You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family, as the old saying goes. Or as Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

I’m not sure that that’s true. But I do find myself wondering if there’s any such thing as a ‘normal’ family. Presumably that’s why there are such rich pickings in family life for novelists. 

I’m endlessly fascinated by families and how they work. The spoken and unspoken rules; the traditions and habits. The ways of doing things that seem totally normal when you are growing up – and that you only question when a friend or partner points them out to you.

The Restless Wave crosses three generations of one family. Edward, born in 1908, spends his early life in India. His childhood is shaped by strong values of service and duty. Orphaned very young, his upbringing is pretty lonely. In contrast, he goes on to have a large family, six children. One of those children is Hope, the second narrator in the book. She grows up in another era and another context: war-time and post-war Britain. For a whole number of reasons, she deliberately turns her back on her parents’ values. It’s safe to say that her parenting of her daughter Nell couldn’t be more different. And Nell’s outlook on life is different again.

Other characters bring different perspectives on family life. I don’t want to say too much more than that. Suffice it to say that much of the book is about the tussle between the generations as each character struggles with what life throws at them.

It’s only towards the end of writing a book that I seem to spot the bigger themes that overarch a storyline. In this case, I think that The Restless Wave is partly about the search for home.  What does home mean if you are separated from your family? If you’ve seen your home destroyed as a result of war or disaster? How do you rebuild a life after trauma? How do you make peace with the past? And what is it that different people need to feel themselves ‘at home’?

For some, it’s a matter of being surrounded by precious possessions, perhaps with associated memories. For others, it’s the landscape that makes all the difference. For others, it’s the people, whether that’s family, the wider community, or both.  

I guess the answer will be different for everyone. We probably all know people who are capable of cheerfully making themselves at home wherever they happen to be. For some, that’s much harder, and they experience a long-term sense of dislocation. Perhaps it’s a lifetime’s work to carve out a niche.

A friend married to a Welshman recently introduced me to the Welsh word hiraeth. I’m told there is no direct translation into English, but that it means a sort of homesickness, a bittersweet longing for something that is missing. It sounds to me as if there’s overlap with the ancient Greek word nostos, from which we get the English word ‘nostalgia’, which is a sort of longing for home combined with a quest. Homer’s Odyssey is the apotheosis of nostos: the tale of the Greek hero Odysseus in his ten-year quest to return home to Ithaca after the Trojan War. Along the way he encounters shipwrecks and other trials and tribulations, but nostos propels him on.

For me, the sentiments expressed in nostos and hiraeth – if I’ve understood these untranslatable words correctly – are pretty universal. They are as much about finding our ‘home’ within our families and communities as they are about specific geographical places.

Our experience within our families is a huge part of what shapes our lives. That’s not rocket science. But one of the things that interests me as a writer is the batons that are passed down the generations without discussion or acknowledgement. The unspoken, unnamed narratives that become part of our own stories without us even knowing.

And in a sense, that’s what The Restless Wave is all about: the lifelong quest we each pursue to make peace with our pasts and find our place in the world.

The war memorials and cemeteries in Normandy are profoundly moving. They are beautifully kept and tended. Line after line of white tombstones fill acres of land overlooking the beaches that witnessed D-Day and its aftermath. However many times I visit, I am moved.

This year, we've been reminded all over again of the extraordinary feat that was D day. The images from the 75th anniversary commemorations were extremely powerful. I don't think I'll forget the sight of the nonagenarian parachutists re-enacting their landings.  I imagine that this will be the last time any veterans will make the journey.
 
I was in Normandy for the 70th anniversary, when by chance we travelled out to France accompanied by a number of veterans. They marched onto the boat in formation, and we were accompanied out of Portsmouth by a naval escort, in honour of the men. Also on the boat were any number of jeeps and motorbikes dating back to the 1940s. The mood was a combination of a festival and something rather more solemn.
 
Above is a picture of Omaha Beach. Some years ago, we took my son and some friends there while we were on holiday. They  were nervous of playing on the beach. They were concerned it was disrespectful, somehow.
 
My own view is that not playing on those beaches would be sadder far. Let’s never forget the sacrifices those soldiers made, but let’s also celebrate the freedom we enjoy as a result.

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​Every novel requires a lot of research. In the case of this book, the action takes place over the space of a century. So that required really quite a lot of homework.
 
Some of this was simply historical. Much of the action of the book takes place around D-Day and the Normandy Landings. An enormous amount has been written about the Second World War, of course, so that is relatively straightforward. What’s much more complex is pulling together all the little details that make the narrative feel authentic. What slang was used in 1944? What was fashionable womenswear in 1959? What was going on in the field of education in 2016?
 
Then there’s the question of how much detail you need to go into. As a novelist you are trying to tell a story, not write a history book. But the more you probe, the more you realise you don’t know. It’s very easy to get bogged down to the point where you feel utterly swamped.
 
But it was a lot of fun, too. I love learning about new things. And I made some rather wonderfully serendipitous discoveries along the way.
 
Edward, one of my three main characters, was a chaplain in the Second World War, and like many other padres, accompanied the troops into Normandy on D-Day. I knew a fair amount about the Battle of Normandy thanks to visiting the museums and memorials that pepper the Normandy coastline over many years, but I didn’t know anything about chaplains. I spent a fascinating morning at the Museum of Army Chaplaincy in Hampshire, with its curator, David Blake. (He was so helpful he gets a name check in the story itself, as well as in the acknowledgements.)
 
Thanks to him, I met a woman called Jenni Crane, whose discovery of a leather suitcase in a junk shop in 2014 led to her search for its former owner, the Revd George Parry, who as killed on D-day aged just 29. Through Jenni I met a lovely man called Frank Treble, whose own father had also been a D-day chaplain. Frank very generously gave me a copy of his father’s unpublished memoir – and gave me his full permission to pillage it. Which I did.
 
And it was while I was reading the diary of another D-day padre in the Bodleian Library in Oxford one day that I came across the name of my own uncle, a Major John Hanson-Lawson. I had no idea he had served at D-day, and he died many years ago. Thanks to Facebook, I managed to track down his only son, my step-cousin, who lives in Hong Kong, and he confirmed that yes, this was his father, and yes, he had indeed served at D-day.
 
Perhaps most curiously, David also told me about a pre-invasion training school for chaplains where the chosen few were put through their paces between March and May 1944. Being picked for this training was quite prestigious. It was also no picnic: live ammunition was used and at least one hapless padre was seriously injured in the process. And guess what? The village where this took place is barely six miles from where I lived at the time, in Northamptonshire.
 
More remarkably still, just a few weeks before my conversation with David, my husband and I were driving down the A5 a stone’s throw from that village when we were stopped by a road block. My husband got chatting with the policeman who was directing the traffic. We assumed there’d been a road accident, but no. The hold-up was all because Army bomb disposal officers were safely detonating an explosive device that had lingered in the field until modern times. It seemed that the more deeply I delved, the more serendipitous my desire to tell this story began to feel.
 
In the end, I accumulated much more research than I actually used, but I’m sure that’s necessary. I had to remind myself that I was writing a novel, not a historical guide. Nonetheless I wanted to know enough to avoid making too many obvious howlers. Fingers crossed….

​People often ask writers where they get their ideas from.
 
One answer is that I’ve no idea. Another is that ideas are all around us. You only have to read a newspaper, watch the news, talk to a colleague, overhear your neighbour’s conversation on the train. Personally, I always seem have to have a hundred ideas bubbling around. Not all of them will make it into a book, of course. But, for me, at any rate, ideas almost always begin with curiosity. I wonder why someone might do that… I wonder what that feels like… I wonder what would happen if…
 
For me, ‘What if…?’ is almost inevitably the starting point. I can’t imagine how you become a writer unless you are incurably curious. (That’s a polite way of saying ‘nosy’). Curious about the world, curious about people. Curious about what makes people tick. The same reasons as I became a journalist – a love of language and indefatigable curiosity – have propelled me into writing fiction.
 
Naively, it seems, I’ve been surprised by how often readers assume that a writer’s work is autobiographical. Only last weekend, referring to my first book Knowing Anna, my aunt said to me, ‘Tell me about Anna. I’m guessing she was a friend of yours.’ She was surprised – and I think a little disappointed – that the answer was no.
 
Of course, of course you draw on your own experience when you’re writing. But it would be pretty dull, surely, if you just rehashed bits of your life? Well, I'm not sure my life has been that fascinating anyway, to anyone else but me. ‘If it hasn't happened to you, how do you know about x, then?’ I was asked at one point. I confess I was taken aback. The answer, I suppose, is research and a bit of imagination. Is it such a great secret that a writer of fiction makes stuff up? 

Anyway, where did I get the idea for The Restless Wave?
 
Well, the starting point was my first book. If you’ve read Knowing Anna, you may remember Anna’s father, William, had a rather overbearing father, who found it hard to settle back in to family life after seeing action in the Second World War. Specifically, he’d been an army chaplain at the Battle for Normandy in the summer of 1944. In Anna, William’s father only merited three paragraphs. But increasingly I found myself wondering about this as yet unnamed man. Who was he? Had the War changed him or had he always been like that? And if so, what had happened? I wanted to know.
 
I’m also interested in what we pass down the generations in our families. Aside from our genes, there are the values and the interests we pass on in an intentional way. But what about the things that aren’t talked about, that inform the whole tenor of family life? Especially at a point in our history when people very deliberately wanted to put the War behind them and concentrate on rebuilding their lives in peacetime.
 
I should probably also confess that at this stage I wasn’t quite ready to let go of the Meadows family. I’d become enormously fond of them, perhaps especially of William. It wasn’t that I wanted to write a sequel – and the new book most definitely isn’t one – but a companion novel? Why not?
 
So my starting point was the desire to find out more about William’s father. To try and understand him, and see how his personality and his behaviour had shaped the lives of future generations. Of course, for this to become a whole book, I needed a lot more ideas besides. The story unfolds through three central characters: Edward (William’s father), his daughter Hope (one of William’s older sisters), and her daughter Nell (William’s niece). So each character needed creating, and the threads of the three stories needed weaving together into one narrative. And that’s when the fun really begins…