Twisted twins, crocs and kinky sex: Kiwi author Rose Carlyle strikes gold with The Girl in the Mirror
Rose Carlyle’s first novel, about extreme sibling rivalry, has made her the toast of the international publishing scene.
Rose Carlyle is living the dream many authors — from prize-winning veterans to Sunday scribblers and creative writing postgrads — quietly fantasise about.
Carlyle’s debut novel, a racy thriller titled The Girl in the Mirror, was bought by Australian publisher Allen & Unwin last year. Before the year was out, British and US publishers were engaged in a bidding war — said to involve six American publishing houses — for the yet-to-be-published manuscript, and a Hollywood film deal followed.
According to Allen & Unwin, the suspense novel, which asks how far you would go to insinuate yourself into someone else’s life, was sold for “huge advances’’. Review understands the figure was in the high six figures, and that’s before the yet-to-be-announced film deal was sealed.
“It has been pinch yourself moment after pinch yourself moment,” says Carlyle, a softly spoken ex-lawyer and single mother from New Zealand. “I’ve still not really adjusted to it (the reaction to her book), even though it’s been nine months now since I realised things were going crazy.”
We speak by phone in early August, just as her book — which is set in north Queensland and the Seychelles — is being released in Australia and New Zealand. It will be published in the US and Britain next month and is to be translated into Russian, Serbian, Czech and Polish.
Carlyle, who lives in Auckland with her three children, still sounds overwhelmed by the response to her first work of fiction, which draws on her year-long adventure sailing a 62-foot sloop across the Indian Ocean. “It does feel surreal,” she says, “especially because right up until I woke up this morning I was still an unpublished author. So you still feel like you’re not quite there yet, and at the same time these amazing things are happening.”
She says that when she sent her manuscript to Allen & Unwin, she didn’t have an agent. Nor did she realise she could secure overseas publishing deals ahead of her book being released. “I didn’t know much about publishing when I starting writing. Probably like most writers, you just write because you want to write,” she says.
Carlyle’s high-octane tale of yachting adventures on restless seas and identical twin sisters whose mercenary nature belies their seemingly close bond, has been described as “an addictive ride” by Australian author Malcolm Knox, while Aimee Molloy, author of New York Times best-selling novel The Perfect Mother, said it “took my breath away” because of its “superbly taut plot” and “unforgettable, haunting characters”.
Carlyle’s page turner centres on Australian twins Iris, who is brittle and insecure, and Summer, who is charismatic and apparently good-natured, who engage in next-level sibling rivalry after a multi-million-dollar inheritance (with its own weird twist) is dangled in front of them. The narrative also features identity theft, kinky sex that edges into potential abuse, and ravenous crocodiles.
Despite her book’s ingenious final plot twist, the writer says the impetus for the story remains “a mystery to me”.
“I didn’t realise I was writing a thriller,” she says. “I was an unpublished writer and I had a story I wanted to write … I just wanted to get it on the page. The story picked me rather than me picking the story.”
Although sibling conflict is taken to an extreme in The Girl in the Mirror, Carlyle’s older sister, Maddie, was a close collaborator on the book. In fact, Maddie, a nurse, is like an unseen presence in our phone interview, she is mentioned so often.
“She was really important in the (overall) picture,” says the author. “She’s really good at that big picture of where the story should begin and end.’’
Carlyle reveals she and Maddie “really came up with the bones of the plot in one day, one lunchtime”, adding: “We suddenly felt like we discovered this story, we stumbled upon it and in some ways felt unqualified to write it because we’ve never had sibling rivalry.”
The writer says her story is not just about the charged dynamics of twin relationships: “I think a lot of readers might have experienced sibling rivalry with their own sister or brother or both. And they’re reading a book in which it’s taken to the next level. In a way the twin relationship is the ultimate sibling relationship. By being that extreme of a sibling relationship, it reveals things about everybody’s sibling relationships; that seething beneath the surface.”
The narrative, says the 47-year-old Aucklander, also explores “that whole uncanny valley thing of not being able to tell which person (or twin) you’re talking to. I feel as though my characters live in a sort of hyperreal world in which everything that happens in real life is pushed to its limit.
“I’m also really interested in the impostor syndrome where we compare our own lives (unfavourably) with other people’s. So it’s not just about siblings, it’s actually about everyone who we look at on Facebook or Instagram.”
Much of the story is set in the fictional town of Wakefield in north Queensland. “The book just told me it’s gonna be set in far north Queensland,” Carlyle says. “I just couldn’t resist that; it really attracted me (because) I find it fascinating the way that people adapt to danger.’’ She has visited the region and was struck by the incongruity between its serene, tropical beauty and its perils — the crocs and sharks that lurk in its brown, serpentine rivers and aquamarine coastal waters.
An experienced sailor who has crewed on scientific yachting expeditions to subantarctic islands, she has met many Australian sailing families and “I became fascinated with the idea that suddenly (in north Queensland) you are in these dangerous waters where you can’t swim, you have to be careful getting in and out of your dinghy, you have to be careful getting on to the beach.”
A dangerous ocean odyssey in The Girl in the Mirror is informed by an epic voyage from Thailand to South Africa that Carlyle undertook with her then husband and three children in 2014.
Her story plays up the risks of navigating a yacht over the open sea — and, intriguingly, she feels almost guilty about this. She explains: “When you write a thriller, you have to present a sense of menace and danger in the ocean. I almost felt disloyal to the ocean by doing that because the truth is that while there is always a risk with going out on to the open ocean — whether with children or not — I do believe you can bring that risk down to a level where it’s as safe as living in a city. If things go well, it’s actually boring.”
She quips: “You can’t really write a thriller about a good sailing passage.”
Nonetheless, there were hair-raising moments and hazards on that family trip. At one point, she says, the family had to “hand steer for a week, 24 hours a day” and her sons, then aged 14 and 12, found themselves taking on adult responsibilities.
“They did a lot of that steering for us so that we could all get more rest, which is something that sounds incredible when you compare them with a typical Western idea of what a 14-year-old and 12-year-old are capable of,” says Carlyle. “But by that stage we’d spent a long time in Asia and we’d seen kids their age holding down full-time jobs and supporting their families. It’s impossible not to be influenced by that or feel that it’s a really positive thing for kids of that age to step up.”
Now that she is a writer and single parent, she spends more time at home in Auckland shaping her sentences than plotting her next waterborne odyssey. Writing had been a long-held ambition, she says, but life as a corporate lawyer and mother of three kids got in the way.
“It was a long-held ambition but I had almost forgotten about it, as I was leading a very busy life,” Carlyle says. “I had practised law for a few years. I had three children in the space of four years.”
She started her professional life at 21, working for two big Auckland law firms. After she gave birth to her first child at 26, she became a barrister and worked part time. She spent “quite a few years” as a homemaker after her third child, her daughter, was born three months premature (this harrowing experience is partly replicated in her book).
Carlyle set about writing The Girl in the Mirror after she returned to work in 2018 — her timing, she reckons, was pretty awful. “I went back to the paid workforce at the same time I started writing the book, which is probably a terrible idea. But that was how the timing worked. I got a job teaching law and wrote, usually early in the morning before starting work.”
Her children are now 20, 18 and 16 and she has wasted no time completing her second novel. “The next book is just about wrapped up,” she says. “I’d been hoping to finish it before this one (The Girl in the Mirror) was launched, but my sister won’t let me put it in until it’s perfect. She’s fantastic like that — she won’t let me get away with anything.”
The second book is another thriller set in Queensland. “I just can’t get away from Queensland; I just love it,” says Carlyle. “I love having that sense of beautiful, warm beaches and the contrast between that and dark (fictional) events. It’s been really fun doing that again.”
The Girl in the Mirror by Rose Carlyle (Allen & Unwin, $29.99) is out now.
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