{"id":4754,"date":"2026-08-26T08:32:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T06:32:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/?p=4754"},"modified":"2026-08-26T08:32:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T06:32:55","slug":"turning-life-into-fiction-with-helen-matthews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.georgiahill.co.uk\/?p=4754","title":{"rendered":"Turning Life into Fiction with Helen Matthews"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Haven\u2019t had a guest on for ages so am delighted to have Helen on here, telling us all about the inspiration behind her novel House of Lies. Over to you, Helen!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you ever go on holiday to France, I\u2019m guessing that, like me, you discover bargains in the supermarket and load up your trolley with wine and cheese. It\u2019s easy to be tempted to get out the credit card and overspend. I do the same. But what I didn\u2019t expect, while we were on a family camping holiday many years ago, was to come home having impulse-bought a house!  And not even a habitable house. A ruin.<\/p>\n\n\n

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That long-ago summer, the heat in our  coastal resort was stifling and it was hard to stay cool under canvas. We heard about a nearby village, with a chateau and a lakeside beach, shaded by trees, and this drew us inland from the scorching coast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a picturesque spot and had a comfortable, leisurely pace of life but the last thing we expected was to fall in love with the village and put down roots there. As we strolled around the streets, we discovered many of the ancient cottages in the village centre were up for sale. In those days I was our main family breadwinner, with a very stressful corporate job, while my husband ran a small business and fitted it around the needs of our children. This was in the days before Airbnb and we used to dream of a new life, perhaps escaping to France to run a g\u00eetes (holiday rentals) business, but the sums didn\u2019t add up. Yet the prices  of these village houses were under \u00a38,000. Inexpensive compared to the UK, but too small for a family of four. That\u2019s when we spotted our \u2018ruin\u2019, an old tumbledown farm building set in a vast overgrown field. A property very similar to the one the Willshire family is viewing in the opening chapter of House of <\/em>Lies<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While our children sulked and protested, we behaved like problem gamblers, inserting all our credit and bank cards into an ATM to withdraw the ten per cent needed for a deposit. We  handed it over to  the estate agent on the spot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took us years to convert our \u2018ruin\u2019 into a liveable holiday home. Every holiday was spent in a caravan on the muddy building site while renovations slowly progressed. To raise the money for the work, we increased the mortgage on our UK home several times.  Our children spent their holidays painting walls and assembling IKEA kitchen units. But, once it was done, they got their reward. They could bring friends on holiday with them, enjoy an outdoor life, roam freely, go surfing and climbing, cycle long distances and take out boats on the river.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I\u2019d often thought of sharing some of these experiences in a novel. As an author, I\u2019m fascinated by family relationships, especially when these are dysfunctional. I like to delve into the more secretive and twisted side of human nature. For my characters in House of Lies<\/em>, there\u2019s no idyllic \u2018year in Provence\u2019 experience. I haven\u2019t set House of Lies<\/em> in the area of France where our holiday house is, but in Limoges and the surrounding Limousin countrysidewhere I\u2019ve created a fictitious village called Sainte Violette. I hope readers will recognise the sights, sounds and tastes of France within the fictional world I\u2019ve created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

House of <\/em>Lies<\/em> was first published in 2019 by a different publisher with the title Lies Behind the Ruin<\/em>. This is a lightly-edited second edition. I began planning the book while on a writers\u2019 retreat at Gladstone\u2019s library in North Wales. At that time, I had no inkling there would be a referendum on Britain\u2019s membership of the EU and that the UK would vote to leave. I was halfway through writing this book when the referendum was announced. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever any of us may think of Brexit, and I\u2019m expressing no position here, after Britain left the EU, it was no longer possible for young families with limited means to start a new life in France. This is what the Willshire family does in House of <\/em>Lies<\/em>. The right to move to France, Spain, Germany or elsewhere \u2013 to work or start a business \u2013 was linked to freedom of movement for EU citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over many years of visiting France, I\u2019ve met British people from all social and income backgrounds who had taken advantage of the freedom of movement rules to start a new life in France. Sometimes they did this after a redundancy, bereavement or other life-changing event; some were artists who wanted to start a business in a place where property was more affordable. Others thought they could give their children a better life in France. That opportunity is now reserved for the wealthy, or those who secure a  job offer from an employer who is prepared to go through the bureaucracy of applying for a work visa for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The challenge of writing about contemporary themes is that the world constantly changes. When the Referendum was announced, I wondered if  I should abandon House of <\/em>Lies<\/em> in case it turned out to be a historical novel before it was even published! But the action in the book takes place between the summer of 2015 and winter of January 2017 before the changes in the law that brought Brexit into effect, so I rewrote some plot lines and et voil\u00e0<\/em> Brexit became yet another challenge for my characters to face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To find out what happens to the Willshire family and the dangers that pursue them when they try to rebuild their lives and renovate their \u2018ruin\u2019 in France, you can download House of <\/em>Lies<\/em>from Amazon at this link:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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