places in a long way home by louise penny

Places in a long way home by louise penny series#

WERTHEIMER: Well, now in any case, your characters who got lost and got to this place - your characters do go on a journey in search of love or meaning or maybe a heart. But the people who do find it were meant to find it. There is a sense that it's only ever found by people lost. So I tried to instill some of that in this book - that Three Pines is a village that isn't on any maps. I really love the South American writers who write with that sense of magical realism. There is an intentional sense of magical realism about it. WERTHEIMER: The characters keep sort of batting around words like magic and magical talking about the place - as if they don't quite believe in this place. So the books are about terror, but they're really about goodness and the relationship these characters have with each other. His terror had to blow itself quite out to let him see it. The books were, in many ways, inspired by a line from Auden in his elegy to Melville where he talks about goodness existed. But there is a sense of community, of belonging. This village I would choose to live in where real life happens - bad things happen to all of the people. It was a warped version of what the world was really like.Īnd so I created this village. And I didn't like that feeling 'cause in my heart I thought that probably wasn't true. And having been a journalist for a long time, I was getting the sense that the world was a very cruel, very dangerous place. So I created a cast of characters I would choose as friends because I knew I would have to be in their company at least for a couple of years while I wrote the first book.

Places in a long way home by louise penny series#

And I knew it would take years, probably, to write the first book of the series - not this one but the first book. To be honest with you, when I was writing this book, I didn't ever think it would be published. There's Myrna Landers who runs - she's a retired psychologist from MontrÃ©al. There's Gabri and Olivier who run the B and B. What is this place? And what is it about this little cluster of houses - most of which seem to be occupied by friends we've already met in earlier books? WERTHEIMER: Now you have moved the family Gamache to an enchanted spot - the little village Three Pines. So Clara comes to Armand Gamache and asks for his help in finding him. He's that sort.Īnd Clara comes to him because her husband hasn't returned as he was supposed to. He is more of a - he might be mistaken for a college professor. He would never be mistaken for an action man. And Three Pines is really a kind of cauldron of creativity in one way or another.Īnd Armand Gamache is the former chief inspector of homicide for the Surete du Quebec which is the provincial police force in Quebec. PENNY: Well, all my books are set in Quebec, where I live, in a small town just north of the Vermont border and south of Montreal in the fictional village called Three Pines. WERTHEIMER: Before we start, could you just introduce us to Clara and Inspector Gamache, and give us a hint of the mystery they have to solve? Louise Penny joins us from the CBC in Montreal. If not in this book, maybe in her next bestseller. But she's famous for finding a way to resolve her stories which leaves us with a sense that somehow the right will eventually prevail. Bad things happen to good people fairly often. Her book is called 'The Long Way Home' which ought to help us all spin the summer reading thing out for a few extra days and nights. Louise Penny has a new book out - a new Chief Inspector Gamache novel. For those of you treasuring these last days of August, we have good news.