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Harry Whittaker inherited a heartbreaking task when his mother, the international best-selling author, Lucinda Riley, died in 2021.

Millions of readers around the world were eagerly awaiting the last book in her acclaimed Seven Sisters series and Harry accepted the challenge of being the one to finish it.

Hi there. I'm your host, Jenny Wheeler and on Binge Reading today, we have a special treat. Harry talks about how he tackled the final book in the series, Atlas, The Pa salt story, as the labour of love for his cherished mother.

And how he's now moving on finding his author voice with books that are very much his own.

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Links for Information in this episode

Lucinda Riley –Video on conceiving The Seven Sisters:

https://youtu.be/KvjD3cxZDwA

Lucinda Edmonds/Riley: https://lucindariley.co.uk/about-lucinda/

Bonnie Garmus: https://www.bonniegarmus.com/lessons-in-chemistry

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58065033-lessons-in-chemistry

Brie Larson:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brie_Larson

Nick Hornby: https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/21856/nick-hornby

High Fidelity:  https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/285092

Slam: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/411527.Slam

About A Boy:  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4271.About_a_Boy

David Nicholls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nicholls_(writer)

One Day: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6280118-one-day

The Understudy: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/366842

Starter For Ten: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/107896.Starter_for_Ten

Where to find Harry Whittaker online

Website: www.harrywhittaker.co.uk

Instagram: @HarryWhittakerAuthor

Twitter:  @HarryTwittaker

Introducing author Harry Whittaker

Author Harry Whittaker - completing his mother's legacy and starting his own

Jenny Wheeler: But now here's Harry. Hello there, Harry, and welcome to the show. It's great to have you with us.

Harry Whittaker: Hi Jenny, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be talking to you in New Zealand from the UK. We've somehow made it work.

Jenny Wheeler: Yes. After a little hiccup this morning. that's right. We're talking about Book Eight of The Seven Sisters.

Atlas; The Story Of Pa Salt for the one or two people left in the world who don't know that you inherited one of the most difficult tasks in the world, with this job to complete an internationally beloved series while also dealing with the personal loss of the author of it all.

What force do you think has carried you through all of it.

Harry Whittaker: That's a good question. In a way there was so much pressure on me that in fact there was no pressure at all.

If 50 million readers, a decade worth of mysteries, the fact that I'd only ever written children's books and never a novel, and I knew that this was going to have to be a very beefy novel because it's what Seven Sisters readers expect...

The pressure was so ridiculous, and you combine everything I've just said with a really tight deadline.

I had one year to do this and there could be no ifs or buts about that. I didn't think about it because if you thought about it for more than 10 seconds you'd want to curl up ...