Andrea Mara Introduces No One Saw A Thing

Andrea Mara is a renowned crime novelist from Dublin. She has written many Sunday Times Bestsellers, such as 'All Her Fault' and 'Hide and Seek'. She gives an insight into her newest book, 'No One Saw a Thing' in this Eason exclusive blog.

Once upon a time, two children got on a Tube in central London. Before their parents could join them, the doors slid shut and the Tube pulled away. Frantically, their parents shouted from the platform but the children didn’t hear. Fortunately, another passenger realised what was happening, and jumped to the rescue.

To this point, the real-life story from my own childhood and the fictional version in No One Saw A Thing are identical.

The real-life children – me, aged twelve, and my sister, aged six – were on holidays in London when we ended up on a train without our parents. In the fictional version, the children are six-year-old Faye and two-year-old Bea.

Where the plot diverges is with what happens next: in the book, when the mother, Sive, arrives at the next station, only two-year-old Bea is there. Faye is nowhere to be found. And as the title tells us, no one saw a thing.

Happily, in real life, my sister and I were both on the platform in Tower Bridge when my parents arrived and the story ends happily much more quickly than it does in the book.

When my dad reminded me of the story a couple of years ago, the idea took hold. What if something had gone wrong? What if one child wasn’t there? What if the children were younger? What if the smaller child, the one who did arrive at the next station, was too young to say what had happened to her sister?

The story became No One Saw A Thing, set over one frantic day in London as Sive and Aaron Sullivan try to find their missing child. Did she walk away? Did someone take her? Does a stranger have their child? Or does the answer – as is often the case in fiction – lie closer to home?

-- Andrea Mara