A few books are published to instant praise and enormous success. Rather more are published, ignored then sink like rocks. Others are well reviewed, sell well and are on the verge of disappearing when, months later, they receive a second wind. A case in point is Peter Ho Davies' first novel, The Welsh Girl.
Acclaimed on its publication in 2007, the paperback edition flew off the shelves after being included on the long list for the Man Booker Prize and that ultimate seal of commercial approval: endorsement by Britain's Richard and Judy Book Club. Davies only needs a film adaptation for a third wind to blow.
Davies, with a Hong Kong heritage, could be described as experiencing a third wind of his own. Born in Coventry in 1966 to an English father and Malaysian-Chinese mother, he intended to follow in his paternal footsteps and become an engineer, studying physics at Cambridge University. This plan was disrupted by the short stories he had already begun to write. Another degree followed, this time in English, before he released his first collection of short stories, The Ugliest House in the World, in 1988.
The book won major prizes and Davies moved to the US in 1992, first to study creative writing and then to teach it at the University of Michigan. He released a second story collection, Equal Love, and in 2003 was included on Granta's list of Best Young Writers.
While a number of his Granta peers appeared to achieve instant success (Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters, for example), Davies took rather longer - as a novelist at least. Six years in the writing, The Welsh Girl is set in a small Welsh village during the second world war and elegantly intertwines a number of narratives: the incarceration of Rudolph Hess; his interrogation by Captain Rotheram, an English officer of Jewish-German origin; the heroine, Esther Evans, who is raped by an English soldier and then falls in love with Karsten, a German prisoner of war.
'When people ask me about the time it took to write the novel,' Davies says, 'I flippantly say that although I knew from the first couple of months that Esther was going to have this pretty dreadful encounter with Colin, it probably took three more years to figure out she was going to get pregnant.'
