Amanda Craig’s tenth novel, The Three Graces was published in June this year, and like her first novel Foreign Bodies, is set in Tuscany where she spent her childhood. Like all her novels The Three Graces is a ‘state of the nation novel’ and deals with difficult social issues such as the Italian migrant crisis, the huge gulf between the very rich and the middle classes, rural poverty and attitudes to ageing.
The three graces are three elderly friends in their eighties living in an imaginary hill town in Tuscany. There’s a German classical pianist, an upper class English woman living with her husband who has dementia and the third friend who is busy organising her grandson’s wedding. The plot has a tight time frame and everything happens over two weeks. Each of the three women has to face a different challenge. The novel starts with the shooting of an illegal immigrant. The gulf between classes is emphasised in the character of a Russian oligarch in hiding from Putin, who sponsors a music festival.
Craig told Marlborough LitFest audience that the novel is an inversion of A Room with a View by E.M. Forster. “There is a love triangle between three young people but at the centre of the story are three elderly women… I think that elderly people are absolutely fascinating and have incredible life stories.” Young people, she says “often write them off as old and boring and the old are often reticent about saying, ‘I have had a life’. I’m keen on old people realising they have agency.”
Craig writes of the three women: “Age had not diminished them; they had become a concentrated version of themselves.” There are, she says, “still huge prejudices about women’s stories. The stories that women have to tell are still the ones that are often untold.”
A number of characters who had appeared in previous novels by Craig appear in The Three Graces. “I do what Trollope did – carry characters on to the next novels. Minor characters become major characters although each novel stands alone.”
Craig carries out a tremendous amount of research to write a novel. In her opinion, “Contemporary fiction is misunderstood as something easy to write but it’s the most difficult of all genres. I do huge amounts of research but it doesn’t look like that. I formally interview people who could help me build a character.”
Despite the serious themes the novel ends on a note of optimism. “I take my characters through very dark things, people trafficking, gang rape but I have a pact with readers that they will never leave a book of mine feeling worse than when they began it. You have to give people hope.”
The Three Graces has just been optioned for TV serialisation by Alison Owen at Momentum Pictures after a three-way auction.
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