Cambridge author Megan Hunter’s new novel ‘Days of Light’ is just in time for Easter

Days of Light is the latest novel by acclaimed Cambridge author and University of Cambridge graduate, Megan Hunter – and she will be presenting it next week at Waterstones.

“Think One Day written by (and starring) Virginia Woolf,” says The Observer of this “radiant, absorbing novel” (fellow author Joanna Quinn) which is set first of all in 1938 and then chronicles six pivotal days across six decades.

Megan’s first novel, the award-winning The End We Start From (2017), was made into a major motion picture starring Jodie Comer (it is currently available to watch on Netflix), while her second tome, The Harpy (2020), is to be adapted for television.

Why has it taken Megan – who has an MPhil in English literature: criticism and culture from Jesus College, Cambridge – five years to publish her third book?

“I would say partly the pandemic, partly this book had an interesting journey where initially I was writing very much about these figures from the Bloomsbury Group,” she explains, “so Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and also Vanessa Bell’s daughter Angelica Garnett, who all lived at Charleston [in East Sussex].

“The book is inspired by them, and I have some notes on sources in my acknowledgements to the book, but in the end I decided to write more of a fictional novel that was inspired by them but had a fictional freedom – and also was echoing parts of my own life as well.

“So it was kind of a meeting point, I guess, between biography, fiction, and autobiography – rather than being straightforward biographical fiction, if that makes sense.”

Megan, who is also a by-fellow at Hughes Hall, adds: “It’s very much a love story, and it’s very much a story of spring – and of redemption, in some ways.

“So I think there’s an appropriateness to the publication date, just before Easter, and the book is very much about light and hope and spring, so it feels very apt that it’s being published at this time.”

During the process of putting together Days of Light, Megan reveals that because it went through these different incarnations, she “completely rewrote it, at least once” – another reason why it took five years to write.

On the subject of the plot, she says: “It starts just before the Second World War, in 1938, so the book is a sequence of six days across this woman’s life, Ivy, our main character, and each day is a pivotal day in her life. And most of the days fall in different decades.”

The decades in question are the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s, before it jumps ahead to the end of the 20th century.

“So it’s all across the 20th century, but quite large gaps between each individual day,” notes Megan, “so there’s a focus on the Megan’s new novel is just in time for Easter present moment in the book, and the ‘daily-ness’ of a particular person’s life.

“You’re very much in her moment-to-moment existence, but then you have this much wider, sweeping sense of a whole life. That’s the sort of structural idea behind the book.”

Megan reveals how one of the characters in the novel develops a religious vocation, something with which the writer herself can readily identify.

“I actually trained to be a priest in my 20s, just for about a year,” she says, “but I obviously had at one point this religious vocation.

“So I’ve been trying to explore that in literature, in fiction, for a while because it was such an important experience in my life…

“But in the end, I ended up exploring it more through this fictional character, who also has a religious vocation – not in exactly the same way, but she also has this religious calling.

“So I was exploring how that religious calling intersects particularly in the novel with the artistic family that she comes from and the tensions, I suppose, that can be there between art and religion.”

Megan speaks of the “central purpose of life”, of “creating a life that sustains art”, and adds: “But for Ivy, it becomes this quest for a search for deeper meaning and for the answers to particular mysteries, which are provoked by tragic events.

“Basically, there’s a central, tragic event in her life, in her family, that propels her on this journey of trying to find the meaning of life, and particularly the meaning of her life.”

Megan was born in Manchester and grew up in Cambridge. She then went on to study for her BA in English literature at the University of Sussex.

She will be reading extracts from Days of Light, taking part in a Q&A, and signing copies of the book at Waterstones Cambridge at 6-7.30pm on Thursday, 17 April, which also happens to be the publication date.

Tickets are £8 (general admission), £5 for Waterstones loyalty cardholders, and £22 for a book and ticket (Days of Light’s recommended retail price is £18.99). Visit waterstones.com/events/an-evening-with-megan-hunter/cambridge-135527.