Suffolk &amp; Cambs


<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="667" height="1000" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-EVENT-CHAIR-Headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-667x1000.jpg" alt="Kate Sawyer" class="wp-image-44683" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-EVENT-CHAIR-Headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-667x1000.jpg 667w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-EVENT-CHAIR-Headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-534x800.jpg 534w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-EVENT-CHAIR-Headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-267x400.jpg 267w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-EVENT-CHAIR-Headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-1025x1536.jpg 1025w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-EVENT-CHAIR-Headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-1367x2048.jpg 1367w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-EVENT-CHAIR-Headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-scaled.jpg 1708w" sizes="(max-width: 667px) 100vw, 667px" /></figure>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-congratulations-on-your-new-book-getting-away-what-can-readers-expect">Congratulations on your new book, <em>Getting Away</em>. What can readers expect?</h3>



<p><em>Getting Away</em> is a family saga meets social chronicle. The novel spans a century of one family’s holidays, using those escapes, to capture Britain’s breathtaking social change. I’m interested in showing, not judging: readers fill the gaps, spotting shifts in class, mobility, women’s freedoms and LGBTQ+ rights for themselves. It’s character-led, easy to read, and, if I’ve done my job, rich fuel for book-club debate.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-was-the-inspiration-for-getting-away">What was the inspiration for <em>Getting Away</em>?</h3>



<p>My grandmother died at 101, and her life crystallised just how much can change in a single lifetime. I love “slice-of-life” structures – think David Nicholls’ <em>One Day</em> – so I set out to show those leaps through brief, telling snapshots. Holidays felt perfect: away from the daily grind we take stock, reassess, dream. I wanted readers to share that reflective space.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="626" height="1000" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/61JerIqX15L._AC_UF8941000_QL80_.jpg" alt="One Day, by David Nicholls" class="wp-image-44689" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/61JerIqX15L._AC_UF8941000_QL80_.jpg 626w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/61JerIqX15L._AC_UF8941000_QL80_-501x800.jpg 501w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/61JerIqX15L._AC_UF8941000_QL80_-250x400.jpg 250w" sizes="(max-width: 626px) 100vw, 626px" /></figure>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-was-the-research-process-like-for-this-book">What was the research process like for this book?</h3>



<p>I began in familiar territory – the late 1970s – but quickly pushed back to 1938 when I discovered the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo6/1-2/70/enacted">Holiday with Pay Act</a>, the first time British workers were guaranteed paid leave. That date, poised on the brink of World War II, gave the story its starting line.</p>



<p>From there I chased questions: <em>How did a working-class family reach the seaside?</em> <em>When could they afford a car?</em> <em>What did Butlin’s really feel like in its heyday?</em> Each detail sent me down another rabbit hole – old transport timetables, factory records, a trove of Butlin’s in-house magazines, even a 1950s Guardian piece by a Labour MP waxing lyrical (and sometimes cringe-worthy) about a week on site. The social attitudes in that article were so startling I echoed its voice in one chapter – toned down only enough to be believable to modern ears.</p>



<p>Research always follows story for me: I imagine the scene, spot what I don’t yet know, then dig until it clicks. The result, I hope, is a novel where you can feel the sand between your toes <em>and</em> the gears of society grinding forward, sometimes smoothly, sometimes with sparks.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="667" height="1000" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-AUTHOR-headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-667x1000.jpg" alt="Kate Sawyer, author" class="wp-image-44685" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-AUTHOR-headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-667x1000.jpg 667w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-AUTHOR-headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-534x800.jpg 534w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-AUTHOR-headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-267x400.jpg 267w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-AUTHOR-headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-1025x1536.jpg 1025w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-AUTHOR-headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-1367x2048.jpg 1367w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Kate-Sawyer-AUTHOR-headshot-2024-credit-Sophie-Davidson-1-scaled.jpg 1708w" sizes="(max-width: 667px) 100vw, 667px" /></figure>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-the-novel-also-wrestles-with-disconnection-and-those-holiday-epiphany-moments-how-does-that-play-out-on-the-page">The novel also wrestles with disconnection and those “holiday-epiphany” moments. How does that play out on the page?</h3>



<p>I wanted readers to experience that jolt you get when you’re suddenly outside your own life, like lying on a beach, staring at the sky, and thinking, <em>Is this really what I’m doing?</em> The book drops you deep into the family’s drama, then pulls back so you can see them from the street, the decade, the century.</p>



<p>I use the textures of each era – bus tickets, telegrams, postcards, text chains, emails – to mark that shift. Mid-book an email pops up and you realise, <em>Oh, we’ve made it to the 1990s already.</em> The same happens with cars: we begin with everyone piling onto a seaside charabanc, but by the final chapter the cul-de-sacs are choked with parked hatchbacks. It’s a stealth way of showing how progress crowds our lives — and how easy it is to miss the view while we’re inching past each other on those narrow, pre-car streets. I often think about when I&#8217;m walking around Bury St Edmunds.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="1000" height="922" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Getting-Away-packshot-1000x922.png" alt="Getting Away by Kate Sawyer" class="wp-image-44684" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Getting-Away-packshot-1000x922.png 1000w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Getting-Away-packshot-800x738.png 800w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Getting-Away-packshot-400x369.png 400w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/Getting-Away-packshot.png 1500w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></figure>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-your-characters-feel-wonderfully-vivid-and-human-what-s-the-secret">Your characters feel wonderfully vivid and human. What’s the secret?</h3>



<p>I start by loving them – every one of them. Even the people who behave badly are products of their time, their class, their hurts. Take Tommy in <em>Getting Away</em>, for example: his aggression is welded to post-war masculinity, national service, the frustration of childlessness in an era that equated fatherhood with worth. If I don’t empathise with that pressure, he collapses into a cardboard thug.</p>



<p>I borrow a trick from acting: inhabit the part without judging it. Ralph Fiennes once said he had to love the character he played in <em>Schindler’s List</em>; at school I was scandalised, now I understand. The “good side” and “bad side” are rarely tidy – ask any war refugee, or the Syrian character in <em><a href="https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81487660">Department Q</a></em> who tells a detective, “When you work out which is which, let me know.” I write from that grey zone.</p>



<p>Flaws make people believable. Betty spends decades numb to her own feelings, then, hilariously and heartbreakingly, realises in her seventies she’s still allowed to change. Robert is the novel’s moral compass, yet he quietly resents others’ success. Over a hundred-year canvas I can show those evolutions: the little course-corrections, the slides into compromise, and that long view, I think, lets readers recognise bits of themselves, warts and all.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-did-you-always-know-how-the-story-would-end">Did you always know how the story would end?</h3>



<p>I never do. I start with a hunch, an itch that this idea will work, and a vivid opening scene. After that I let the subconscious drive: if I turn up at the desk, the pages arrive. Only in revision, with my long-suffering editor firing endless “Why this? Why that?” questions, do the real themes surface and the loose ends tighten into a shape you’d call a plot.</p>



<p>That interrogation is vital. It forces me to ask why I made a character suffer, or why a theme keeps recurring, until the strongest threads shine through. A clear structure – in this book, the rhythm of successive holidays – gives me just enough boundary to stop the story sprawling. Without those rails I’d happily wander off, both in life and on the page; with them, the novel finds its focus and, eventually, it&#8217;s ending.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-would-you-say-to-aspiring-writers">What would you say to aspiring writers?</h3>



<p>Get to the desk. That’s the hardest and most essential part. Break it down: 80,000 words sounds overwhelming, but 800 words a day? That’s doable. Two evenings a week instead of Netflix, or weekends if you&#8217;re working full-time. That’s how I wrote my first novel, while working and pregnant, with a very real deadline: my daughter’s birth.</p>



<p>Set a target, give yourself grace, and write the draft knowing it won’t be good. That’s okay, it’s not meant to be. You have to give yourself something to shape, to tear apart and rebuild. Writing a novel is a long-distance process. The joy is in the edit, in spotting the patterns and connections you didn’t realise were forming, until suddenly they do. That’s the moment it all starts to make sense.</p>



<p>That’s why I write. That click of everything coming together – <em>only connect</em>, as E.M Forster said – is how we understand story, and maybe even how we understand life. It’s what I love as a reader, too. Maggie O’Farrell’s <em><a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/hamnet/maggie-ofarrell/9781472223821">Hamnet</a></em> is a perfect example – so many emotional threads, all pulled tight in the final scene. That kind of payoff is why we keep going, through the chaos of first drafts and the mess of middle chapters. </p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-books-are-you-loving-right-now">What books are you loving right now?</h3>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img decoding="async" loading="lazy" width="658" height="1000" src="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/riversinsky-658x1000.jpg" alt="There are rivers in the sky" class="wp-image-44686" srcset="https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/riversinsky-658x1000.jpg 658w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/riversinsky-526x800.jpg 526w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/riversinsky-263x400.jpg 263w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/riversinsky-1011x1536.jpg 1011w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/riversinsky-1347x2048.jpg 1347w, https://dev.muddystilettos.co.uk/suffolkcambs/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2025/06/riversinsky-scaled.jpg 1684w" sizes="(max-width: 658px) 100vw, 658px" /></figure>



<p>I’ve been deep in organising the Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival – tickets go on sale the same day my new book comes out, in fact – so my reading time has taken a bit of a hit this year! That said, I always gravitate towards books about families and relationships, anything that puts emotional life front and centre.</p>



<p>One I really enjoyed, out this summer, is <em>Kakigori Summer</em> by Emily Itami. It’s set on a holiday, but it’s quite an unusual one: three British-Japanese sisters reuniting in Japan. It’s so sensory and vivid; you feel like you’re travelling as you read. But it’s also deeply inward-looking and full of emotional insight and unspoken dynamics.</p>



<p>I also loved <em><strong>Enlightenment</strong></em> by Sarah Perry, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize last year. It’s this luminous, intricate portrait of two seemingly ordinary lives. Finding the extraordinary in the everyday is something I try to do in <em>Getting Away</em>, too.</p>



<p>And right now, I’m reading Elif Shafak’s<strong> <em>T</em></strong><em><strong>here Are Rivers in the Sky</strong></em>, because I’m lucky enough to be interviewing her very soon. It’s exactly the kind of book I find so moving – stories that feel separate at first, across time and place, slowly drawing together until you realise just how connected we all are. That idea of connection, through time, across continents, is endlessly powerful to me.</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-share-your-fave-spots-in-suffolk">Share your fave spots in Suffolk&#8230;</h3>



<p>My favourite café in the area is <a href="https://folksuffolk.com/">FOLK café</a> in Bury St Edmunds. You’ll often find me there doing a bit of work or writing, or mostly drinking coffee and eating their delicious food. </p>



<p>I love the <a href="https://www.redlionsoham.com/">Red Lion</a> pub in Soham, for a Sunday lunch. It’s probably my favourite place to get a roast in the area.</p>



<p>I really enjoy <a href="https://www.instagram.com/tacor_taqueria/?hl=en">Tacor</a> in BSE. I think what Hannah Gregory is doing there is really impressive – plus it’s just down the road from me! I never thought I’d live close to a taco joint when I left LA for Suffolk!</p>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-what-s-coming-up-next">What&#8217;s coming up next?</h3>



<p>I&#8217;m going on tour. I&#8217;m really looking forward to meeting readers and answering their questions. Then in October, I&#8217;ve got the <a href="https://www.burylitfest.co.uk/">Bury St Edmunds Literature Festival</a>, plus I&#8217;ve got a deadline for my next book in January. More books, more stories, more connections. </p>



<p>Kate Sawyer&#8217;s launch party for her new book, <em>Getting Away</em>, is on <strong>2 July</strong> at the Apex in Bury St Edmunds. Book tickets <a href="https://www.burylitfest.co.uk/event-details/bury-st-edmunds-literature-festival-2025-launch-party-getting-away-an-evening-with-kate-sawyer">here</a>.</p>



<h4 class="wp-block-heading" id="h-more-interviews-you-might-enjoy">More interviews you might enjoy&#8230;</h4>



<p><a href="https://suffolkcambs.muddystilettos.co.uk/life/people/a-suffolk-influencer-talks-slow-living-local-gems-and-the-perfect-weekend/">A Slice of Suffolk</a><br><a href="https://suffolkcambs.muddystilettos.co.uk/life/muddy-meets-emma-paton/">Muddy meets Emma Paton</a><br><a href="https://suffolkcambs.muddystilettos.co.uk/life/people/muddy-meets-rachel-ducker/">Get to know Rachel Duker</a></p>


Suffolk author, Kate Sawyer talks about new novel Getting Away

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