This is the ultimate aspiring novelist’s fantasy: A completed manuscript weakens years in a desktop before the author decides, what the hell, I will give it a crack and send it to an agent – and within weeks the book is caught, even fought by different publishers.

If this happened in a movie, you can mock. But New Zealander Jennifer Trevelyan lives out this dream.

Trevelyan wrote several novels and put them all in a drawer while working in other posts. But in the end, she decided to try her happiness with her favorite one. Incredibly, it was not just bought by one of the world’s most famous agents, it became the center of an international bid war, and was selected for a film adjustment before it was even printed.

The 50-year-old man started writing the atmosphere A beautiful family, A part-thriller and a decade ago a part of the upcoming age, suitable a decade ago before work while her husband and children were sleeping, and sneaked to a cafe where she would write before she went to her right work.

Trevelyan agrees that her overnight success is a fantasy scenario, although “maybe not share the ten years”, she says about Zoom from her home in Wellington.

Former wedding photographer Trevelyan also worked in the publishing house of children, but it was only before she completed a master’s degree of creative writing at Wellington University University that she decided to re -visit her manuscripts.

The concept for what has become A beautiful family Was, she says, the favorite of the stack she hid.

“I couldn’t read it again,” she says, “but I knew it was the best thing I did. I got to this point where I just went around and didn’t necessarily improve it. I was just sick of the sight of it. So I thought I would take a little back, a little. “

Then she walked back a lot. “I was planning to put maybe three months in the drawer, and it was turned into three years in some way.”

Maybe things may not have stretched out in the same way if she didn’t wait.

When she decided to try her luck, she sent it to one of the world’s most famous literary agents. Felicity Blunt, who works at Curtis Brown in London, is probably one of the world’s most respected literary agents, with a stable of clients including Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, Ann Patchett and Jilly Cooper. Blunt is also the sister of actor Emily Blunt, and is also married to actor Stanley Tucci.

Has Trevelyan just reached a point where she thought, why the hell?

‘Absolutely! But also, I don’t think I completely realized how smart she was, ‘she says. “I knew she had these movie star connections, but I didn’t actually look at her list and I didn’t realize the caliber of some of the people she represents. I think if I knew it, I might have been a little intimidated. ‘

Blunt described online after which she searched for prospective manuscripts, and Trevelyan thought it sounded like the book she would have driven away.

“She talked about transporting another place on the other side of the world, and she said she liked Daphne du Maurier – and I love Daphne du Maurier, so I thought, why not?”

Why not. Bluntly snapped up A beautiful family And there was a bid war right away. It was, says Trevelyan, “minded”.

Blunt told her to prepare herself for interviews with interested publishers, and Trevelyan was worried about what they would ask her, how to investigate for this – just to tell that it was she who would do the ‘interviewing’.

“I got frustrated at every step! I think I suddenly sat on stage and got the lead in your dream production … I just got a stage scare, I think. “

Told from the perspective of 10-year-old Alix, A beautiful family took place in 1985, in the course of a summer holidays on the Kapiti coast on New Zealand’s North Island. Alix is ​​at a rented beach house with her family, but both her parents are unusually distracted and her sister Vanessa, now 15, no longer wants to go to the beach with her; She is more interested in partying with older teens and meeting boys.

Then Alix Kahu meets a boy at her own age who tells her about the mystery of a young girl who has disappeared in the area a few years before, and whose body has never been found. Their search for the girl’s body gives the pair a focus for the long summer days, between swimming and lying on the beach. It also takes off Alix’s thoughts that are going on at home – she is not unaware of the arguments and silences between her parents. And then there’s the creepy man in the beach house behind them.

Trevelyan used memories of her own children’s holidays along the same coastline. “We had a big extensive family holiday, and it ran around with my cousins,” she says.

And one year there was even a strange man next door. “We had a summer where my dad booked a very basic beach house, and although we were still very nice, it had a kind of slightly funny atmosphere,” she says. “I loved it, but there was a house next door we overlooked one. And there was a man who stayed there, who was very creepy. ‘

It became her starting point.

“He wasn’t creepy to me, but he was against the older women,” she says. “He would … look at the older women.”

To say much more about the book’s creepy character would give away the story’s plot.

Trevelyan initially wrote the book from an adult’s perspective, but the use of a ten -year -old’s voice offers a different point of view and in the story.

Load

‘It posed some problems – there are some restrictions on areas you can’t really go. For example, I knew that I couldn’t do a complicated police investigation, ‘she says. ‘But it also created this bubble of just this holiday. And I tried to capture the thing when you are an adult, and you look back on your childhood, and you … don’t know if your memories are true or whether you made it. “

With the 1980s nostalgia-Walkmans, split Enz, the type of cellphone-free childhood that simply no longer exists-and a moving sense of place, it’s not surprising A beautiful family has been selected for a film. New Zealand filmmakers Niki Caro (Whale rider) and Finola Dwyer (Brooklyn) is on board to adjust the novel.

Trevelyan is excited, and fortunately the story will not be transplanted into a US environment. ‘The institution was very important to me. I’m so excited to see it. ‘

She is already working on her next novel and can now call herself a full -time writer, grateful that she does not have to go back to the photography of weddings, a performance in which she fell after studying photography.

“I was a little shy and couldn’t really see it, but I really wanted to be a writer.”

A beautiful family By Jennifer Trevelyan (Allen & Unwin) is out now.

The booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.