Guest Post: A century of holidays in a single novel

Getting Away, the third and most anticipated novel by Costa-shortlisted author Kate Sawyer will be published in a week’s time on 3 July. Here she shares her reflections on a story that’s all about holidays - and that you’ll want to put straight into your suitcase!

Costa-shortlisted author, Kate Sawyer

My third novel, Getting Away, invites you to join the Smith family as they visit over twenty-five holiday destinations - from the beaches of Greece and Blackpool, to the streets of New York and Venice - as their lives, loves and secrets unfold over the course of almost a century of holidays.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the idea for Getting Away, came to me when I was on a family holiday myself.

All holidays are significant, but that one felt especially so. It was our first holiday abroad after the pandemic, and the first since my sisters and I had become parents. That meant that, of the three generations of family that travelled together, for the first time we weren’t the youngest. And although we’d all holidayed without her on our various solo travels, it was the first time that my grandmother, who was in her centenary year, hadn’t accompanied us when the family all travelled together.

As it so often the case for me, I was in the water when I first found myself turning over the idea that would become central to my third novel. I left the book I was reading - The Light Years - on my sunbed and escaped the intensity of the late-afternoon sun by jumping into the pool. I swam a few leisurely lengths and, as I did so, found myself considering a family saga centred not around a house or a home - as my second novel This Family and the one I had just reluctantly left at the side of the pool were - but completely away from it. What might it look like if a family were on holiday, for example? And would it be possible to tell the story of one family, spanning many years, not in a series of books - as Howard so brilliantly did with her Cazalets - but in a single novel?

Like any good idea, for the rest of that holiday, it wouldn’t leave me alone. I shook a bottle of Orangina to share it with my daughter and thought of how my grandfather had done the same for me thirty-five years earlier. We stopped at a roadside aire for a picnic and my mum reminisced about the first time she’d driven through France. It felt as though our family history was somehow concertinaed into every moment, something that was only amplified by witnessing my daughter and her infant cousins experiencing and exploring a new country and culture.

When I got home, I started a bit of research and began to sketch out a few ideas: I wrote down all the places that I had visited or lived in and started to develop some characters by writing vignettes set in environments drawn from my own experiences. I had just discovered the 1938 Holidays with Pay Act, which gave the working class in the UK the right to some paid holiday for the first time and decided that would be as good a place to start my novel as any, when my incredible nana died, at the extraordinary age of 101.

It was some months before I returned to my desk. But when I did, I came with an even stronger sense of what I wanted to explore in Getting Away. I started to write in earnest and soon found that it was the book’s characters that were leading my journey. Because, for all the opportunities that family saga gives a writer for social commentary, what makes it so fulfilling to write is the canvas it presents to explore the subtle interweaving of relationships over many years. The roots of this novel and the broad experiences of how holidaying has evolved over the decades are drawn from personal and family experiences, but these characters and their specific exploits are all born from my imagination.

Getting Away will be in bookshops from 3 July 2025. Pop to your local bookshop on the day or pre-order here!