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Dorothy Koomson On Nosey Neighbours, Not Writing About The Pandemic & Writing As A Career

Dorothy Koomson is one of the UK’s bestselling authors with over two million copies sold. Known as the ‘Queen of the Big Reveal’, she returns with the thriller I Know What You’ve Done. A Brighton neighbourhood is thrown into chaos when Priscilla appears near-death on Rae’s doorstep. Revealing that she knows her attacker and thrusting a diary of everyone’s secrets into Rae’s hands, Rae must sift through the inner lives of her neighbours to track down who left Priscilla fighting for her life. It asks how far we will go to protect our secrets and what we’re all capable of.

When the idea came to her, Koomson was sick in bed. Realising she had an uninhibited view of her street and her neighbours’ houses, a thought struck her: what if she saw something she shouldn't? The pandemic changed our relationships with our neighbours. Not long after the clapping faded and the government encouraged us to snitch on each other, things took a weird turn. “I think a lot of us became really nosy and judgemental,” says Koomson. “Usually I wouldn’t care what my neighbours are doing. Suddenly I became so obsessed.”

“What if I saw somebody was in someone’s house and they shouldn’t be there?” she says. “And then I thought, what if someone tries to kill you because of it?”