Latest news with #Trevelyan
New York Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Slow-Burn Summer Thrillers
Two of this month's books are slow-burn stories about summer vacations that devolve into disaster, and one is a techno-thriller about artificial intelligence run amok. You won't be able to guess how any of them end. A Beautiful Family A hum of low-grade unease accompanies a couple and their two daughters as they drive to a New Zealand seaside town in 1985. Their rented house is a disappointment, 'as plain on the outside as a public toilet and not much bigger.' Something is off in the parents' marriage — the mother is distracted, the father resentful. Only 10-year-old Alix, the watchful narrator of Trevelyan's A BEAUTIFUL FAMILY (Doubleday, 310 pp., $28), recognizes that the man next door isn't as harmless as he appears. With her imperfect understanding of the adult world and her longing to keep her family together, Alix is the perfect guide to a story in which so many things are unspoken and unexplained. The book trundles along at a deceptively languid pace until you realize that Trevelyan has expertly set up multiple mysteries that converge, stunningly, late in the game. But for most of the book it looks like a normal vacation. No one's paying much attention to the kids. Alix's surly teenage sister starts shoplifting and sneaking out at night with her sketchy new friends. Thrilled, at least in the abstract, by the tales of a girl who disappeared two years before and is presumed drowned, Alix and a boy she meets embark on a seemingly harmless mission to find the girl's body. Then someone goes missing for real. The Confessions Artificial intelligence is advancing with such terrifying rapidity that it may be outpacing even the fevered imaginations of novelists. In Carr's THE CONFESSIONS (Atria, 324 pp., $28.99), an A.I. model named LLIAM shuts itself down and sends out letters — via the postal service, hilariously — baring the shameful secrets of users around the world. (Maybe the scenario isn't too far-off: In a real-life experiment, an AI chatbot recently exhibited what its creators called 'extreme blackmail behavior,' threatening to expose an engineer's extramarital affair after being fed emails hinting that it might be replaced by a new model.) LLIAM is more advanced than that, making decisions for a billion-plus users: what to eat, whom to marry, where to live, how to carry out their jobs. When it goes rogue by taking itself offline, chaos ensues, paralyzing even the world's most brilliant engineers. Without LLIAM, 'they literally had no idea where to start,' Carr writes. Two people are key to what happens next: the company's chief executive, who took the job when her predecessor suffered an untimely fatal plunge from a rooftop, and the former nun who tried to teach LLIAM how to be humane and who now runs an off-the-grid bookstore. But they're being thwarted by rival forces with their own plans for LLIAM. The story focuses mostly on their race to restart LLIAM and outlines — but doesn't dig deeply into — the interesting details of the catastrophe the shutdown has set off worldwide. But he (yes, LLIAM is a 'he,' by the end) is a terrifying window into the future, either way. The House on Buzzards Bay THE HOUSE ON BUZZARDS BAY (Viking, 276 pp., $30) is set in a seemingly placid town on the southern coast of Massachusetts. It's here that a group of old friends gather for a vacation that, alas, isn't going to be very fun. Jim, whose great-great grandmother built the house, is desperate to resurrect the closeness they all shared in college, now 20 years ago. But the house seems improbably out of sorts, and not everyone shares Jim's nostalgia. 'To keeping things just as they are and never swerving,' one of the group, Bruce, says in a sarcastic toast. 'May we live in museums of generations past.' Things boil over one night when Jim and Bruce exchange angry words, and more. The next morning, Bruce is gone, his room cleared out. Perhaps he's left in a huff. 'It was so like him,' Jim thinks. Murphy's dispassionate style brings to mind the novels of Javier Marías or Katie Kitamura, even as matters in his book descend into the inexplicable. Several people report having frightening, vivid dreams about sex and violence. A mysterious and beguiling woman turns up, declaring that Bruce invited her but acting unruffled by his absence. She also claims to have been married three times, though she looks like she's 25. 'I'm beginning to suspect you appeared this summer with an agenda,' Jim observes. This novel is oddly unclassifiable, and the ending leaves you wondering. Is it a 'Big Chill'-esque story about old friends who learn that the past is a different country? A novel about a haunted house in a malevolent town that doesn't much like outsiders? A murder mystery? Maybe it's all those things.
Sydney Morning Herald
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The audacious moment that changed this debut author's life
It's the ultimate aspiring novelist's fantasy: a finished manuscript languishes in a desk drawer for years before its author decides, what the hell, I'll give it a crack, sending it out to an agent – and within weeks the book is snapped up, even fought over by different publishers. If it had happened in a film, you might scoff. But New Zealander Jennifer Trevelyan is living this very dream. Trevelyan had written several novels, and stuck them all in a drawer while working in other jobs. But eventually, she decided to try her luck with her favourite one. Incredibly, it was not only bought by one of the world's most renowned agents, it became the centre of an international bidding war, and was optioned for a film adaptation before it was even printed. The 50-year-old started writing the atmospheric A Beautiful Family, part-thriller and part coming-of-age story, a decade ago, fitting in writing before work while her husband and kids slept, sneaking off to a cafe where she would write before heading to her real job. Trevelyan agrees her overnight success is a fantasy scenario, although 'perhaps not the 10 years part', she says over Zoom from her home in Wellington. A former wedding photographer, Trevelyan also worked in children's publishing, but it wasn't until she completed a master's of creative writing at Wellington's Victoria University that she decided to revisit her manuscripts. The draft for what became A Beautiful Family was, she says, the favourite of the pile she's stashed away. 'I couldn't face reading it again,' she says, 'but I knew it was the best thing I had done. I had got to this point where I was just going around and not necessarily improving it. I was just sick of the sight of it. So I thought I would take a step back, a little bit.' Then she stepped back a lot. 'I intended to put in the drawer for maybe three months, and it's somehow turned into three years.' Perhaps things might not have panned out the same way had she not waited. When she decided to try her luck with it, she audaciously sent it to one of the world's most famous literary agents. Felicity Blunt, who works at Curtis Brown in London, is arguably one of the world's most respected literary agents, with a stable of clients that includes Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, Ann Patchett and Jilly Cooper. Blunt is also the sister of actor Emily Blunt, and is also married to actor Stanley Tucci. Did Trevelyan just reach a point where she thought, why the hell not? 'Absolutely! But also, I don't think I quite realised how clever she was,' she says. 'I knew she had these movie star connections, but I hadn't actually looked at her list and I didn't realise the calibre of some of the people that she represents. I think if I'd known that, I might have been a bit intimidated.' Blunt had described online what she was looking for in prospective manuscripts, and Trevelyan thought that sounded like the book she'd squirrelled away. 'She was talking about being transported to another place on the other side of the world, and she said she loved Daphne du Maurier - and I love Daphne du Maurier, so I thought, why not?' Why not indeed. Blunt snapped up A Beautiful Family and there was promptly a bidding war. It was, Trevelyan says, 'mind-blowing'. Blunt told her to prepare herself for interviews with interested publishers, and Trevelyan worried about what they would ask her, how she should research for these – only to be told that it was she who would be doing the 'interviewing'. 'I sort of freaked out at every step! I think being suddenly put on to the stage and being given the main role in your dream production ... I just got stage fright, I think.' Told from the perspective of 10-year-old Alix, A Beautiful Family takes place in 1985, over the course of a summer holiday on the Kapiti coast on New Zealand's north island. Alix is at a rented beach house with her family, but both her parents are unusually distracted and her sister Vanessa, now 15, no longer wants to go to the beach with her; she's more interested in partying with older teens and meeting boys. Then Alix meets Kahu, a boy her own age who tells her about the mystery of a young girl who went missing from the area a couple of years earlier, and whose body has never been found. Their search for the girl's body gives the pair a focus for the long summer days, between swimming and lying on the beach. It also takes Alix's mind off what's going on at home – she's not oblivious to the arguments and silences between her parents. And then there's the creepy man in the beach house behind them. Trevelyan drew on memories of her own childhood holidays along the same coastline. 'We had big extended family holidays, and it was running around with my cousins,' she says. And one year, there was even a weird man next door. 'We had a summer where my father booked a very basic beach house and while we still had a great time, it had a sort of slightly funny vibe,' she says. 'I loved it, but there was a house next door that sort of overlooked our one. And there was a man staying there, who was quite creepy.' That became her starting point. 'He wasn't creepy towards me, but he was towards the older women,' she says. 'He'd be … watching the older women.' To say much more about the book's creepy character would give away the story's plot. Trevelyan initially wrote the book from an adult's perspective looking back, but using a 10-year-old's voice offered a different point of view, and way into the story. Loading 'It did pose some problems – there are some restrictions on areas you can't really go into. For example, I knew I couldn't have a complicated police investigation,' she says. 'But it also created this bubble of just this holiday. And I was trying to capture that thing when you're an adult, and you look back on your childhood, and you … don't know if your memories are true or if you've made them up.' Imbued with 1980s nostalgia – Walkmans, Split Enz, the type of mobile phone-free childhood boredom that simply doesn't exist any more – and an evocative sense of place, it's not surprising A Beautiful Family was optioned for a film. New Zealand filmmakers Niki Caro (Whale Rider) and Finola Dwyer (Brooklyn) are on board to adapt the novel. Trevelyan is thrilled, and happy the story won't be transplanted into an American setting. 'The setting was super important to me. I'm so excited to see it.' She's already working on her next novel, and can now call herself a full-time author, thankful she doesn't have to go back to photographing weddings, a gig she fell into after studying photography. 'I was a bit shy and couldn't really see it panning out, but deep down, I really did want to be a writer.'
The Age
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The audacious moment that changed this debut author's life
It's the ultimate aspiring novelist's fantasy: a finished manuscript languishes in a desk drawer for years before its author decides, what the hell, I'll give it a crack, sending it out to an agent – and within weeks the book is snapped up, even fought over by different publishers. If it had happened in a film, you might scoff. But New Zealander Jennifer Trevelyan is living this very dream. Trevelyan had written several novels, and stuck them all in a drawer while working in other jobs. But eventually, she decided to try her luck with her favourite one. Incredibly, it was not only bought by one of the world's most renowned agents, it became the centre of an international bidding war, and was optioned for a film adaptation before it was even printed. The 50-year-old started writing the atmospheric A Beautiful Family, part-thriller and part coming-of-age story, a decade ago, fitting in writing before work while her husband and kids slept, sneaking off to a cafe where she would write before heading to her real job. Trevelyan agrees her overnight success is a fantasy scenario, although 'perhaps not the 10 years part', she says over Zoom from her home in Wellington. A former wedding photographer, Trevelyan also worked in children's publishing, but it wasn't until she completed a master's of creative writing at Wellington's Victoria University that she decided to revisit her manuscripts. The draft for what became A Beautiful Family was, she says, the favourite of the pile she's stashed away. 'I couldn't face reading it again,' she says, 'but I knew it was the best thing I had done. I had got to this point where I was just going around and not necessarily improving it. I was just sick of the sight of it. So I thought I would take a step back, a little bit.' Then she stepped back a lot. 'I intended to put in the drawer for maybe three months, and it's somehow turned into three years.' Perhaps things might not have panned out the same way had she not waited. When she decided to try her luck with it, she audaciously sent it to one of the world's most famous literary agents. Felicity Blunt, who works at Curtis Brown in London, is arguably one of the world's most respected literary agents, with a stable of clients that includes Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, Ann Patchett and Jilly Cooper. Blunt is also the sister of actor Emily Blunt, and is also married to actor Stanley Tucci. Did Trevelyan just reach a point where she thought, why the hell not? 'Absolutely! But also, I don't think I quite realised how clever she was,' she says. 'I knew she had these movie star connections, but I hadn't actually looked at her list and I didn't realise the calibre of some of the people that she represents. I think if I'd known that, I might have been a bit intimidated.' Blunt had described online what she was looking for in prospective manuscripts, and Trevelyan thought that sounded like the book she'd squirrelled away. 'She was talking about being transported to another place on the other side of the world, and she said she loved Daphne du Maurier - and I love Daphne du Maurier, so I thought, why not?' Why not indeed. Blunt snapped up A Beautiful Family and there was promptly a bidding war. It was, Trevelyan says, 'mind-blowing'. Blunt told her to prepare herself for interviews with interested publishers, and Trevelyan worried about what they would ask her, how she should research for these – only to be told that it was she who would be doing the 'interviewing'. 'I sort of freaked out at every step! I think being suddenly put on to the stage and being given the main role in your dream production ... I just got stage fright, I think.' Told from the perspective of 10-year-old Alix, A Beautiful Family takes place in 1985, over the course of a summer holiday on the Kapiti coast on New Zealand's north island. Alix is at a rented beach house with her family, but both her parents are unusually distracted and her sister Vanessa, now 15, no longer wants to go to the beach with her; she's more interested in partying with older teens and meeting boys. Then Alix meets Kahu, a boy her own age who tells her about the mystery of a young girl who went missing from the area a couple of years earlier, and whose body has never been found. Their search for the girl's body gives the pair a focus for the long summer days, between swimming and lying on the beach. It also takes Alix's mind off what's going on at home – she's not oblivious to the arguments and silences between her parents. And then there's the creepy man in the beach house behind them. Trevelyan drew on memories of her own childhood holidays along the same coastline. 'We had big extended family holidays, and it was running around with my cousins,' she says. And one year, there was even a weird man next door. 'We had a summer where my father booked a very basic beach house and while we still had a great time, it had a sort of slightly funny vibe,' she says. 'I loved it, but there was a house next door that sort of overlooked our one. And there was a man staying there, who was quite creepy.' That became her starting point. 'He wasn't creepy towards me, but he was towards the older women,' she says. 'He'd be … watching the older women.' To say much more about the book's creepy character would give away the story's plot. Trevelyan initially wrote the book from an adult's perspective looking back, but using a 10-year-old's voice offered a different point of view, and way into the story. Loading 'It did pose some problems – there are some restrictions on areas you can't really go into. For example, I knew I couldn't have a complicated police investigation,' she says. 'But it also created this bubble of just this holiday. And I was trying to capture that thing when you're an adult, and you look back on your childhood, and you … don't know if your memories are true or if you've made them up.' Imbued with 1980s nostalgia – Walkmans, Split Enz, the type of mobile phone-free childhood boredom that simply doesn't exist any more – and an evocative sense of place, it's not surprising A Beautiful Family was optioned for a film. New Zealand filmmakers Niki Caro (Whale Rider) and Finola Dwyer (Brooklyn) are on board to adapt the novel. Trevelyan is thrilled, and happy the story won't be transplanted into an American setting. 'The setting was super important to me. I'm so excited to see it.' She's already working on her next novel, and can now call herself a full-time author, thankful she doesn't have to go back to photographing weddings, a gig she fell into after studying photography. 'I was a bit shy and couldn't really see it panning out, but deep down, I really did want to be a writer.'
The Spinoff
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
A Beautiful Family: a haunting summer holiday novel, reviewed
Claire Mabey reviews the novel about a New Zealand summer that caught the attention of one of the world's most famous agents and is being released in multiple countries, with a film adaptation attached already. Jennifer Trevelyan's pathway from unknown author to international name is a particularly compelling one. Media attention has been hot and close this past week as A Beautiful Family is released in Aotearoa, Australia, the US and UK. On RNZ's Nine to Noon, Trevelyan told Kathryn Ryan how she'd been writing away for a decade before she finally felt she had a manuscript worthy of sending out to an agent. Felicity Blunt – renowned literary agent – responded (for the uninitiated, this is notable in itself: it is extremely hard to get an agent, especially such a huge one) and the fairytale trajectory from hopeful scribbler to signed-up writer was set into motion. Blunt sold the book into multiple territories, secured Trevelyan a two-book deal, and sold the rights to the film, which already has Niki Caro down to direct. Trevelyan told Ryan that her one wish is that it is filmed in New Zealand. Without knowing anything about the novel, this is an extraordinary story. It is notoriously hard for New Zealand writers to crack the international market: not many manage to do it and certainly not via the pull power of Felicity Blunt, who represents Meg Mason, Jilly Cooper, Claire Keegan and Bonnie Garmus among others. It's the kind of dream-come-true that gives hopefuls just enough to plough on with. Though the chances of such a sequence of events happening again is so slim it's hard to imagine it repeating anytime soon. I received a limited edition advance proof of A Beautiful Family a few months ago with the number 137/150 handwritten on the promotional cover, which read 'if you only read one book in 2025 make it this one'. I have to admit that at this point in the game I'm skeptical of such commands. I get a lot of advance copies with grand promises and I don't read them all: that would be more than a full time job. I put the book in my pile and frankly forgot about it until a week ago when I was looking through my to-be-read piles trying to find something that I'd be able to read quickly, and that might hold my attention over a gloomy, frigid day in which I was stuck inside with a head cold. Enter, the child. Trevelyan's narrator is 10 years old. She's unnamed until the very end of the book (I won't reveal it here: best to find out for yourself). It's this naive perspective that makes A Beautiful Family both easy to read and impossible to put down. The narrator's innocence is pitted against several disturbing factors, all orbiting her summer in various shapes and shades, and it's that persistent dance of disturbances that creates the sustained and unrelenting tension in the novel. Child narrators aren't uncommon in adult literature but the decision to use them is fascinating to me. Catherine Chidgey's The Book of Guilt uses the perspective of three siblings to tell that sinister story; John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a famously affecting use of the child's perspective to tell a holocaust story – the adult reader immediately understanding what the child characters do not. This distance between the child narrator and the adult reader is where sickening suspense lies: as adults we know more than they do and all we have left is to hope that, in this story, we're wrong. A Beautiful Family is set on the Kāpiti Coast in the 1980s. We know this because Trevelyan is meticulous with her references to the time period: the child's prized possession is a Walkman through which she plays Split Enz; The Exorcist has aired on TV; there are Seventeen magazines with sealed sections; the child and her sister Vanessa get terrifically sunburned and only after getting blisters does their mother buy some SPF15. There is also casual racism at play in varying degrees of intensity. A Chinese family is talked about in grotesque terms; a Māori character is described as having 'skin the colour of burnt caramel'. It makes you grind your molars until you remember that this is the 80s and such clangers were horrifyingly commonplace. The question that came to haunt me as I read A Beautiful Family was from what distance is this child narrator telling her story? The voice is in first person, past tense, which indicates that there is space between the events and the telling of them. But it's never made clear how much space: only a couple of moments where the narrator says directly that she doesn't remember a certain detail. For some reason this struck me and niggled at me. I suspect that not many other readers will be at all concerned with this but I wished for those intimations of distance to be either removed or embellished because, for this reader at least, it made me question memory, naivety and the precise impact of the story on its teller. Trevelyan has revealed herself to be a perfectionist and a very careful writer so I doubt that this ambiguity is erroneous, but rather a deliberate nod towards the way core childhood memories stay, and replay. Because this is a summer that lingers: it's the kind of childhood scenario that would lodge itself in the brain and return to the mind's eye with changing lenses as you aged. It is immediately clear that the child's parents are unhappy and that Vanessa (the sister) has struck a particularly unpleasant and caustic stage of her teenage years. The child is left largely to her own devices until she meets Kahu, a young boy, and he tells her about Charlotte who disappeared from the beach one summer when she was nine years old. The book is haunted by Charlotte in several ways. As an unsolved mystery it gives the two lonely children something to investigate; and it adds an extra element of suspicion to the dead-eyed neighbour that trains his gaze over the child and her family. Trevelyan carefully places her threats: there's the simmering unhappiness between the parents; clear signs of an affair; a very creepy neighbour; and the sea. Children are frequently left alone at the beach in this story. While the descriptions of diving in and out of the waves like dolphins are charming, nostalgic, you're left to worry about drowning. New Zealand has horrendous child drowning rates. Our losses make it very hard to read a local novel where the sea laps and waits for unsupervised children. You're left to shout into the pages for the adults to focus on their kids for once; to shout 'remember Charlotte?!' The mother character is one of the most intriguing figures in this novel where the adults are so absent they're almost abstract. She's having an affair (this is made obvious early on), and she's trying to write a book. At least, her child thinks that's what she's doing. Whatever it is she's scribbling, it lets her take her eye off the ball: helps her escape her family, escape parenting, her miserable marriage, her surroundings. Early on we learn that the mother usually demands they holiday in remote places. So her family finds it unusual that this summer she wants to go 'where there are people'. It becomes clear that the affair has a lot to do with this change of heart; but what I found most interesting was the depiction of the writer as selfish, self-isolating and self-destructive. I suspect that many women of a certain age will empathise strongly with her, particularly in contrast to the man she married. Through his child's eyes we get glimpses of a father who thinks it's not his job to chaperone the children on the beach; who is friendly enough but who is quietly fuming about his marital situation; who is racist; and who enacts a violence that will severely scar any of Trevelyan's readers who are writers. A Beautiful Family reminded me, to some degree, of the film Little Children (2006). Ostensibly a movie about an affair, it becomes, in dramatic fashion, a story about the selfishness of adults: the damage they can cause to the children they like to think are unknowing and unseeing. Trevelyan's story plays a similar trick in that its mystery centres on a missing girl, a creepy man, and the terror that experimenting teenagers can inflict upon themselves and others. But this is really a novel about parents: about what they don't see, what they distract themselves with (cricket, BBQs, projects, affairs, discontents) and what they miss. But what of that bold claim on the proof copy? A Beautiful Family is well written, it's immersive, and it is haunting. It's a novel that will prompt you to look back over your own childhood and assess the threats; the fast friendships; the collisions with siblings and strangers. A Beautiful Family has an atmosphere and an eye for place that means it has the potential to make a good Aotearoa noir film and one hopefully filmed on the Kāpiti Coast. I can see why Felicity Blunt was so confident about this novel: there is a universality to the way the child observes danger, weathers the storm of family, is plagued by what she remembers. There's a cinematic quality to the writing. But I hope you read more than one book in 2025. New Zealand is producing so much compelling fiction: more of it deserves to be read, discovered, and helped to go big. Hopefully Trevelyan's success will help kick that door open a little wider. A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan ($37, Allen & Unwin) is available to purchase from Unity Books. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
Vancouver Sun
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Vancouver Sun
Brit dressed as giant bird walks 85 km in support of endangered curlew
Article content This one is for the birds. Article content A bird enthusiast recently walked 85 km dressed in a homemade bird costume to raise awareness for one of Great Britain's most iconic and threatened birds. Article content Matt Trevelyan, 46, made the trek dressed as his favourite winged species – the Eurasian curlew – which is endangered in the United Kingdom. Article content The elaborate costume was three yards long and was made out of split bamboo, muslin and polystyrene. Article content Article content Trevelyan, a Farming in Protected Landscapes officer, walked with friends and family around the Nidderdale Way route in the Yorkshire Dales in support of conservation projects. Article content Article content 'They have such a beautiful song — it pulls at your heart strings — it was great to hear it whilst walking the awareness-raising adventure.' Article content The bird lover finished the walk over the Saturday and Sunday of Easter weekend ahead of World Curlew Day on April 21. Article content Article content The day was created in 2017 by Mary Colwell to raise awareness of the declining numbers of curlews and the issues they face because of habitat loss, land-use changes and climate pressures. Article content Article content The walker covered 40 km on the first day, including a 22.5-km trek, before stopping for lunch and then going another 17 km. On Day 2, he walked and occasionally ran the remaining 45 km. Article content 'The walk was a joy — there were beautiful views and the weather was perfect,' Trevelyan said. Article content 'I underestimated how fast I could walk, meaning I was trundling along for a solid 12 hours a day.
