Welcome to this Tuesday Teaser episode of Best Book Forward! Today, I am giving you an exclusive sneak peek into my conversation with Rebecca Taylor McKay ahead of the main episode dropping this Thursday.

The Honeymoon Suite is out now (grab your copy here: The Honeymoon Suite)

It is such a brilliant read, you do not want to miss this book (or episode). Make sure you hang around to the end of the episode to hear Rebecca read a little extract for you.

The main episode drops this Thursday so think of this as a little added bonus. If you are already subscribed to Best Book Forward, your podcast app will send you a little notification the moment the main episode lands. In the meantime, come and say hello to us both over on Instagram by hitting the links below!

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📲 Connect with Us

• Follow Helen on Instagram: @bestbookforward
• Follow Rebecca Taylor McKay on Instagram: @rebeccataylormckay

Welcome back to our final Best Foot Forward Tuesday teaser for Season six.

I don't know where this time has gone, but it has seriously flown by.

I really hope that you've enjoyed this series as much as I have and I hope that you've welcomed lots of lovely new books onto your TBR that you will fall in love with.

So for our final episode this week, and don't worry, there are more episodes coming in the autumn and we have Rebecca Taylor McKay joining us to talk about her brilliant debut novel the Honeymoon Suite, which feels like such a great book to end the summer season on.

Don't forget to hang on to the end of this episode.

It's only very short, but you'll get to hear an exclusive reading from Rebecca at the end.

It is a brilliant read.

I loved the classic suspense vibes and the talented Mr. Ripley that I could feel coming off the pages.

It is a brilliant read, perfect to take on holiday with you.

On Thursday's episode, Rebecca and I talk about her inspiration for the Honeymoon Suite.

Now, something that really surprised me is that Rebecca has never been to Italy.

Whilst I was reading the Honeymoon Suite, I felt sure that she must have been camped out doing her research because because it just felt like it was coming off the page and it was so visual.

I was sure that she was either a local or she'd spent a lot of time there.

But here's how it actually came about.

I've never been to Italy, I've never.

Been to the Amalfi coast and people are always very surprised, which I take as a huge compliment because I was so worried about getting it wrong.

So hopefully that means that I haven't.

The fact that I've tricked people into thinking that I have actually been there.

So I haven't done an awful lot of traveling.

And so when I knew I wanted to write this honeymoon thriller and that it was going to be somewhere really stunning, visually stunning, I was really struggling to think because the number of places I've been to was very small and I so I sort of knew it was I was going to have to choose somewhere that I've never been.

And then I have the note, a little note on my phone that from that original idea that had come to me and it just said honeymoon thriller question mark.

And that was as far as I'd got with it.

And in the first episode, he goes to Italy and he goes to Pompeii.

And he also went to Positano to.

Talk about how Patricia.

Patricia Highsmith had been inspired to write the talented Mr. Ripley there.

And the minute Positano came onto the screen and Richard Le Grant's walking down this little narrow street, I was like, that's the place that was in my head.

But I didn't know where it was because I've never been there.

And I just knew that that was where Clara and Spencer's honeymoon was going to take place.

So I just threw myself into the research then, thinking, right, well, I have to find out as well, much as I can about it so that I can kind of get it right and make people sort of feel that they're there.

We also talk about the historical setting of the novel.

What drew Rebecca to want to go back to the 60s.

And I loved hearing her talk about this and how, quite simply, it helped to remove any technical help for our poor protagonist.

Clara, take a listen to this.

This was the first time I'd ever tried writing historical.

And I got partway through and really thought to myself, you don't have any business trying to write this historical novel.

You don't know enough about the 60s.

You're not qualified to write it.

You should just take this whole plot and move it to contemporary current times.

And as soon as I did that,.

I realized that pretty much the whole.

Thing fell apart, because any.

Any questions that Clara had about who her husband is, what is actually going on, would be very easily solved with.

With the Internet and social media or just.

Even if I moved it back a bit, even just picking up the phone and being like, you know, having a ring round.

So I definitely then thought, no, this.

This has to take place further back in time to get rid of that.

Often when I'm interviewing authors, I hear them talk about how some of themselves will appear in their characters.

Early on in the honeymoon suite, we find out that Clara's doctor had diagnosed her with a nervous collapse.

While Rebecca's own experience was entirely different, here she talks about being able to relate to Clara following her own experience with chronic illness.

I did put a lot of myself in Clara.

I mean, I think we're very different in a lot of ways, but I think lots of the kind of things that she has going on are things I've taken from my own experiences.

And then just used to sort of feed her character.

So I got a chronic illness that.

Came on very suddenly in my late 20s.

And looking back, there were little inklings that it was coming on, but in the experience, in the moment, it felt very sudden.

And that shock of going from someone who's very independent and sort of physically active and capable to being someone who's very dependent on others and not sure if you can really trust your body to do what it used to do.

And that juxtaposition between feeling like in your head you are one way, but you're very conscious that people are seeing you and reacting to you in a different way.

And I think she even says over the table, I think, to Vivienne and.

Fred, and says, oh, I've always been.

So healthy and robust.

And she can sort of sense them.

Looking at her like, have you?

I'm not sure.

And that feeling of what she.

How she sees herself is different, how other people are perceiving her.

So I definitely, even though our conditions that, you know, our illnesses are very different and we're different, I definitely use my experiences of that to kind of inform how I wrote about it, I think.

And she's a working class character and I'm a working class writer, so I.

Think that was in there too.

And that sense of she is really the only working class character among the.

Main characters, at least.

And her being so desperately wanting to.

Fit in and to do the right.

Thing and to not stand out or give herself away, and that causes her.

A lot of stress and embarrassment.

Yeah, Obviously, part of me crept in there, but I should say she's definitely not me.

And we are quite different in a lot of ways.

So the episode drops on Thursday.

I really hope it's one you're going to love.

If you've subscribed to the show, you'll get a notification as soon as it drops.

But for now, I'm going to leave you with a reading from Rebecca from the honeymoon suite.

I hope that you'll enjoy it and I will see you on Thursday.

Prologue Positano, Italy.

On Mondays, I walk down to the cemetery.

It's a little habit I've developed in recent months.

I follow the winding dirt track carved into the cliffside by centuries of footsteps, my leather sandals kicking up dust in the dry September heat.

There's a strong breeze rustling through the leaves of the olive trees, and as the branches dip and sway, I catch the dazzling blue of the sea and feel it pierce some delicate part inside me, as it always does when it catches me like this, unaware, I'm thinking the track meets the sun, bleached stone steps that will carry me the rest of the way down the cliffside to the wrought iron gates of the cemetery, thrown open in invitation.

Inside, the dead wait not in the neat flat lines and granite headstones of an English cemetery, but what in what at first glance appears to be heaped disarray.

The cemetery, like the village, must obey nature, making the most of what is on offer.

Ornate stone crosses and flat brick monuments rub shoulders with simple, unmarked urns, and then come the rows of shrines offering the dead shade from the glittering sun above.

These tombs cling to the cliff like a mirror image of Positano itself, death imitating life on the steep ground.

I step into the pool of the mausoleum and move through the ghostly rows, the curling letters of each name calling out to be read and acknowledged.

A lifetime of love, sorrow, secrets and lies reduced to a single line of text.

I avert my eyes and press on.

No one I loved is in here.

Stepping back out into the sun, I reach my final destination, a low walled path along the edge of the cemetery, from which I can see Positano in its entirety, spread out before me like a picture postcard.

It's exactly like the photograph in the brochure Spencer had waved in front of me before we were married.

I could still recall the thrill I'd felt gazing upon the riot of colour and the seemingly haphazard zigzag of buildings up the cliffside.

The villas and the hotels looked as though they were piled up from the beach, one atop the other, like a tower of child's playthings.

It doesn't look real.

I'd exclaimed.

He'd ruffled my hair then, in that way of his, a mix of adoration and condescension.

I promise it is.

You'll see.

And he was right.

It was real.

In the end, though perhaps it would have been better if it weren't for all of us.

A railing has been added to the low stone wall, discouraging people from leaning too far over as they take in the view.

It would be all too easy to become overawed by the dazzling blue of the sea stretching away in every direction.

Even those afraid of heights find it difficult to resist the law.

Here they call it Il requiamo del voto, the call of the void, the intermingling of thrill and dread as you approach the edge of and for a split second imagine what it might be like to jump.

I stepped back from the wall and turned my back on the aching beauty of it all.

I'll return to the villa now, this fresh image of Positano etched in my mind, layered over the countless others, all the way back to that very first, the glossy photograph in the brochure that started it all.

Later, I'll doze in the shade, dreaming, as I always do, of where it went wrong.

They say that the urge to jump affect affirms the desire to live.

Perhaps that's why I no longer feel either.

Sa.