Canadian Bestselling Author Lesley Crewe has US Debut in 'Recipe for a Good Life'

Canadian bestselling author, Lesley Crewe, joins us to discuss her heart-warming, new novel, Recipe for a Good Life. Set in 1955, Recipe for a Good Life follows the life of Kitty, a mystery novelist living in Montreal, Canada, who is suffering from writer’s block and decides she is done writing any more detective novels. This news sends her publishers into a frenzy and as a result, they persuade her to retreat to the quiet island town of Cape Breton in hopes of inspiring her to create her next novel. While there, she meets an eclectic group of friends who provide her with the solace and comfort she didn’t know she needed. For Crewe, who writes both contemporary and historical fiction novels, she found that setting her story in 1955 in Cape Breton brought some ease into her storytelling. She remarked, “Sometimes the world is pretty scary… and I think I enjoy going back to a time that seemed a little simpler. Maybe it wasn’t, but it seemed like it was.” In addition, having Kitty move to Cape Breton was nostalgic for Crewe, as it was the place her mother grew up and where Crewe spent her childhood summers. “I knew I was going to live there. I just loved it. I mean, for a city kid to be on the beach for two months with no shoes on, I thought it was marvelous!”

Just as in Recipe for a Good Life, Crewe’s novels often center around family and friendships. “My stories are basically about… what makes the world go around. I mean, some of my books have romance in them… [but] they’re certainly not romance kind of novels or anything like that. Some of them don’t have romance at all. It’s just basically a woman growing up in some circumstances and trying to get through her life kind of thing. So, they’re all different and they all take place in different communities…” Additionally, it was also important for Crewe to create characters who were relatable, ones that her readers could see themselves in. “I find that our hearts are the same, doesn’t matter what country you live in… we all have the same feelings, we all go through the same things… when readers read these books, they recognize themselves, and they recognize their families and they like knowing that other families are exactly the way yours are. We all deal with the same kinds of issues… maybe people can’t write them down, but they sure do recognize it when they read it. ”

As for her writing process, Crewe begins only with a title in mind. “…that’s my beacon. That’s my little, kind of, nugget, my shining light, that I can go back to… because when you write for days and days and days, you can go off course very easily. So I have to keep remembering the title to bring me back to where I started, but [it’s] the characters that tell me what’s going to happen. I have a vague idea of what the story might be about, but I never know how it’s going to end… sometimes the best characters come in halfway through a story and I never thought of them… “