Sophie Jonas-Hill

Sometimes definitely control! E.g. ‘Suffering a tyrant may be bad but tyrannicide leads to civil war, which is worse’ – see Plutarch via Shakespeare via this morning’s ‘In Our Time’ 😉

As Orwell wrote ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’ – and to my mind, the past = the historical narrative =…[Read more]

Control or to warn?

And I suppose that’s another thing…. we all choose the stories we want to hear!!

I’ve also come to realise that themes / controlling ideas are basically the reason why human beings have always told, written and read stories.

We are all trying to understand how the world works and how best to live our lives within it.

Maybe it’s something as simple (elegant) as “when desire burns too hot, it destroys”?

I think mine is: “only when culpability is deeply acknowledged can true reconciliation occur.”

Thanks guys! I’m going to try and draw up a shortlist for Sarah today…

I really appreciate all the help

I LOVE the sound of this book!!

How about…. (London’s) Queen of Time and Shadow

Exactly 🙂

Tangled Web (A, The, What a, Weaving a,)
Untangled Web

Time is sometimes described as a fourth dimension, so:
Fourth Dimension
The Fourth Dimension
Into the, From the, Out of the, Attack of the. (last one was a joke).

The time between?
Between times?
The Time Snatcher of London Towns?
A shadow of time… (working on from Jonathan’s suggestions)
A shadow in time?

I really hate titles sometimes!;)

In the Shadow of the City
The City in Time’s Shadow
?

I like that way of putting it. Helpful.

I haven’t seen ‘Downsizing’ but it sounds like a film that is a bit overloaded with ideas and ends up getting lost among them.

Oh my goodness, guys, what great suggestions! I will check out those links too.

@Squidge, I’d love to take a look at your exercise if you can send it?

The focus for the book is about whether and how a family can truly reconcile after such a trauma, and what level of culpability a family must ultimately shoulder. Much time in the book is spent in…[Read more]

Hi Philippa,

From all the information gathered I would suggest:

– Missing You (works on several level depending on who the sentence refers to or who us doing the miss – if that makes sense)

– The Other You

– The Way Home (again can be interpreted on several levels)

– Little Girl Lost (again lost can be interpreted on several levels)

– Here…[Read more]

I like the ‘Here Ends…’, but what to say is ending.

…the Seven Years of Pain
…the Seven Years of Separation.
Why not something like Seven Years Apart or The seven years of separation. The End Begins Here…? Just playing now!

I also wonder if some of the other themes are more relevant to the title? There are an awful lot of themes going…[Read more]

Interesting one. Titles can be hard. Sometimes a really perfect one will just present itself. Other times…

I was looking, as I’m sure you have, at a thesaurus to see if it was possible to simply replace ‘abduction’. The best I could do was ‘Here Ends the Absence’, or possibly ‘Here Ends the Departure’ which I’m not sure really does it.

During the abduction, she believed her family had abandoned her. Now that she has returned, she doesn’t know whom to trust, or where her “real” home is. She clings to cousin Jess, she mistrusts the adults, in the end she turns on her cousin too (bit of an all-is-lost moment there, before the end).

Yes, abducted aged 8, now 15. She grew up enmeshed with her cousin – they were like twins in a fairy-tale. She is blonde, her cousin brunette. Otherwise, an unstable childhood; her biological dad is estranged. Brought up by her step-dad since aged 4, and has twin half-brothers (now aged 7).