Louise Doughty

Louise Doughty has never been one to shy away from difficult subjects. In Dance with Me, she tackled mental illness and sexual betrayal. Honey-Dew  centered on the mystery of a middle-aged couple found stabbed to death in a rural village.  And Stone Cradle opens with the birth of a child in a graveyard.

Her latest, the Costa shortlisted, Whatever You Love takes on a woman’s quest for revenge when her daughter is killed in a hit-and-run accident.  Louise handles this emotive subject matter expertly and draws the reader into the story of a mother’s grief and the tragic consequences that she sets in motion.

In this clip from The Book Show Louise tells Mariella how, as a mother, she could draw on her own fear of accidents to write such an unsettling book.

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Louise was born in 1962 and grew up in Rutland, England's smallest county, a rural area that later provided the setting for her third novel, Honey-Dew.   She attended Leeds University, where she earned a BA in English Literature and also took the famous MA in Creative Writing course at University of East Anglia where she was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.

After graduation, she moved to London and spent the rest of her twenties in a series of temporary jobs including teaching, bar jobs and secretarial work.  It was her experiences as a temp secretary that provided the material for her first novel, Crazy Paving, a black comedy about her experiences of working in London.

After her first three novels, Louise took a dramatic departure with her fourth, the internationally acclaimed Fires in the Dark, it was to become the first in a series of novels based on the history of the Romany people and her own family ancestry.  It was followed by Stone Cradle in 2006.
 
Louise also writes radio plays and journalism and regularly broadcasts for BBC Radio 4.  In the past she has worked as a critic and cultural commentator for a variety of newspapers and magazines.  Notably she was theatre critic for the Mail on Sunday and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s book programme A Good Read.  Louise currently writes a column for the Daily Telegraph’s Saturday Arts & Books Section; a collection of which were published in 2007 entitled A Novel in a Year.

Bibliography
Crazy Paving   (Touchstone, 1995)
Dance with Me   (Touchstone, 1996)
Honey-Dew   (Scribner, 1998)
Fires in the Dark   (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
Stone Cradle   (Simon & Schuster, 2006)
A Novel in a Year   (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
Whatever You Love   (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty
Two police officers knock on Laura's door and her life changes forever. They tell her that her nine-year old daughter Betty has been hit by a car and killed. When justice is slow to arrive, Laura decides to take her own revenge and begins to track down the man responsible. Laura's grief also re-opens old wounds and she is thrown back to the story of her passionate love affair with Betty's father David, their marriage and his subsequent affair with another woman. Haunted by her past, and driven to breaking point by her desire for retribution, Laura discovers the lengths she is willing to go to for love.

If you’d like to download an extract from Louise’s Whatever You Love then visit lovereading.co.uk

And follow the link for more recommendation in our If You Liked That, You’ll Love This series