KYD First Book Club Event: ‘The Everlasting Sunday’

Our First Book Club pick for March, Robert Lukins‘ The Everlasting Sunday, is a haunting novel about the winter seventeen-year-old Radford is sent to Goodwin Manor, a home for boys who have been ‘found by trouble’. Lukins spoke with Ellen Cregan at Readings Carlton on 29 March about writing and revising his novel – and the dozens of practice novels that came before it.

Further reading:

Read an extract from The Everlasting Sunday.

Read Ellen Cregan’s review of the novel.

Our April First Book Club title is Laurie Steed’s You Belong Here.

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TRANSCRIPT

Meaghan Dew: Welcome back to the Kill Your Darlings podcast. Today we have a recording of our second First Book Club event for the year. If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know our March title was Robert Lukins’ The Everlasting Sunday. We recorded Robert in conversation with our book club coordinator Ellen Cregan at Readings on Thursday March 29.

Ellen Cregan: So welcome, Robert. And we’re here today to launch and discuss and have a book club of sorts to do with your debut novel, The Everlasting Sunday, which is right here. I’m actually going to start by asking Robert to read from the book, which I think is always a good way to give sort of a taster of what it’s like and I know a lot of you probably haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, because it is relatively new. So I’ll pass over to you, Robert.

Robert Lukins: Thank you. Thanks everyone for being here. I’ll read a bit.

The boys stood in wonder, for above them the sky was breaking apart. It seemed to Radford exactly how a mirage might present itself. The starlings had lifted from their roost and swarmed into a molten object which oscillated above the horizon, making impossible shapes. They were a snake, a heart, a firework. The flock breathed with a lone purpose and it was this unity that struck him. That all these beaks and breakable wings could come so close to disaster, yet make a song so sweet. It made it’s way into his pulse, rising and falling as the colony moved closer or away.

‘Seen this before?’ he said as the formation turned into a long arrowhead and named itself at the setting sun.

There were a few shaking heads.

‘Mad.’

‘Mad.’

‘I’ve seen it,’ West said. His voice had softened. ‘Years ago with my parents in Devon. My father used to take us with his caravan to Slapton Ley and we’d go for these awful walks.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s called a murmuration.’

They stood as silhouettes in the silver distance and the birds continued unaware.

KYD: Thank you that was really beautiful. So, the first thing I’d like to ask you about with this book is the setting. So it’s quite a specific setting. It’s set in the midst