while I was relatively “old” when that happened, it brought me back to that kid I used to be. I guess there was a lot I was processing in those days, and the image of the boy with the half-red face became a symbol for all that.


02 Your novel references Telemachus, son of


Odysseus, who, like Silas, has a father who leaves on a journey. Years ago, when I was in college and backpacking through Spain, I purchased an antique book called Las Aventuras de Telemachus for a few pesetas. When I finally made my way back home to New York and showed my father my purchase, he was quite familiar with the book and said it had been one of his favourites growing up. Apparently it was a really popular book once upon a time. Anyway, it’s the story of Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, all grown up, embarking on a quest to find his father, who has failed to come home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.


03 Why do stories about early modern America hold such


universal appeal? I see this as a slice of America in the days when much of it was still an unexplored wilderness. I suppose there is something about the sheer vastness of the landscape that captivates the imagination.


04 Were any parts of the book based on true events?


No, not in terms of the what happens to the characters, though the back- ground is set against true events. The early days of photography. Trying to photograph the Moon. The counter- feiters operating at a time when there was no central monetary system. The rage of spiritualism. These were all things lurking in the background.


05 Did you enjoy writing a historical novel?


I really did enjoy writing Pony—this time around. I started it in 2014, and was about 400 pages into it when I realised that what I had written was not the way I wanted to tell the story. I didn’t want to write a whole long saga, which is what that version would have been. In it I had crammed all the research I had done, which was extensive. Too much research, really. I needed years to disassemble


all that stuff and, in the end, when I finally came back to writing the book, I had only retained what was necessary to tell the story. I wanted it to be as minimalist as possible. I wanted the landscape to be bare, the


TheBookseller.com


The theme of Wonder, about choosing to be kind, hit the zeitgeist in a way that I don’t think anyone anticipated


place names to be irrelevant. So, to answer your question: I didn’t like writing it the first time around. And then, during lockdown, it was the right time, and it flowed out of me. That time writing it was a joy.


06 There is also a supernatural element. What were you


trying to explore through the character of the ghost, or did he just appear one day as part of the story? The supernatural element was always there. The character of Mittenwool was part of the story from the very beginning. The whole book is about the connections we make in our lifetimes, which I believe last well beyond our lifetimes. So I wanted to represent that in as simple a way as possible. Mittenwool is Silas’ best friend, his companion, but there is nothing special about him—other than the fact that no-one other than Silas can see him. His being a ghost, in a way, isn’t the important part. It’s his being a friend that ultimately matters.


07 How did you become an author?


I worked in book publishing for more than 20 years before writing Wonder, which I wrote in the evenings while I was still working. That background helps, of course, because I understood the process and business of book publishing from the inside out. One


dayI had an idea for a book, and decided to write it. It wasn’t the first novel I started


over the years, by the way. But it was the first one I actually finished.


08 When was Wonder published, and was it an


instant hit? Or did its popularity grow more slowly? Wonder was published as a midlist book. That means a big advance wasn’t paid. There were modest expectations for the return on that investment. There wasn’t, initially, a large monetary investment for a marketing campaign. It was, like so many novels published, probably not expected to earn out its advance. But an editor—both on my side of


the Atlantic and on yours— loved it enough to want to publish it anyway. Then what happened was that the people in-house who started to read it, started really falling in love with it. That’s when the momentum for Wonder first started: in-house, with that team of people I mentioned earlier. Then the booksellers, who also fell in love, started hand-selling it. Teachers and librarians also started talking about it. And within a few months, this little book about kind- ness—which is how we all thought of it—surprised everyone and started selling. The theme of the book, about choosing to be kind, hit the zeitgeist in a way that I don’t think anyone anticipated.


09 Can you tell us a bit about your writing life and habits?


I love to tell stories, and writing is my preferred way of doing that. But I also love spending time with family and friends, and I can’t say I’m one of those writers that writes every day even when I’m not working on a book. I write until a story is finished, then I do other things. Then when I have another story to tell, I write that one.


A Wonder-full life


There is probably no better example of a slow-burn hit than R J Palacio’s Wonder. The children’s début novel sold decently when first released in the UK in 2012, shifting just over 17,000 copies. Yet as the word- of-mouth buzz built, with kids and parents pulled in by the uplifting story of a disfigured boy’s path to self-acceptance, the title hit great heights, shifting between 80,000 and 120,000 units over the next eight years.


It has been a solid


performer week-in, week-out. At 691,000 units, the Wonder mass-market paperback is the top-selling kids’ fiction title in the BookScan era to never claim a Children’s number one, and it is the bestselling book released since 2010—adult or children’s—to have never shifted more than 10,000 copies in a week. It came close once, with 9,137 copies sold in Christmas week 2017, when the film adaptation starring Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson was in UK cinemas. Part of the success is


undoubtedly down to the design and branding on related titles in the “world of Wonder”, which include short stories, a graphic novel and books of daily quotes (which have combined to sell £4.7m through the TCM). Palacio says she did not design the cover, but she might have been asked for her thoughts: pre-Wonder, under her real name Raquel Jaramillo, she led several New York publishers’ art depart- ments, including a 17-year stint as creative director for Henry Holt’s adult list, where she designed a number of iconic covers—including for Paul Auster’s Timbuktu and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.


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