Sarah, Your upcoming novel, The Diverging Lives of Bethany Raven is out in May. Can you tell us a little bit about the book? The book follows science genius Bethany Raven who is standing on the cusp of a huge professional breakthrough that she believes will change the world. But then she wakes up and discovers she didn’t write down her brilliant new formula and that the flipflops she bought the week before have changed colour from beige to bright white. She shrugs it off as stress but then she wakes up to find her normally lazy sister is in the gym at 7am and realises she must be in an alternate universe. She continues to fall through different multiverses, trying on the lives of the Bethanys who inhabit them, but with each skip she discovers the differences to her own world are becoming more extreme and she’s increasingly desperate to find her way home. So she enlists the only person who can help her, her bitter rival and fellow science wunderkind, Tyler. He also happens to be hot as hell, and perhaps not as hideous in the personality department as she’d previously thought! What was the inspiration for this novel? A few years ago I sent my husband into the loft to find my black light-weight parka. He came back down a while later and handed me one that was clearly navy blue. To this day, I swear I’d bought a black one! We joked at the time that perhaps I had bought a black one but was now in a parallel universe. That small moment stuck in my head and I always knew I wanted to write a story about it, but I didn’t know what kind of story it should be (as a big sci-fi fan there was a vague notion of an epic space-opera but it never felt right!). Then, a year or so later, I watched a video on Twitter about a woman whose boyfriend hijacked her graduation ceremony to propose. The comments were full of women telling her to run. And suddenly I had a backstory for Bethany Raven: a woman falling through the multiverse and in every single one she had told the boyfriend to get lost… except in one universe where she married him. Throw in a hot physicist who’s also her nemesis and I realised it was definitely a rom-com! Who was your favourite character to write? Definitely my favourite thing about writing this book was coming up with all the alternative Bethanys! Our Bethany finds herself living their lives and it was so interesting to come up with ways she could have been different if she’s made alternative choices, found new hobbies, or met other people. Each one of the other Bethanys has a ‘quirk’ or something that differentiates them and it gave me such an opportunity to think about the ways our lives are shaped. As someone with a graveyard of former hobbies, it was fun to get the Bethanys to try some of these on for size (like getting into journaling, or fitness, or collecting pretty special edition books). I also experimented with things I’ve never personally experienced, like decanting, being obsessively tidy, or going down a rabbit hole of cheap online shopping! Other than Bethany, I think my favourite character is Amina (who you don’t meet until quite late in the book and I spent a long time trying to bring her into the story earlier!). She’s got a real strength to her that I love. And Flick was great fun to write too. What has been the highlight of your author career so far? The Diverging Lives of Bethany Raven is my first speculative rom-com after a career of six darkly funny thrillers. An absolute highlight has been seeing the reaction from my readers and other author friends when I said I was switching genres. Everyone has been so lovely and supportive and it’s really given me a huge lift. I can’t wait to write more speculative love stories and it’s definitely refreshing not to have to think of new ways to hide a body! But I think the real highlight was something that happened a few years ago. I had a message from a reader in the US who’d love my debut thriller and told me her late-teen daughter (who wasn’t a reader) was going to start it. A month later she sent me an update: her daughter had loved Her Perfect Twin and was now working her way voraciously through a pile of other books. The idea that my book inspired someone to take up reading as a hobby is such an honour and I hope she has many happy decades of stories ahead of her. What do you do when you’re not writing? Two years ago, my husband and I decided to relocate to Devon with our very spoiled rescue dog, Lily. And when I say spoiled, I mean spoiled! She even has a cameo in The Diverging Lives of Bethany Raven and I dedicated the book to her! Being in Devon is fantastic and we spend a lot of time walking on Dartmoor, playing fetch on the beach, or exploring the cute highstreets of small towns (and their bookshops of course!). I’m a huge reader and love books across a range of genres, from rom-coms to science-fiction to thrillers and occasionally some romantasy. When I’m not reading, I can also be found playing Stardew Valley and I’ve developed a fairly serious Lego habit in the past year or so. Oh, and obviously spending far too much time on Bookstagram and Booktok and then buying more books than I could ever possibly read (especially if they have pretty special editions)! |
The Diverging Lives of Bethany Raven by Sarah E. Bonner is out on the 7th May.
Pre-order your copy here.
SYNOPSIS
Just when she thought she had everything figured out . . .
Waking after a career-defining breakthrough, physics genius Bethany Raven expects to find her multiverse theorem written in the notebook by her bed. Instead the pages are blank … and her new flip-flops are white rather than the beige she remembers buying with her sister, Cesca.
At first she shrugs it off, but then certified lazy-girl Cesca calls from the gym at 7 a.m. and Bethany can’t deny something is seriously wrong. She’s skipping through alternate universes trying on other Bethanys’ lives, other Bethanys’ increasingly diverging lives. And with each skip her relationship with Cesca becomes more and more distant.
Desperate to find a way home to her own world and her own Cesca, she’s forced to seek out the only person who might be able to help. Shame he’s her bitter rival – the cocky-as-all-hell darling of the physics world, Tyler Adams. But when Tyler turns out to be very different to the man she thought she hated, Bethany discovers that working with him to get back to her reality might not be all bad …