Book Club Collection: 'One Perfect Couple' by Ruth Ware

Ten beautiful strangers.
One deadly game.
Who will escape alive?

Lyla Santiago has spent months working on a research project that could be the key to getting a permanent job in her field. So, she can’t really drop everything to go to a desert island with her actor boyfriend Nico to film One Perfect Couple, a new reality TV show that Nico is sure will lead to his big break – can she?

Two weeks later, Lyla finds herself boarding a boat to an isolated luxury resort in the Indian Ocean.

The rules of the game are simple. Ten strangers have to survive together on the island – and the last couple standing scoops the prize. There will be sun, sea, laughs and a little competitive flirting. What could possibly go wrong?

But after the first challenge leaves everyone rattled and angry, an overnight storm takes matters from bad to worse. Cut off from the mainland by miles of ocean, deprived of their phones, and unable to contact the crew that brought them there, the group must band together for survival.

As tensions run high and fresh water runs low, Lyla realises that someone is playing this game for real – and they’ll stop at nothing to win.
(Summary provided by the author.)

Ruth Ware is an international number one bestseller. Her thrillers In a Dark, Dark Wood, The Woman in Cabin 10, The Lying Game, The Death of Mrs Westaway, The Turn of the Key, One by One, The It Girl, Zero Days, One Perfect Couple and The Woman in Suite 11 have appeared on bestseller lists around the world, including the Sunday Times and New York Times, and have sold more than ten million copies. Her books have been optioned for both film and TV, and she is published in more than 40 languages. Ruth lives near Brighton with her family. Visit ruthware.com to find out more.

If you’re writing a festival programme or presenting to your reading group, perhaps that’s all you need to know. But possibly you’ve already read that paragraph on the back of one of my books, and you’ve come here, as per the last line, to “find out more”.

At this point I should probably admit that by far the most interesting thing about me is my books, which are full of murder, family secrets, toxic friendships and things that go bump in the night, in contrast to my own very mundane, peaceful existence. I’m often asked which of my characters most resembles me, and I’m never quite sure how to feel about this, since my main characters are usually complicated, conflicted, lonely, spiky and sometimes downright criminal. Of course they’re also brave, defiant, dogged and occasionally very selfless – much more so than me, actually. If I was faced with half the set backs my characters encounter, I’m pretty sure I’d pack up and go home. The truth is that barring a few obvious overlaps (Nora in In a Dark, Dark Wood is a writer, Isa in The Lying Game is a parent) the biggest autobiographical element of most of my books is that the main characters are generally intolerant of bad coffee.

But if that doesn’t bother you, let me fill in some of the gaps and tell you a little bit about where I am today, and how I got here.

Right now, I’m a full time writer, and I feel very lucky to be able to type that. I’ve done a whole lot of other jobs, from waitressing to bookselling, and much as I loved them, my dream was always to be an author, and I was so glad when I was finally able to make that happen. I’m writing this at my desk in my office-slash-guestroom, so there is a bed to my right, which is very tempting when work is going badly. My desk faces a blank wall, which is deliberate, because I prefer to make sure the pictures in my head are more interesting than the view in front of me. But if I turn my head I can look out of the window at a beautiful living wall of trees – which I love. I find it very hard to live without trees, which is maybe why there are so many forests, woods and copses in my books. The trees are mostly holly and laurel – which is good, because they are evergreen, so it means I have something cheerful year round. But of course, they are also spiky (holly) and poisonous (laurel). Maybe that helps keep me on track as a crime writer?

How I got here is still kind of a mystery to me – but all I know is that I always wanted to be a writer, right from when I was a little girl. I was always scribbling out little stories, and when I was about 7 or 8 my mum went back to college and took a typing course, so then I began to type them out on her old fashioned type-writer, which somehow felt much more like a “real” book. All through my teens I kept writing, mostly on sheets of lined A4 paper, clipped into a ring binder, and the stories got longer and longer, until they began to resemble full-length books. A “novel” would take about one whole ring binder. But I was always too shy to show them to anyone (apart from my best friend, who read a couple of them), so they spent most of their time under my bed, hidden from prying eyes.

When I was in my twenties I began to work in the book industry. On the one hand, it was a brilliant apprenticeship, and I learned a lot about how publishing works. On the other hand, it gave me a massive attack of stage fright. I was working with some amazing, award-winning writers, and had a first-hand glimpse into the number of brilliant books published every single week, and it became increasingly hard to imagine that there would ever be a place for me on those heaving bookshop shelves. I kept writing, but I kept putting the books under the bed. (Or rather, leaving them on my hard drive, as by this time I had learned to touch type and use a word processor).

Eventually, when I was in my thirties and had two very small children, I realised that my writing was a hobby, and that I didn’t really have time for hobbies any more. I was snatching writing time in 30-minute chunks here and there while my baby napped, time I should more sensibly have spent washing my hair, or catching up on my own sleep. And I realised that unless I did something drastic, I was going to find my writing time whittled down further and further, until it likely disappeared all together.

That “drastic” step turned out to be plucking up my courage, and finally sending out a book to agents. It felt like a leap of faith at the time – like the main character in The Turn of the Key, I don’t deal well with failure, and publishing is full of rejections and heartbreak and set backs. I got my fair share of all three along the way. But I kept going, and I’m so incredibly glad that I did.

I’m often asked what advice I would give to aspiring writers, and although I wish I had a magic formula or something that would work for everyone, I don’t. The truth is that your obstacles are maybe not my obstacles. But I can tell you what I wish someone had told me, all those years ago, which was, have faith, and hang in there. Keep reading, keep writing, and keep sending out your work even when you get knocked back. Oh, and learn to self-edit.
(Biography provided by the author)