Sell the hell out of it!

From book launch to Times Radio: a literary Cinderella at News UK

Jun 23, 2025

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OCEAN, my new novel is out now. Billed by Louis de Bernieres as ‘strange, wonderful and compelling’ it’s the story of a family sailing the Atlantic to heal their broken lives after a terrorist explosion in London.

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Ready to meet Geoff Norcott at News UK, London Bridge

Dear Reader

Last Friday, Ocean was formally launched with a lovely private drinks party in London. I was, however, completely sober throughout — and left early. Not because I was in a huff, but because I had an invitation for a live interview on Times Radio’s Book of the Week slot, going out live at 9.15pm. The show is comedian Geoff Norcott’s three-hour foray through the week’s news and culture: Friday evening with Geoff Norcott.

Asked to be there at 8.45, I found myself marching into News UK headquarters at London Bridge, clutching a big bunch of flowers like a literary Cinderella leaving the ball. The glass foyer gleamed. The security was airport-grade. The whole place had a smart, high-frequency energy, with screens showing various shows, rather different from the BBC studios at Portland Place, where I’d recorded an interview a couple of weeks before. The security there is much the same, but there’s a cosier feel: institutional rather than commercial.

On the wall, a long mission statement is carved with the permanence of an excavated Egyptian tomb. I was too wired to take it all in (nor could my phone camera) but it is no less powerfully resonant for that. The George Orwell statue at Portland Place was covered up when I went for my interview there, but the quote from Orwell is rather pithier: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

These are very different entities, to which I was bringing the same self, the same novel. This is the life of the novelist with a book newly minted: you have to adapt to all kinds of new and unfamiliar situations on the fly in order to talk about your work. I had no idea what direction the interview would take. Geoff Norcott is a very sharp and witty comedian. All I knew was that I had to be on my toes. I’d consumed exactly one Pimm’s. At my own launch!

I was met by a young woman, who smiled and informed me that her name was Ellie and it was her very first day on work experience. She led me up the escalators, through various half-empty open-plan offices, to the ‘green room’: a quirky and delightful corner with a long bright yellow sofa, chairs, and an idiosyncratic array of snacks, including wine, high-end naan breads, and jelly babies. I wasn’t in the mood to eat. I took a moment to rehearse a few brisk sentences about the book, should Geoff simply ask me point blank: “What’s it about then?” Little did I know, he’d be even blunter than that.

Mainly, I tried to relax. Ocean is my third novel, and I have some experience now — and I actually like to talk about it. After a few minutes, Ellie took me to the studio. The producer stood, shook my hand.

“You’ve got seven minutes,” he said. “Sell the hell out of it.”

Ooookay. I hadn’t anticipated something quite so direct. I realised then I had not been on a national commercial channel before. It’s fast. It takes no prisoners. And no one is embarrassed about selling.

“Has he read the book?” I ventured.
“God no. He has twenty guests on a Friday night.”
The producer seemed surprised I’d even asked. Once I understood the scale of the operation, I was too.

But it was clarifying. “This is what we’re all here for, right?” the producer said.
Indeed it is. Mentally, I flexed my muscles, and went in during a commercial break.

Geoff looked tired. He was on the last forty minutes of his three-hour Friday night marathon. I felt it incumbent upon me not to make it drag for him. Maybe I could even pep him up. After all, Ocean is exciting! People really do want to hear about it. I was ready to do my job, with the same devotion he was doing his.

His opener would have floored debut novelist me.

“So, what’s the elevator pitch for this novel?”

Back when I was on a publicity circuit for Larchfield, and — I have to say — utterly overwhelmed by it, I appeared on Mariella Frostrup’s BBC Radio book programme of the time. Thankfully it was a pre-record, because I was floored by her opener:

“Your heroine, Dora, has postnatal depression. Did that come from your own experience?”

I found this so wildly intrusive that I was completely silenced. I sat there, unable to say a word. I could feel my publicist having conniptions behind the glass as her charge appeared to disintegrate before her eyes. I think tears may have prickled my eyes. Mariella finally looked at me, as if for the first time, and her face softened.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “Let’s start again and I’ll ask you something else.”

The interview went on seamlessly, now that we were talking about what I thought was important about the novel — namely, W.H. Auden and how the book evokes him. I could probably have answered the depression question, had it not been the opener. But I was not the hardened and battle-scarred talker I am now.

So I was delighted to find that Geoff’s opener had the effect of sharpening my focus. I’ve learned something in this long dance of publication: when someone hands you a microphone, you speak. And when someone asks for the elevator pitch, you try not to talk about trauma or metaphor, but give them something clean, bright, and true. Though I hadn’t rehearsed anything, I answered with the truth:

“It’s a book about how much one person can really take. When you think it’s over — when you’ve suffered enough, when you can’t go on — what if more happens?”

I could feel the relief in the studio as Geoff realised he could rely on me not to stumble or freeze. Then we were off, and I saw in action how a good presenter flies with and riffs on the brief. We covered marriage, orcas, disaster, obsession — and why sailing into the Atlantic is not always a shortcut to healing. Geoff was particularly interested in the magnificent gesture of Frank, Helen’s husband, finding the Innisfree and suggesting the trip as a way to save their marriage.

Geoff: “So this is — in relationship terms — almost like a Hail Mary. He's renovated a boat. ‘We're going to get back to the good old days.’ What sort of things start to go wrong?”
Me: “Well... without giving too many spoilers — they have a very dangerous encounter with orcas...”

It’s brisk and smart, and though not the deep dive I had with Len Pennie on BBC Scotland’s arts programme, I liked it all the same. Selling, done with commitment and polish, is a rather beautiful thing.

As I was leaving, Ellie, the intern on her first day, pressed a copy of the book into my hands.

“It sounds absolutely amazing!” she said. “Will you sign it?”

I did, gladly. And as we walked out together through the gleaming atrium, she confessed that what she really wanted was to be a writer. She was hoping to find a job that might support her while she figured it out.

Getting an internship at News UK, she said, had felt like an incredible stroke of luck. But of course, things are only lucky if they’re what you actually want.

Around us, the building hummed. Massive screens glowed with faces, news, headlines, ticker tapes. It was after 9.30pm, and people were still at their desks.

I hesitate to advise anyone — I really do — but I’ve been a writer long enough to know what it takes.

“Journalism is a whole thing of its own,” I said. “I don’t think it’s a job that helps you write novels. The jobs that do… well, they’re the holy grail.”

The truth is, the deep work of novels seems to preclude almost any other kind of work. I didn’t write poetry at all while writing novels, and eventually, I found I couldn’t even hold down a job. I couldn’t even, when at the highest intensity of work, pay proper attention to my relationships. There’s something total about the commitment: it’s not glamorous, just consuming.

And yet, Geoff Norcott has a full stand-up career and a prime-time radio slot. Some people have a different kind of energy — fizzing, adaptable, wired to move.

Maybe the trick is not to compare energies. Just to know what kind of writer you are.

Thank you for reading,

Until next time,

Polly x