The Last Lifeboat, Kilcullen launch today
It's just 11 years since Hazel Gaynor's first book, The Girl Who Came Home, launched on the Amazon Kindle platform and quickly became a best seller there, writes Brian Byrne. Four years later, having been picked up by HarperCollins, she had two New York Times Best Seller novels on bookshelves both sides of the Atlantic and a new deal with her publisher. Two days ago, her latest fictional exploration of a true story, The Last Lifeboat, hit the shelves, bringing her solus novels to seven, plus three co-written with her friend Heather Webb, and a contribution to an important collection of short stories based around WW1.
By any measure in the world of writers and publishing, Hazel's own story is one of success to be admired, and maybe envied by very many other story-tellers struggling to have their voices heard in a precarious and even scary career choice. But for those who know her, it's a success based on two notions — hard work and dedication to detail. Underpinned by a consuming curiosity about near-past historical events and an urge to tell the stories of the ordinary people affected by them.
Hazel's first book involved a lifeboat from the Titanic which had sunk in the Atlantic in 1912. Her latest has her story in a lifeboat once more in the Atlantic, but this time in 1940, following the sinking by a German U-boat of a ship carrying child evacuees on their way to Canada. An episode that actually happened, that made headlines and inflicted terrible tragedy on families who had entrusted their loved little ones to the risks of wartime sea travel in order to save them from Hitler's anticipated invasion of England.
The core of the story is about eight days spent in the lifeboat by a number of those children, their volunteer escort 'auntie', and some sailors who had survived the sinking. Eight days of cold, discomfort, indignity, hunger and terror. Of wondering if they would survive. Of not knowing if anyone was even looking for them, a tiny bobbing flotsam of humankind in a vast and tumultuous ocean. As readers, we don't spend all our time with them — the author chapters how those in the little group came to be there, where they came from, who they had left behind when they started out on their voyage of sadness, peril and hope.
This is Hazel Gaynor's key skill as a story-teller. Each of the characters we come to know in their ordinariness made extraordinary by their circumstances. The descriptions around them we can feel, we know them at least in part from our own lives. From the smell of scones in the kitchen of one family to the grief of a mother left widowed to bring up her children on her own. The importance of a winning marble to a little boy. The heartache of entrusting little ones to a stranger's care for a future unknown. The lucky charm of a white bird feather. The need to flail out in anger at faceless officialdom when feeling powerless in the midst of tragedy.
This author's other ability is to bring out details of time and period that will not be familiar to today's readers, the work of a skilled historical novelist. I wasn't aware of the transatlantic evacuation of children during WW2. Nor did I know of the 'Mass-Observation Diarist' programme whereby individuals were encouraged to send in their daily feelings about wartime life, to be archived — a Facebook of its time? She uses extracts from these to punctuate her book and her characters' stories, to momentarily bring us to the realities of wartime for others outside the story's space.
Hazel Gaynor doesn't write the kind of dramatic thriller that would be my normal kind of book to escape into. But she has always come up with a tale that has to be read to the end, that every page finished insists it be turned immediately. Because we just need to know, what happens next? I read The Last Lifeboat in two (and a bit) sessions. Which says it all.
The Kilcullen launch of The Last Lifeboat is today, Saturday 10 June 2023, at 3.30pm in Woodbine Books.
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