Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author Fiona Barton enters the world of online dating in her latest thriller. Talking to Strangers is published by Bantam Press.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Art Settler for Sussex Newspapers.
00:06Really lovely to speak to Fiona Barton. Now Fiona, who lives in the Chichester area, has got
00:10a new thriller out, which is coming out in August, and it's called Talking to Strangers,
00:17and it deals with something really fascinating that shouldn't be sinister, but it is the whole
00:22world of online dating. What drew you to that world? What made you want to explore that in the book?
00:30I think it was how ordinary it had become, how mainstream it had become, yet the risks persisted.
00:43I'd met women a few years ago who had started online dating when it was still, you know,
00:50not something that everybody talked about, they felt they were being judged,
00:54and they said they were doing it, and I was just, I was surprised at the risks
01:01they were taking. And those risks are encapsulated in the title, which is
01:06Talking to Strangers, that is the risk, is it? It is. You're putting your trust. Yes, so where, you know,
01:15a long time ago when I was dating, it would have been discos and pubs where you met people,
01:21where you could look them in the eye and know they were real. You know, the stories I've heard,
01:29the investigations that I've looked into, where, you know, people have been scammed and conned and
01:37misled, you know, thinking that they're meeting the love of their life, and it turns out to be
01:44a boiler room in another country, scamming them. So it's for a thriller writer then, clearly.
01:51Exactly, it's food and drink to me. So I like the jeopardy and the hope, you know, people
02:00go into this very genuinely, looking for their life partner, and you know, I'm sure a good deal
02:07of them find them. But lurking around, it's this jeopardy that actually you don't know who you're
02:15talking to. And, you know, the whole talking to strangers as a child. That's fascinating.
02:21And you came into writing with a long background in journalism for national newspapers. Does
02:27a journalist and you survive in the writer? Does that carry over in any way? You've got a
02:32journalist's account? Well, yes, it does. Because how can you shrug off, you know,
02:3930 years of being a reporter, and I wouldn't want to. Because I think what I what the reporter in
02:46me brings to it is observation and short sentences. And, but I had to unload, unlearn a lot of things
02:56when I started. And, you know, as a journalist, you, you tell the story in the opening paragraph.
03:02Yes, that's not great for a thriller, it turns out.
03:09Well, I got to 10,000 words of my first book and thought, I've got nothing left to say.
03:16But I did, I had to give myself permission to invent. I know people think, you know,
03:22that journalists invent all the time, but they don't. And so I still, I ground myself a lot in
03:31experiences I've had people I've talked to. I like to, I like to have my feet on the ground and know
03:38that, you know, that these are the sort of things that people actually do, actually say, I'd be
03:45hopeless at sci fi. Fantastic. We have to write about what you know, don't you? In essence?
03:51Yeah. Well, yeah, you do. I mean,
03:55Or at least use it as a starting point of this.
03:58Exactly. That's it. That's it. Yeah.
04:00Fantastic. Well, the book is Talking to Strangers by Fiona Barton.
04:04Lovely to speak to you, Fiona. Thank you.