There is Theo, a self-pitying middle-aged novelist, still involved with his snooty ex-wife, Carla.
The result of that walk three years ago was A Slow Fire Burning, set on and around the canal in north London and featuring a cast of characters all of whom, to one degree or another, are satisfyingly bent out of shape. Hawkins is speaking to me via video from Edinburgh, where she spends half her time and sat out much of lockdown. “Peering into people’s houseboats – lovely, pretty ones with flower pots on the roof and solar panels, and also the ones that are sinking into the water and look as if nobody has touched them for years.” The thought she had was: “There could be anything in there.”
Hawkins was mulling new options while she walked. That novel, published in 2015, had sold a staggering 20m copies and been made into a film. Into the Water, her second novel – the second to be published under her own name, that is – had come out a year earlier, and she was still experiencing aftershocks from the extraordinary success of her first, The Girl on the Train. It was 2018 and she was wandering around trying to think of ideas. I t started, for Paula Hawkins, with the memory of a story and a walk along the canal near her London flat.
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