Ask the Author
What were the key challenges you faced while writing your book 'The Remaking of myles'?
The biggest challenge was developing a writing style that was conducive to writing fiction, especially having come from an academic background where I was the expert and my writing was reflective of conveying expert knowledge. Having worked with a book coach for a period leading up to the writing of my novel, it became more and more obvious that the approach of ‘telling’ the reader, needed to be replaced by ‘showing’ the reader as the story unfolds. So, the challenge became relying on the reader’s imagination to interpret my own imagination. Even as I was writing the novel, slipping back into the ‘telling’ versus the ‘showing’ approach occurred regularly, and recognising this as it occurred was a continuing challenge. Having finished the book, I think I can happily say, I’ve got it! And so the sequel is moving ahead well.
How did you develop the characters? Was it organic or did you always have these in mind as part of the overall planning?
The original planning for the book had identified the creation of Myles’ immediate and partially extended family, but at the time of planning, I had not fully developed these characters to the extent that unfolded as writing commenced.
Myles was the only character that had a fully formed and considered character arc, but, the others did not. In part and to a great extent they matured as a direct result of Myles’ own development.
That’s not to say that I hadn’t planned for Myles’ soon to be ex-wife, his brother and sister-in-law and their children, as well as his own sister, but it was how these characters effectively fell into line as the writing took hold, that resulted in the organic aspects of their lives and how these shaped Myles. And this became the guiding influence in the development of the characters. How did they shape Myles?
As a debut novelist, this is what made writing the story so rewarding. I was growing as a writer whilst the characters were growing as well.
The ending leaves Myles at a hopeful but uncertain point. Are you planning a sequel?
Yes — I’m currently writing it. The Remaking of Myles ends with Myles standing at a genuine threshold, but a threshold isn’t the same as an ending. I wanted readers to feel the hope in that final scene without it being tidy, because real change doesn’t resolve in a single moment — it keeps being tested afterward, sometimes harder than before.
Without giving too much away, the sequel picks up not long after where the first book leaves off, and it asks Myles a much harder question than the first novel did: what happens to everything you’ve just rebuilt when life doesn’t cooperate with your plans? I’m not interested in writing a character who’s already finished growing. I want to keep finding out what he’s actually made of.
I’ll share more as it comes together — but if you finished the first book wanting to know what happens next, you’re not alone. So do I, some days, until I’ve written it.
Your writing has been described as restrained — you don't spell everything out for the reader. Was that a deliberate choice?
Very deliberate, and it comes from somewhere unexpected — decades of academic research, where the discipline is to let evidence speak for itself rather than announcing your conclusion before the reader has had a chance to sit with the material. I brought that instinct into fiction almost without meaning to.
I think there’s a temptation in novels dealing with big, weighty subjects — grief, inherited trauma, family secrets — to explain the meaning as you go, as if the reader might miss it otherwise. I trust readers more than that. Myles doesn’t fully understand what’s happening to him for most of the book, and I didn’t want the narration to understand it on his behalf. The reader walks alongside him at roughly the pace he’s walking himself — sometimes a little ahead, sometimes behind, but never being handed the answer before he’s earned it.
I’d rather a reader finish a chapter with a question than a lesson. That’s been true since the very first draft.
What made you want to write about the children of Holocaust survivors specifically, rather than the survivors themselves?
I wanted to write about what gets carried forward, not just what was carried. Survivors’ stories are rightly at the centre of Holocaust literature — but I was drawn to something quieter and less examined: what it’s like to inherit trauma you didn’t personally live through, and to spend a life deciding what to do with it. Do you honour it by staying close to everything your parents survived, or does honouring them sometimes mean building a life they never got the chance to have themselves?
Myles spends most of the novel trying to outrun that question. I don’t think there’s a single right answer to it — I’m not sure I have one myself — but I wanted to write a character who has to actually sit with it, rather than resolve it neatly. That felt more honest than a tidier story would have been.