Why being a teenager sucks (From The Northern Echo)

Why being a teenager sucks

2:34pm Monday 12th September 2011 in Features By Tamasyn Guy-Jobson, Reporter (Darlington)

Tamasyn Guy-Jobson gets her teeth stuck into the latest novel by Matt Haig.

YORK writer Matt Haig has written six books over the past seven years.

His latest literary offering, The Radleys, is about a family of vampires living incognito in a quiet North Yorkshire village.

The novel was picked by Jo Brand and actor Stephen Tompkinson as their favourite summer read on the programme TV Book Club, on Channel 4, and went on to win the viewers’ favourite accolade. It has also been shortlisted for the Portico prize and nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and been translated into 26 languages.

Matt, 36, who studied English Hull and Leeds University, says he didn’t always want to become a novelist.

After leaving university, he took on various dead-end jobs some of which lasted a few months, others, such as at call centre, just a few days.

“Gradually, through perseverance, I got some freelance journalism work writing about technology in business, which led to a book on the subject,” he says.

“Buoyed up by my first published book, I got an agent. Soon after that I started looking after my mother who was suffering from ovarian cancer and while taking care of her I had a bit of free time on my hands so I started to write my first fiction novel, The Last Family in England.”

It became a bestseller and was followed two years later by The Dead Father’s Club and then the Nestle Children’s Book Prize-winning Shadow Forest in 2007.

His latest book attracted interest from reputable film director and producer Alfonso Cuaron even before it was published in hardback last year.

Cuaron, of Pan’s Labyrinth fame, is currently in talks with Matt and BBC Films to produce the film, for which a screenplay has already been written by Matt.

The Radley’s, set in the fictional village of Bishopthorpe, tells the tale of a blood-abstaining vampire GP, his wife, and their two children.

Peter and Helen Radley, trying desperately to put their hedonistic vampire days behind them and act as responsible adults, make the mistake of trying to conceal their children’s blood-sucking heritage. But things start to unravel from the seams when Clara and Rowan, both in their teenage years, start to develop classic vampire tendencies When daughter Clara kills a drunken boy who attacks her, it is clear that the perfect facade the Radleys have created has been lost forever.

The book features the market town of Thirsk, York and the North York Moors.