The Road Home by Rose Tremain is Hay Festival Book of the Month for November, continuing the festival's campaign to celebrate and ignite conversation around current and backlist books that have contemporary resonance.
First published in 2007, just three years after Poland and nine other countries joined the EU, the novel offers a view of the UK through a migrant’s eyes: inequality looms large as the stresses of chasing status and success in a new country settle on protagonist Lev’s shoulders.
In a far-ranging conversation with Hay Festival director Peter Florence, Tremain touched on:
The Road Home today… “The Road Home is as much about us as it is about Lev. It’s about how he sees us. It's a sad fact that if I was writing Lev's story now, it would need more nastiness, more cruelty, more crime. It was only 10 years ago, but the world has changed."
Food… “Someone could one day write a whole thesis on food in my fiction. I don't see myself as a foodie person, but it consistently plays an important part in my narrative.”
Writing… ”In writing this I held in mind something that Ian McEwan said: every bit of an ending has to be earned by what has gone before.”
Cultural appropriation… ”I’m not sure I would be able to write this novel today, perhaps my anxiousness of treading on someone’s cultural toes would put me off. The novelist is now poised between a belief that the imagination is paramount and the complicated issue of cultural appropriation. Are we going to get to the point where nobody can write about anything other than themselves or people just like them?"
… and fiction… “What fiction can do, better than anything else, is take the story of one man and make it the story of us all.”
Find out more about Hay Festival’s Book of the Month here. Read our interview with Rose Tremain here. And look over for the session's audio on Hay Player very soon.