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As I was writing I cycled through a lot of names for The Island Child, a few of which I loved, but didn’t end up suiting the novel when I’d finished writing. Just before my agent sent the book out to publishers I realised the name was The Island Child. I was reading WB Yeats poem called ‘The Stolen Child’ and it hit me that its title was quite close. However, my narrator Oona leaves her island, Inis, off the west coast of Ireland. She’s not stolen. It’s a choice for her so I replaced ‘stolen’ with ‘island’. Sometimes naming is that simple. Also the island is really what the novel rotates around. None of the characters can really escape it. They’re constantly drawn back. There are several important...[read on]
Q&A with Molly Aitken.
--Marshal Zeringue
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