It’s Friday, which means it’s time for Series 2, episode 3 of A Quickie with….. and this week the lovely Araminta Hall is chatting about her new book.
Araminta lives by the sea in Brighton, on the south coast of England, with her husband and three children who come and go between universities and flat shares. Most of her time is spent in her gorgeous writing cabin battling words, but she also loves walking her dog on the beach, doing a bit of very amateur gardening, seeing friends and reading, reading, reading.
She has written six novels; Everything & Nothing (2011), Dot (2013), Our Kind of Cruelty (2017), Imperfect Women (2020), Hidden Depths (2022) and One of the Good Guys (2024).
Both Everything & Nothing and One of the Good Guys have been picked for the Richard & Judy book club at WHSmiths and four of her novels are under option. Filming started in May on Imperfect Women, staring Elisabeth Moss, Kerry Washington and Kate Mara and will be a major series on Apple TV.
What is the title of your new book and the date of publication?
Unreliable Narrator, 05/03/26
Please describe your new book in 5 words
Can you trust your memory?
The last 5 star book you read and would recommend
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
What is the last text or message you have received?
I can’t eat this sandwich – from my daughter
What is your secret talent?
Reading, but not sure it’s secret as everyone knows I’m addicted. (Wish I could say something interesting here like recite the alphabet backwards).
What’s the one product you couldn’t live without?
My laptop
What is the weirdest thing in your Google search history?
Amongst the almost exclusive recipes are a few odd ones like: what is the process when a body decomposes.
What is one piece of advice you wished you’d seriously taken?
Exercise is good for mental health. Took me about 40 years to realise that was true.
Do you have any phobias or superstitions?
No phobias, but I touch wood a lot, especially around health.
What’s the most embarrassing moment you’ve ever had in public?
Doing a signing for my first novel at Waterstones to which no one turned up.
What are your pet peeves and what are YOUR worst habits?
I really hate it when people don’t take responsibility for their actions – if you say sorry pretty much everything is forgivable. I am ashamed at how bad I am with technology. It’s like my brain freezes and I can’t undertake the simplest of tasks. And I put off doing things I find hard, which means I am always very late sending out my newsletter and never promote it.
How would your closest friends describe you?
I hope they’d say I’m loyal, available, fun, good at listening and good at chatting! Oh and good at recommending books.
When Hope finds her real life in the pages of a bestselling novel, truth and fiction become blurred.
As a young woman, Hope’s dreams are as aspirational as her name. Curious and beautiful, she lands a job working for an up-and-coming author at his Somerset home. Drawn into the orbit of a glamorous bohemian elite, she quickly falls under the spell of this exotic world, which revolves around Ambrose Glencourt, his artist wife and their semi-adopted son, Tom.
But her time with them ends in a fatal disaster. She has kept the truth of those events a secret ever since.
Ten years on, Hope lives a lonely life that she has accepted not just as penance for what she did, but also to protect Ambrose. Except he hasn’t upheld his side of the bargain and is using her story in his new novel. And he has a very different tale to tell about what happened that summer.
But which one of them is a reliable narrator? And at what cost do you take control of the narrative of your own life?
