Setting, characters and secrets in AFTER THE STORM

My second novel After The Storm is set in Belize City and an island in the Caribbean Sea called Roatan. I’ve been there and always felt this would be a great setting for a novel. Roatan is a beautiful island but also has a kind of frontier feeling where the normal rules do not apply. I kept a holiday journal when I visited and took photos and these helped me create the atmosphere of the island. The Roatan in my novel is sun-soaked and stunning on the surface with something dark underneath. 

CHARACTERS

For me fiction is always about the characters. There are four main characters in After The Storm. British couple Anna and Rob and American couple Owen and Kim who have a handsome old sailing boat which they have been living on for three years. On their first night in Belize Anna and Rob meet them. Owen suggests they charter his boat and he will take them to the island of Roatan, where the diving is sensational. Anna does not want to go but Rob is really keen and persuades her it will be a great adventure. Unknown to them Kim is desperate to go home to Florida. It is Owen who is determined to continue their life on the boat. So straightaway we have conflict of wishes between the four characters and a boat is a claustrophobic place when tensions start to build.

CONTRAST

The two women in After The Storm are very different. Anna fears many things in the physical world – cockroaches, wasps, flying, lack of privacy, storms at sea.  She is however emotionally strong and empathetic. She is a speech therapist who works with old men who have had strokes and she tries to help them to speak again. Kim in contrast is streetwise, capable and resourceful. She knows how to gut fish, how to cook on a boat when it’s pitching up and down, how to adapt and make the best of things. They are very different women and as a consequence do not really get on. The two men are different too. Rob is laid back and Owen is troubled but they do get on, from their first meeting.

SECRETS

The two couples set off. It takes ten days to reach Roatan and that is a long time when one of the four, Owen, is hiding a terrible secret.

The strapline of the book is Some Secrets Destroy You. With the exception of Anna, the others have secrets which they are hiding. Some of these secrets are trivial, some are more serious and some are deadly. The underlying theme of the novel is that you need to bring dark secrets out into the light of day in order for them to lose their destructive power.

The storm of the title is both a weather storm and a psychological storm. By the end of the novel all four characters have been changed by the experience of spending this intense time together.

My novels are published by Head of Zeus.

After The Storm

The Lie of You