How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Sabine Durrant's Twitter perch and Instagram page.
With every novel, I have a working title which I think is brilliant and in every case my publisher disagrees wildly and we play title ping-pong for several weeks until we finally come up with something that everyone’s happy with. My working title for Sun Damage was Lulu. The main character in the book is a con artist, who takes on personas and plays with identity, and I liked having a title that dealt with that head on (’Lulu’ isn’t her real name). But Sun Damage, which is what it ended up as, is a much better title. It tells you more. It gives you an atmosphere. Lulu could be a romantic comedy, or social realism or a pop star’s biography. Sun Damage could only be a thriller. It immediately sets up a tension between expectation and reality, between vacations in a sunny clime (the south of France) and...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Sun Damage.
Q&A with Sabine Durrant.
--Marshal Zeringue
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