Talking Location With ….Linda Newbery: NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

7th June 2025

#TalkingLocationWith … Linda Newbery, author of The One True Thing – Northamptonshire (and Mumbai)

At the centre of my novel is a large Edwardian house, home to the Harper family. That might sound like the set-up for a Big Country House story, but in fact Wildings isn’t particularly grand or notable, though it represents, as does many a fictional big house, status, privilege and continuity. And as in many a big house story, those qualities are questioned and eroded.

Bridget, one of my three viewpoint characters, is dismayed by the move to her husband’s family home when he inherits it, eleven years into their marriage. She feels far from her working-class roots, unsure how to find a role here. It’s the garden and the outbuildings that ultimately give her a purpose: shocked that the old stables and cottage are unused, she makes it her project to renovate them, with the aim of renting them out. This brings two other key characters into her life: Meg, a young stone-carver, resolutely independent, and Adam, an artist whose bold abstract paintings conceal deep inner conflict.

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The novel moves back and forth between two generations. Bridget’s daughter Jane sees Wildings as an anachronism, embodying privilege and excessive consumption. ‘We can’t go on living like this,’ she thinks. ‘Can’t take it as our right to own a big, poorly insulated house that runs on oil, Dad and me in a house big enough for eight or ten. The planet can’t afford it.’ In the opening chapters she’s abruptly called back from a yoga retreat in India. Having started her trip in Mumbai, the return to her comfortable home makes her aware of sharp contrasts. When she catches herself thinking it’s unfair that she’s lost both parents while still in her twenties, she rebukes herself. In Mumbai ‘she’d seen extreme poverty – families subsisting in spaces under flyovers and between buildings, children begging on the streets or sheltering beneath sagging cardboard. How did they survive? No concept of fairness or injustice in her own life could have meaning, thrown into such jarring contrast. Her parents had died in their late sixties and seventies respectively, after lives of comfort, fulfilment and material success. How could they – she – not be seen as fortunate?’

My reason for siting the house near a fictitious village on the Northamptonshire / Oxfordshire border was to enable Bridget to offer Wildings as an Artweeks venue. This is a three-week festival every May in which galleries, studios and workshops open to the public, displaying a dazzling array of arts and crafts. Like Bridget, I love Artweeks – the range of talent, and the glimpses into artists’ studios and working practices, and all at this most beautiful time of year.

Swifts are emblematic in the novel – their return eagerly awaited, their screaming, arrowed flight a confirmation that summer is really here. As I write, it’s nearly time for these remarkable birds to complete their flight of thousands of miles – they live on the wing – returning to nests in roof-eaves and hollows. As the novel opens,  Bridget is in the garden, adjusting to the realisation that this summer will be her last. ‘Birdsong swelled from the woods beyond – croon of woodpigeons, silvery trickle of willow warbler and, closer, the throatier song of a blackbird. Soon swifts would shriek overhead and the day would be in full flight.

Photo credit: RSPB

So many times she’d stood like this, caught in the spell of dawn chorus and early sunlight. Today it was both familiar and strange: too bright, too loud … Next May the oaks would come into leaf, lambs would bleat in the fields, the blackbird would sing from the ash tree; all without her. In three weeks it would be midsummer, and from that turning point her life would wind down as the days shortened. Each seasonal shift, each subtle change of light, each flowering and fruiting, would be the last she would know.’

The ‘present day’ sections of the novel take place in 2018-19, when Extinction Rebellion began to make itself known. As we become increasingly aware of climate breakdown and nature loss, the reliable progression of the seasons can no longer be taken for granted. In the final chapter, when Meg and Adam watch the swifts, ‘it was touched with a kind of grief, because everything, everything, was under threat; but there was joy in that too, because this evening was now, here, poignant in its fragility.’  Wildings no longer stands alone in its island of privilege. It’s part of a changing, unpredictable world.

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Linda Newbery is the award-winning author of Set in Stone (category winner, Costa Book Awards), Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon, The Shell House, Sisterland, Lob, The Brockenspectre, The Key to Flambards, This Book is Cruelty Free – Animals and Us and many others. She has mostly written for young readers, but Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon was her first adult novel, published in paperback as Missing Rose. She has twice been shortlisted for theCarnegie Medal and was a judge for the Whitbread Book Awards in 2005 (the year before they became the Costa Book Awards). With Adèle Geras and Celia Rees, she edits the blog Writers Review. She is an active campaigner on animal and environmental issues. www.lindanewbery.co.uk X: @lindanewbery  IG: @lindanewbery

An absorbing, poignant and exceptional literary novel from a Costa Book Awards category winner, The One True Thing explores family relationships, histories and secrets.

When the ground shifts, where can one true thing be found?

Jane, in her twenties, is left parentless when her father dies suddenly; a second shock follows when his will reveals the existence of a son no-one knew of. Now Wildings, the family home, must be sold.

Spanning two generations, The One True Thing simultaneously tells the story of Bridget, Jane’s mother, trapped in an unhappy marriage on which her career depends, and of stone-carver Meg, who wants only independence but is enmeshed in conflicting loyalties and desires when Adam, a young artist, enters their lives, to devastating effect.

Now far from Wildings, Meg is bound by a promise to support Jane in her loss. Having thought of herself as an observer who saw everything, she’s forced to realise how much she failed to see – and the cost to those she loves.

The One True Thing is a heartrending story of betrayal and family loyalties, told through complex, authentically drawn characters and gorgeously evocative writing.

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