Janet Hancock

Find Janet
on table number 57
at the summer
Oxford Indie Book Fair
on 13-July 2025

See home page for details, map and more.

I grew up surrounded by books. My mother used to recall that when I was three I cried tears of frustration, because ‘I will never be able to read.’ I did learn, before I started school. When I was about nine, I was given a copy of Captain Marryat’s Children of the New Forest, set in the English Civil War. It introduced me to The Past, where people dressed differently, ate different food, lived in strange-looking houses, but were still individuals like us with good and bad times.

This caught my interest. At the grammar school, I had an inspirational history teacher. The subject lived; his story. We were there, marching, fighting, signing treaties, existing.

In my 20s and 30s, I devoured novels by writers we hear little of today – Catherine Gavin, Catherine Gaskin, Ann Bridge – about ordinary fictional characters, often in central or eastern Europe, during the two decades between the two world wars, a time of revolutions and social change. I determined I would write such a book, but the rest of life got in the way.

When I did start writing, it was with short stories, but I wanted a big canvas for a novel. I found it when I came across a newspaper snippet about an unnamed Englishwoman who was caught up in the 1917 Russian revolution in Baku. Where was Baku? I love maps and was fascinated to find that the Russian Empire stretched as far south as the Caspian Sea.

Immediate questions about this Englishwoman demanded answers: who was she? How did she come to be in Baku? If she had to leave, how and in which direction would she travel? I fictionalised her into one of the protagonists of my first novel Beyond the Samovar. In spite of the Baku connection, my second novel The West in Her Eyes stands separately. It is a tale of exile, ambition and love in a fictional, oil-rich, Russian family during the decade after the 1917 revolution. They have lost everything and leave with a bundle each.

More maps, and research, which I also love. While I was editing the book, I realised that in the course of a century very little has changed. We still have migrations of people hoping to find sanctuary, always the outsider.

I write in my study upstairs, disappear into the world and time of the book-in-progress, although people-watching out of the window at the small car park opposite can be a distraction, sometimes a revelation.

Both books will be on sale at the Book Fair. Come and find me and have a chat.