Next week on Friday 6 February, Alex Preston will be talking about his latest novel A Stranger in Corfu in a special event at The George. The author, whose historical novel Winchelsea continues to be a best seller, explains why his new book moves the action to Greece.
History plays a huge part in all your novels. When did your interest in historical facts begin?
History, for me, is inseparable from place. It began not as an abstract interest in dates or events but as a way of understanding why places feel the way they do. My writing is part of a larger and ultimately futile attempt to know a place truly, deeply, and in more than one dimension. Not just to recognise the lanes and fields, the churches and pubs, but to sense the flow of time moving through them. Historical research is a way of pressing at that depth: understanding what has been endured, forgotten or misremembered. You never fully arrive at that knowledge, but the act of trying sharpens your attention and deepens your attachment to the landscape itself.
Your novels have often explored moral complexity and the consequences of choices. Would this be true of A Stranger in Corfu?
Very much so. A Stranger in Corfu is built around the idea that choices are rarely clean or heroic in the moment they are made. Moral drift is often incremental. What interests me is how people justify themselves, how control and restraint can shade into secrecy, and how the past exerts pressure even when it is unspoken.
You use place and setting to their full advantage in all your novels. Why did you choose Corfu for the latest novel?
It’s an island I love. I run the Corfu Literary Festival and have been going there for years and it just felt like the right time to express that love in a novel. It is a place shaped by occupation, empire and strategic importance, but also by extraordinary natural beauty. The island allows you to hold pleasure and unease in the same frame. That tension felt exactly right for the psychological territory of the book.
You showcase Englishness, privilege and moral drift. Where do you get your inspiration from?
I think those themes come from proximity rather than judgement. They are things I recognise, have lived alongside and have questioned. Fiction allows you to examine them obliquely, through character rather than writing some didactic editorial. Privilege is often invisible to those who possess it, which makes it narratively potent.
A Stranger in Corfu has a central male figure who is observant, controlled and secretive. Are you always observing characters and reactions for future novels – has it become a way of life?
Observation is unavoidable once you start writing seriously. Cynthia Ozick said writers are always selling someone out. I am definitely a collector and hoarder of characters. But it’s not like they are then regurgitated wholesale in the novels. It is less about collecting material than about paying attention. You notice how people hold themselves, what they choose not to say, the gap between intention and action. That attentiveness seeps into everyday life, though I hope not in a way that feels extractive.
In A Stranger in Corfu and Winchelsea you use coastlines as moral thresholds. Are you drawn to the sea as a backdrop?
Yes, very much so. In Winchelsea and A Stranger in Corfu, the coastline becomes a hinge, a place of crossing, temptation and escape. I grew up by the sea and had this beauty and emptiness stretching out to the south of me. Swimming is how I disappear. The sea represents both freedom and risk, which makes it a powerful moral landscape.
When you start to write a new novel, do you have it mapped out at the start or do the characters unfold as the writing progresses?
I like to have an ending in mind. Frank Kermode wrote that every novel is in constant dialogue with its own ending, and I believe that strongly. But it cannot be over-determined. If the structure is too rigid, the characters have no space to surprise you. The best moments often come when the book resists your original plan.
The island’s beauty – the olive groves, the turquoise sea, the intense Mediterranean light – creates a deliberate contrast with the novel’s psychological depth. You often use landscape ironically. How easy or difficult is this to make work well?
I am not sure I think of it as irony. It is more about constancy. The natural world offers a kind of promise – continuity, indifference, even grace – against which human fragility is thrown into sharper relief. The challenge is restraint: allowing the landscape to do its work quietly, without over-signalling, so that the contrast emerges naturally rather than being imposed.
Alex will be talking about his new novel A Stranger in Corfu on Friday 6 February at The George Hotel
The Rye Bookshop presents Alex Preston in Conversation on Friday 6 February (6.30pm to 8pm) at The George in Rye, High Street, Rye. Free tickets available from The Rye Bookshop (not from The George).
Image Credits: Kt bruce , Alex Preston .