Highlights from Wednesday in Wellington

• Walking along the waterfront watching the sun rise
• Emily Perkins reading from her novel in progress
• Catching up with "old" colleagues from various places
• Watching Audrey Niffenegger smile her way through a huge signing queue
• The fig icecream

Sarah Waters has written 3 novels set in Victorian times and 2 set in postwar Britain. She described The Little stranger as exploring tensions, social, cultural and personal. She likes to surprise her readers but also wants the story to be intelligent, gripping and emotionally true. Her historical settings are not meant to recreate the past but to look at it with fresh eyes. That is quite different to Sarah Dunant's approach. The Little stranger is her most recent book and was shortlisted for the Booker prize but I prefer Night watch.

Audrey Niffenegger is an author, an illustrator and a teacher and a very interesting person to listen to. She described her books as extremist but appeared to be a gentle, bashful person. Her fearful symmetry is a twenty first century take on a nineteenth century novel and took a long time to research. She even became a tour guide at Highgate Cemetry in order to understand how to write it into the story. The Time traveler's wife was a huge success but she has not and will not see the movie as she holds her own pictures in her mind. She did work very hard constructing the story so that the "rate of reveal" was just enough to keep the action rolling along. She thinks fiction is unlimited in what it can offer the reader but it must still be recognisable with a certain amount of reality.