Intersection: Crime and Historical Fiction - Emma Flint in conversation

The acclaimed novelist Emma Flint joins Brunel’s Claire Lynch to discuss the intersection of True Crime and Historical Fiction writing in Emma’s second novel, Other Women.

Emma Flint was born and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. Since childhood Emma has been drawn to true-crime stories, developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of real-life murder cases from the early 20th century. She graduated from the University of St Andrews with an MA in English Language and Literature, and later completed a novel-writing course at the Faber Academy. Her first novel, Little Deaths, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, for the Desmond Elliott Prize, for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award, and for The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. Other Women is her second novel.

Other Women:
Mesmerising, haunting and utterly remarkable, Other Women is inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago. Six years after the end of the Great War, the country is still in mourning. Thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and sweethearts were lost forever, and the sea of women they left behind must carry on without them. But Beatrice Cade is not a wife, not a widow, not a mother. There are thousands of other women like her: nameless and invisible. Determined to carve out a richer and more fulfilling life for herself, Bea takes a job in the city and a room in a Bloomsbury ladies’ club. Then a fleeting encounter changes everything. Her emerging independence is destroyed when she falls in love for the first time. Kate Ryan is a wife, a mother, and an accomplished liar. She has managed to build an enviable life with her husband and young daughter. To anyone looking in from the outside, they seem like a normal, happy family. On the south coast of England, an anguished moment between lovers becomes a horrific murder. And two women who should never have met are connected forever. A devastating story of fantasy, obsession, and ultimately the lengths we will go to in order to save the ones we love.

Emma Flint will be joined in conversation by Claire Lynch, Professor in English and Irish Literature at Brunel University London. Claire specialises in teaching contemporary British and Irish fiction, Modernism, and Life Writing (both theory and practice) at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In 2021, she published Small: On Motherhoods - A debut literary memoir on diverse motherhood that charts her experience of becoming a mother with her wife. 

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