As it turned out, two solar eclipses were visible in 1981 - one in the very southern South Pacific and one in what was then Burma, now Myanmar. Then it was just a matter of finding out where the moon shadows would have fallen that year. I knew that I wanted her to be 30-ish when the book was released, so I settled on 1981 as a birth year for her. I like the word ‘umbra’ and I liked the idea that this bald character whose husband would someday travel to the moon would be born in the moon’s shadow, with the sun flowing around it as hair. I knew that I wanted Sunny to be born in the midst of a solar eclipse, because I had this image in my mind of the way the solar flares appear around the moon as flowing hair. I thought I’d give a little insight into three of the choices I made in my novel: Why my main character was born in Burma, why she was as bald as an egg, and why she named her son Bubber.īurma came about very scientifically - no inspiration whatsoever was involved.

Did a writer agonize over a certain element of the novel for months or years, toiling and sweating to narrow down the possibilities? Did she just sit up from a dead sleep at 3am, panting and frothing, having come to a sudden, inspired decision? Did she crib a plot point off an obscure adventure novel she’s sure no one has ever read? What? No one ever does that? Oh, me neither. In an article written specially for bookoxygen, Lydia Netzer reveals some of her inspiration for the book.Īs a reader myself, I often wonder about the choices authors make. Shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction 2012 and selected as a New York Times Notable Book, Lydia Netzer’s first novel was published to a storm of favourable criticism and comparisons with Yann Martel, Mary Gaitskell, Anne Tyler and Don DeLillo. Published by Simon & Schuster 13 June 2013

Shine shine shine by lydia netzer