Roz Nay is an award-winning author with a rich and diverse background who warmly self-describes as “a British-Australian-Canadian who works in a courthouse and is married to a gravedigger”. Nay’s latest thriller, The Offing (Penguin Random House Canada, 2024), is deeply personal and “if you can believe it”, she describes it as “almost entirely autobiographical. I say almost because when I took the journey, there was a lot less murder,” she smiles.
The story is this: at 28 years of age, she embarked on a solo backpacking adventure around Australia, which included crewing on a yacht owned by a father, his daughter, and their cat: “I sailed off into the tropical heat with two other backpackers I’d never met before.” Nor was this a unique event: “I spent a lot of my twenties travelling the world, and always kept notes in a travel journal. When I think about it now, I was saving little details in a very ‘writerly’ way – gestures, snippets of dialogue, an image or metaphor.” And she’s gone on to use almost all of these tidbits in her travel thrillers – first in The Hunted and, now in The Offing.” So when she devised the premise for The Offing, the writing process focused a lot on remembering those months spent aboard, and “tweaking them into a way scarier story”.
The thriller is set primarily in the waters around Australia. The story follows Ivy and her best friend Regan, who are two young American women embarking on a month-long trip to Australia as an escape for Ivy from a predatory ex-lover. They take jobs as crew members on a small yacht sailed by a doting father and his troubled daughter. Along with one other handsome crew member, they set off north into tropical waters. However, the relaxing getaway soon turns foreboding. The close quarters of the boat create a creeping, claustrophobic atmosphere, in which tensions rise as secrets from the characters’ pasts threaten to catch up with them. Ths fast-paced, twisty thriller explores the dangers that can lurk beneath seemingly idyllic surfaces.
The Offing delves into themes like female friendship, parent-child relationships, coercion, trust, sociopathy, and violence against women. Reflecting on these themes, Nay deems the book a “cautionary tale”. With a wry smile, she admits,“In quiet moments, I’ve questioned whether I’m writing stories like these to warn my children not to make the terrible choices of their mother!” On a more serious note, she acknowledges the continued advance of female independence and power since her youth, but “whilst that’s true–women are taking charge of their own power” she is distressed by how “the statistics of who is at threat in society still persist. Women are still preyed upon more than men, and so I wanted to write a book that highlights the gaps and imbalances that still exist, and the ways in which we can fight to close them.”
Among the intriguing cast of characters in The Offing are the two college friends Ivy and Regan, the father Christopher and his daughter who are on the run, and a sinister college professor. Nay particularly enjoyed writing Christopher because “there are a lot of layers to him, and since his story needs to be teased out little by little, he presented most of the challenges structurally – as well as providing most of the plot accelerators, when he speaks to the police.” And for the curious, she clarifies that while Christopher was inspired by the skipper from her own boat journey, the character was largely created to fit his role in the narrative.
For Nay, the “real challenge” was maintaining excitement and suspense while developing these characters within a coherent story. It was how to create “a page-turning thriller full of evil and vulnerability, without actually allowing the girls to see too much of it! I couldn’t make the boat too scary, or they’d simply get off.” To manage this, she cleverly uses a dual timeline and police transcripts to build dread and menace. As a result, “very quickly, readers will figure out that the world of the boat, whilst present tense, is actually happening about 8 days ago. And that way, readers get the dramatic irony of knowing more about the danger than the girls do.” At the same time, thrillers hinge on characters making bad choices, or being flawed, or believing they know each other better than they really do, or that they’re invincible in ways they’re really not. “Ivy and Regan are carefully honed so that there are gaps in their friendship that I could exploit for extra tension.”
Nay unequivocally enjoyed the experience of writing The Offing, and hopes that shines through in its pages. And she hopes that readers take away a sense of the enduring strength of fierce female friendship: “Ivy and Regan have their ups and downs, but when they have to fight to the death for each other, they’re ready. I love that about them.”
At the close of our conversation, Nay shares the best advice that she ever received about writing: “Put blinders on, stay in your lane, and set your own standards of success.” This guidance has served her well because experience has taught her that the writing industry is tough, and it is too easy to compare yourself to others: “What I’ve learned is that unless you set your own finish line and congratulate yourself for crossing it, you’ll never feel like you’ve arrived.”
Nay has clearly not just arrived: she’s made herself right at home. The Offing is an unputdownable, edge-of-your-seat read that offers readers a thrilling ride filled with suspense, complex characters, and contemporary concerns that will keep them glued to its pages, eager to race to the final revelation.
© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2024
