed the post. I am always around to
answer questions or chat!
Best,
Lisa
About The Book
Title: Between The Cracks She Fell
Author: Lisa de Nikolits
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Publication Date: September 15, 2015
Format: Paperback / PDF
Pages: 350
ISBN: 978-1771332255
Genre: Suspense Thriller
Buy The Book:
Discuss this book at our PUYB Virtual Book Club on Goodreads by clicking HERE
Book Description:
The award-winning author of the Hungry Mirror, West of Wawa, Glittering Chaos and The Witchdoctor's Bones delivers an original and riveting new novel about societal betrayal, familial loss and religious jihad. A suspenseful and lyrical read, Between The Cracks She Fell is a powerful - first person narrative about the explosive consequences of betrayal, survival in troubled times and the pervasiveness of religious domination.
When Joss finds herself having to make mortgage payments without help from her depressed, stoner boyfriend who has just moved out, and the company she works for folds leaving her suddenly unemployed, she is forced to sell her house, on which she takes a financial loss. She decides to camp out in a vacant complex of school buildings to give herself time to decide what to do next. It turns out the building is used by a gang of teenagers for wild, drug-fueled parties and Jess soon finds herself both repelled by their charismatic evil leader, as well as sexually attracted to him. She knows he is dangerous even before she finds his girlfriend's dead and violently abused body in the school library. During this time, she meets and befriends two other people in difficulty: Emma, a narcissistic thief living with her dog in a stolen car and Ashley, a young homosexual who is heartbroken by the fact that he has been expelled from the Jehovah's Witness church because he is gay. When her former boyfriend reappears as a born again Christian, Joss is immersed in a journal she found that contains the thoughts of a Muslim teenager who becomes increasingly radicalized. Her struggle to understand her former boyfriend and this young man's spiritual quests prepare her to make some hard decisions about her future. Between The Cracks She Fell is about a woman who falls off the grid and the explosive consequences of betrayal, survival in troubled times, and the pervasiveness of religious domination.
Book Excerpt:
Exodus
I reached my destination with no great sense of joy but at least I wasn't crying.
A purple, red and black pentagram marked the path ahead of me and the sea of grass rolled this way and that and my throat closed and my eyes stung but I swallowed the tears.
I tried to pretend I was Gibreel Farishta, a hero bigger than me; that tuneless soloist tumbling out og thin air; what an entrance, yaar.
First you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry?
But there would be no more crying for me. My former life was dead. I needed to escape for a while, hide out and then, once I got my energy back. I would figure out what came next.
Right now all I could say was that I was alive, and that is the point I guess, much like Gibreel, standing, with pigs falling out of his face and no God to help him.
I held my arms aloft and waded through the knotty field, as if paddling through an upward flowing river, pushing forward against the current.
The summer offered shoulder-high fragrant grasses laced with thistles and weeds and despite the misfortunes of past events, I was not blind to the beauty of the tiny lilac flowers or the red roses that grew wild and free.
I could see the buildings in the distances. It had been a while since I had seen them but they sprawled low at the other end of the playing fields, just as I remembered.
I had packed for the task at hand; knife, bottled water, flashlight, pillow. Kind of funny really, how natural this solution felt, like it was some kind of okay. It wasn't the first time I'd purposefully left the grid; my first solo adventure had taken place when I was eleven. Tired of school, friends, mother, swimming lessons, and tuck shop lunches, I hid out in a farmer's shed, armed with books and apples and bars of chocolate. i stayed for two nights and two days, sleeping in a hairy horse blanket that I shook free of cobwebs and drew close around me, breathing in that rich scent of dry sage, dust, leather, sweat and all the other good things that horses smell of. I returned home when I ran out of food and reading material. Mum was furious but I wasn't sorry; I'd done what I needed to do and it was the same this time, although there was less choice in a sense, as I had in fact lost my house to the bank and my job to the recession and my boyfriend to a nervous breakdown.
I could think of no other way to heal, to regroup and to find the solo me that I could rely on. I had made a mistake, relying on Shayne but I would get over that. I would get over everything.
Book Trailer: http://bit.ly/1h9oqnN
About The Author
Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has been a Canadian citizen since 2003. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy and has lived in the U.S.A., Australia and Britain.
Her first novel, The Hungry Mirror, won the 2011 IPPY Awards Gold Medal for Women's Issues Fiction and was ling-listed for a Relit Award. Her second novel, West of Wawa, won the 2012 IPPY Silver Medal Winner for Popular Fiction and was one of Chatelaine's four Editor's Picks. West of Wawa is available in bookstores and online.
Her third novel, A Glittering Chaos, launched in Spring 2013 to reader and review acclaim, and is about murder, madness, illicit love and poetry.
Her fourth novel, The Witchdoctor's Bones was launched Spring 2014 to reader and literary acclaim. The Witchdoctor's Bones is a thriller about the darkest secrets of African evil; the novel seamlessly weaves witchcraft and ancient folklore into a plot of loss, passion and intrigue and a holiday becomes a test of moral character.
Her fifth novel, Between The Cracks She Fell, was published in Fall 2015 and has been called "a whirligig-ride into the dark recesses of "what-next?" It is a compelling and multi-layered penetrating and twisty tale of insurrection."
"A lyrical and deeply moving examination of emotional pain and faith on a collision course with organized religion. Lisa de Nikolits highly believable and human characters are outsiders struggling to find meaning, and perhaps hope, in contemporary urban society. With a deft and confident clarity of style, she explores the complex interplay of faith, crime and social isolation. Highly recommended." - M.H. Callway, award-winning author of Windigo Fire (Seraphim Editions).
Connect with Lisa:
Author Website: http://www.lisadenikolitswriter.com/
Instagram: https://instagram.com/lisadenikolits/
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/lisadenikolits/
The Mesdames of Mayhem: http://mesdamesofmayhem.com/about/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/LisadN
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