Nayomi Munaweera
Nayomi Munaweera's new novel is What Lies Between Us. From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: How did you come up with the idea for What Lies Between Us, and for the book’s main character?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I’ve been quite interested in mother-child relationships. I’m very interested in women’s issues—my first book was about two women going through the civil war in Sri Lanka. It’s something I’ll always be grappling with.
I was going to write about domestic violence—she would have murdered her husband. I thought that was too easy to garner sympathy for the character—I was interested in unsympathetic characters and how you humanize that.
I was thinking of a woman who had killed someone—her husband was emotionally too easy [in terms of sympathy for the character], so I turned it quite a bit darker.
I read Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which is such a brilliant book. The most obvious threat is coming from the child. The only scarier thing than that is...[read on]
