Gorgeous Chloe is now 19, and takes it upon herself to set Alice up with Jack, which would be great except Jack’s dreaming of Chloe… Chloe’s mother Belinda, aged 50, wistfully reflects how much better at sex she is now than when she was young, but she’d never be unfaithful to her husband Tom. So when she discovers he’s having an affair she’s more than angry….

Read the most recent Secret Intensity of Everyday Life review in The Observer

‘It’s a reunion of sorts, but you’d never guess they ever had anything in common to see them now. Nick: Securities Trader for Goldman Sachs and collector of art. Humphrey: an artist with ethics and a cheque he’s not sure he should cash. Christine: the beautiful girl they both loved. All together again, in Nick’s Elizabethan mansion, getting ready to celebrate the unveiling of a new sculpture.

But under the surface Humphrey is angry. Angry in the same way that the whole world is angry, angry about how people like Nick seem to have got away with causing a financial meltdown that affected everyone, but still manage to bank their bonuses.’

My first experience of pornography came at the age of nine. As a day boy at a mostly-boarding prep school I was secretly commissioned by a boarder to buy him a copy of the News of the World, so he could look at the semi-naked women. I couldn’t see the point myself. A few years later, now myself at boarding school, I was allowed to look at a friend’s pack of five black-and-white photographs sent in a plain envelope from Amsterdam. I was overwhelmed.

Today any teenager can see full-colour full-action hardcore video porn for nothing at any time they desire. One survey claims that by the age of eighteen, 93% of boys and 62% of girls have watched internet porn at least once. I don’t blame them. If I’d had their access I’d have been glued to the screen.

But I also remember other longings from my teenage years, which were just as powerful. The hunger to be loved, and the desperate need to be approved in my uncertain maleness. These longings were partly sexual, but they were also intensely emotional. When at last I had sex for the first time, with my first ever girlfriend, who I adored beyond all reason, the whole experience was one of glory and wonder. True, a purist with a stopwatch could have clocked my performance at well under fifteen seconds, but the glory and the wonder is with me still.

In more recent years, now as a writer of books for children and teenagers, I found myself looking back on those days with affection. My own children, it seemed to me, could never know such innocence, such ignorance, such excitement. But then I thought: why not? Are they so very different? Just because they can look at sexual acts I could barely imagine at their age, does it mean anything else has changed?

When I was in my teens I knew all about my own fears and longings, all of which revolved round girls; but I knew nothing about girls. It seemed to me that they had all the power – to grant me status, joy, respite for my passions – while I had none. No source of information told me otherwise. I learned the technicalities of sex in the usual muddled ways. I followed the love affairs of characters in books and films. But nothing really connected the two. There was nothing that told the story of love and sex, and how they affect each other, for better and worse.

I think there’s still nothing today.

For all the sex-saturation of our present world, the stories on offer remain segregated. They’re either romantic or they’re pornographic. The victory of pornography is so total that writers and film makers are afraid to include explicit sex in their stories lest they’re branded pornographers. So the battle is lost. Sensitive, intelligent, truth-telling writers – I aspire to be one such – abandon the field to talentless exploiters. As a result a generation is growing up in the belief that porn is all there is of sex; that the ritualised sequences of suck, lick and poke are how it’s done, and are all that’s to be experienced.

My other books for young people are in the end all about love. I resolved that in my new book I would take the next step, and explore the world of love and sex. Rich and Mad is my attempt to tell girls what boys are feeling, and to tell boys what girls are feeling – boys like the boy I once was. It’s my attempt to be truthful about sexual fears and longings. And it’s my attempt to convey the glory and the wonder I felt all those years ago.

One reviewer has called it ‘definitely national-curriculum-approved sex within a loving relationship’, which is true, but makes it sound like an instruction manual. My book makes no claim to any authoritative status. It’s not based on statistical research. It’s a story, made up the way all writers make up stories, out of their own lives and observations. It’s meant to be truthful the way fiction can be truthful, in that readers respond, Yes, I’ve felt that way too. The book is only just published, so I have yet to learn whether I’m right.

The story ends with an account of my characters, Rich and Maddy, having sex for the first time. I have been warned that such explicitness will be offensive to some, perhaps to many, and that teachers and librarians will feel unable to make the book available to their young charges. We shall see. I for one refuse to leave all depictions of sex to the pornographers.

April 9 2010

Why did I write Rich and Mad?

Reviews

Falling in love for the first time is also the primary theme of William Nicholson’s compelling and funny Rich and Mad, now out in paperback. An astonishingly versatile author, who has written plays and screenplays (Shadowlands and Gladiator among them), as well as adult fiction, Nicholson began writing for children a few years ago and this is his first novel for young adults. I would definitely place it at the adult end of the spectrum, since there is plenty of graphic sex and adisturbing subplot concerning violence against women. But within that it is a tender, moving, unexpected and intelligent take on family life, sibling relationships, mid-life angst and, above all, first love and first sex, which examines why we always want what we can’t have and don’t want what is there for the taking. The central characters are wonderfully believable and in Rich, Nicholson has created a lovable, geeky antihero who worships Larkin and gets his ideas about love from a battered copy of The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm’s 70s classic on human behaviour, which his friends suspect is a sex manual. He feels so real you suspect he might well be based on the author’s young self. Alone among his peers, Rich refuses to have a laptop or a phone, reasoning that anyone who really wants to talk to him will actually come and find him. That’s what I call brave.

Lisa O’Kelly, The Observer, April 4 2010

WITH screen credits for blockbusters such as Gladiator and First Knight, William Nicholson must be a writer well used to the term ‘epic’. For the rest of us, perhaps, the closest we can come in real life are those all-consuming feelings of falling in love for the first time, and fortunately Nicholson’s on hand to guide readers on this equally heroic journey. One of the most striking aspects of Rich and Mad (Egmont, 6.99), however, is the lack of histrionics, special effects or CGI set-pieces. Rich Ross and Maddy Fisher are pretty average 17-year-olds and their quest for love is gently witty and moving, never over-blown or gushing. Undoubtedly the final ten pages of the 440-page novel are what everybody will talk about: first love naturally leads to first sex. Yet Nicholson wants to tell the full story of an epic teenage adventure and robbing the audience of this particular climax would surely feel dishonest.

Keith Gray, The Scotsman, April 5 2010

Writers rarely stray as far from their territory as WILLIAM NICHOLSON has in RICH AND MAD (Egmont, £6.99). To go from fantasy writing – he is best known for his Wind on Fire trilogy – to teen fiction is tantamount to dating outside your species. But for something that is against the laws of nature, Nicholson has done a fine job. He has spoken of his concern about the “pornification” of teenage sexuality and this novel is an attempt to redress the balance, but anyone hoping for a literary crusade in favour of abstention will be disappointed. Maddy’s mission to fall in love and understand sex starts with her and a friend watching porn, a woman with bunny ears fellating a headless man “…it was like a little god wanting to be worshipped. On and on with the worshipping, bowing before it, kissing it, on and on. I wanted to hit it with a spoon…”. Nicholson is brilliant on the anxieties and awkwardness of sex, and when Maddy and Rich finally realise their destiny, after both suffering the bitter humiliation of unrequited love, their consummation is realistically short but sweet. But it’s definitely national-curriculum-approved “sex within a loving relationship”. Less realistic is the instant repair job done on Maddy’s parents’ broken marriage, and Rich’s reliance on The Art of Loving – romantic heroes should not read self-help books. (Age: 13+)

Dinah Hall, Sunday Telegraph, April 4 2010

“I hate school! I hate ratings! I won’t reach higher! I won’t strive harder! I won’t make tomorrow better than today!” In the walled city of Aramanth, exams are everything — not only for children, but for whole families. When Kestrel Hath dares to rebel, the Chief Examiner humiliates her father and sentences the family to the harshest punishment. Desperate to save them, Kestrel discovers that life in Aramanth was once different — and if she can find the secret of the Wind Singer, maybe life can change for the better once more. So she and her twin brother, Bowman, set out on a terrifying journey — to the true source of the evil that grips Aramanth…First volume of The Wind on Fire trilogy
Smarties Gold Award 2000, Blue Peter Book of the Year 2001

This is the second volume of The Wind on Fire Trilogy.

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This is the final volume of The Wind on Fire Trilogy.

Each decision she takes has a ripple effect on her husband, her children, and all those she comes into contact with. In short chapter after short chapter we follow the chain of human interactions, shifting each time to a new viewpoint, discovering that our characters know nothing of what’s going on inside each other. They misread each other, fail to notice the dramas being played out before them, absorbed as they are in their own intense inner lives. Over six short days in Sussex we watch a dozen lives collide and transform each other, without any of the protagonists realising the true impact of their words and actions.

These are ordinary middle-class people, getting on with unremarkable lives. But for each one their life is a passionate drama in which they take the lead part. Running through each story is the question: how happy can I expect to be? Is what I’ve got enough? Am I leading the life I meant to live?

Observer Article

Telegraph Article

But these are dangerous times. Secret enemies have sworn to destroy Anacrea. In the imperial city of Radiance, a city ruled by priests where human sacrifices are thrown to their death every evening, the plans to attack the Nom are far advanced. Seeker, Morning Star and the Wildman become caught up in the race to save the god of the Nomana from destruction, and find that they may have to pay with their own lives.

Book Reviews

In this gripping searching novel of ideas, art and literature, William Nicholson weaves an intricate tale of suspense as he explores what it is men and women really want from each other.

“He has nowhere to go. So he goes there.”

Thus begins a novel that is part spy story, part philosophical treatise, one that sweeps the reader along. Hypnotic, intellectually challenging, with all the pace and thrust of a thriller.

Reviews
“A novel I would dearly love to have written… Exciting, funny, wise, and beautifully written…
Nicholson has to my mind established himself with this first work of adult fiction as one of the best novelists around.”
Piers Paul Read, The Spectator

“Buttock-clenching thriller.”
Tatler

“It is thrilling in every sense, but it is also hypnotic, fast-moving, and intellectually challenging and, as it twists and turns, leaving you confused, uncertain, even uncomfortable, and yet utterly hooked. A philosophical master class, it is quite staggeringly good.”
Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

“Like a ratings-grabbing episode of Holidays from Hell… A thought-provoking testament.”
Andrea Henry, Sunday Mirror

“Nothing prepares you for the journey you undertake while reading this incredible thought-provoking novel.”
Waterstones Books Quarterly

“Alongside the action, you have a continual debate over ideas about as the blurb puts it the meaning of life. This is a rare book that does precisely what it says on the tin. This makes it a very un-English novel. There is nothing parochial or narrow about it. It puts you in mind more of a Camus or a Pushkin…. You turn the pages as your mind turns in circles following the mental games going on. It’s a challenge as well as a pleasure, but The Society of Others is a novel that demands attention.”
Peter Stanford, The Catholic Herald

The three are about to discover the secret behind the Nomana. But not before they realise their enemies are closer than they think…

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