A coming-of-age tale set on the island of Sark from the daughter of novelist Maggie Gee
Rosa Rankin-Gee wrote her debut novel fresh from an extended visit to the remote, semi-feudal island of Sark. The opening chapters of The Last Kings of Sark take place one summer on the timeless-seeming island, when a bond develops between three young people, all on the cusp of adulthood – private tutor Jude, her teenage pupil, Pip, and the household cook, Sofi.
An inspiring location, then? "I'm a big fan," concedes the 26-year-old daughter of novelist Maggie Gee. And one that lends itself readily to fiction? "Like any island, it's a smaller, intense microcosm of the world." It also felt right for the hymn-to-youth, "rose-tinted" mood of those early chapters, she says. "It's about the last summer of childhood, where the characters share a final period of innocence, full of sun. and brightness." Pip's parents are peripheral, and there is a sense of the young characters trying to dodge adulthood. "They don't want to look at the darker sides of the adult world, so they look at each other."
The Last Kings of Sark started life as a novella and was written soon after Rankin-Gee left university, while she was working as a receptionist at a property agency in Paris, where she lives. The story earned her the Shakespeare and Co novella prize in 2011, and she soon "fleshed it out", adding a second half – in which the three characters' fragmented lives are revisited and put into context.
Rankin-Gee grew up with "a realistic view of what it is to be a writer" and as a teenager worked on Saturdays in her local independent bookshop, Queen's Park Books in London, which she loved. "Everyone is friendly in a bookshop, or if not, they're bizarre and interesting."
Her old stomping ground informed the Polish-British character of Sofi. "She's my favourite character, and she's like a lot of north-west London girls I've met," she says.
Plenty more in the book was drawn from Rankin-Gee's own experiences, as might be expected with a first novel: "During my stay on Sark I was definitely watching the world and trying to work out how to change it into a sentence." And the friendships? "Well, like the main characters, I'm an only child, so my friends are my great love."
Will the second novel be harder? Inevitably more self-conscious, she suspects: "The characters and themes in this one had been brewing for a long time and came out naturally."
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