From Madagascar to a UK Bookshelf: My Author Journey

I am holding the book now. It is heavier than I expected — not in a way I can explain physically, because the weight is ordinary enough, but in the way something is heavy when it contains a very long accumulation of time. There is a particular disorientation in that moment of first holding your own published novel. Part of you keeps waiting for the version of you who started this thing to arrive and see it. She is not here, of course. She became this version, the one standing at the kitchen counter on an ordinary Tuesday, turning the spine in the light. The distance between where this story began and where it has arrived — geographically, emotionally, temporally — is one of the stranger things I have tried to sit with. This is an attempt to account for that distance honestly.

Where It Started — Madagascar and the Stories I Grew Up With

Before I was a writer I was a listener. In Madagascar, storytelling is not a separate, literary activity — it is woven into conversation, into family gatherings, into the way history is kept and transmitted. The oral tradition is not a quaint remnant of a pre-literate past; it is a living technology for carrying meaning across generations. I absorbed stories before I had any formal understanding of what a story was.

What I did not absorb, because it did not exist in the books I had access to, was Madagascar on the page. The island appeared occasionally in nature documentaries — its extraordinary biodiversity made it a reliable subject — but as a place where people lived full, complex interior lives, in fiction that took those lives seriously, it was largely absent. I noticed this in the vague, un-analysed way that children notice absences: not as an injustice yet, simply as a fact of the landscape.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a note was made. Someone should write this. Someone should set a story here that is not about the lemurs and the baobabs, but about the people — the arguments and the silences, the way grief moves through a family, the particular texture of love as it is expressed in this place. For a long time, "someone" was anonymous in my thinking. It took me years to accept that she was me.

The Move to the UK and What It Did to My Writing

Displacement is a strange kind of education. When you leave a place, the things you took for granted — the specific light, the rhythms of speech, the food smells, the social codes so internalised they required no conscious thought — suddenly become visible. They become things you have to name, to yourself, because they are no longer the water you swim in. They are memories, and memories require language.

Moving to the UK sharpened my sense of Malagasy identity more than living in Madagascar had done. It sounds counterintuitive, but I think it is common among diaspora writers. Distance made me a more attentive witness to what I had come from, because I could no longer be passive about it.

The UK literary scene is, from an outsider's perspective, a simultaneously welcoming and opaque world. There are conversations happening about diversity and representation that feel genuinely important. There are also structural realities that have not caught up with those conversations. I was building a writing life while working full time in a demanding career. The reality of that was early mornings, weekends, voice notes recorded on the commute. Writing is not romantic in those conditions. It is logistical. You learn to find the hours and protect them.

Writing The Eucalyptus Tree — The Process

The story began with an image: a specific tree, a specific quality of afternoon light, a woman standing with her back to me. I did not know who she was yet. I did not know what she had lost or what she was about to discover. I only knew that she was in Madagascar, and that the landscape was not backdrop — it was participant.

The research phase was something I had not anticipated needing so urgently. I had grown up in Madagascar. And yet when I sat down to write its history with the specificity that literary fiction demands, I found myself reaching for sources beyond my own memory. I reconnected with the Malagasy language in a more conscious way than I had for years — reading, listening, noting the way certain ideas exist in Malagasy that require considerable circumlocution in English. I called family members and asked questions that must have seemed strange. I read historians and let the documented record complicate my recollections.

The first draft took longer than I had planned. It always does. What surprised me most was how emotionally demanding the writing was — not in a melodramatic way, but in the sustained, low-level way of carrying a world inside your head while your daily life continues alongside it. The revision process clarified what the book was actually about, which turned out to be related but not identical to what I had thought it was about when I started.

The Publishing Decision

The landscape for debut literary fiction in UK publishing is genuinely complex, particularly for writers from underrepresented backgrounds. There has been meaningful progress — more agents actively seeking diverse voices, more prizes specifically recognising this work, more noise about the issue at an industry level — and the structural realities that determine what gets acquired, distributed, and reviewed have shifted more slowly than the conversation suggests.

I thought carefully about the path I wanted to take. The traditional route has obvious appeal: the validation of a major publisher, the distribution infrastructure, the review coverage. It also has a particular set of trade-offs that felt significant for this project — around timelines, around creative control, around the specific ways a book about Madagascar might be packaged and positioned for a market that does not yet have many reference points for it.

I made the decision that gave me the directest relationship with my readers and the most control over how this story entered the world. Setting up the store and managing the physical book experience directly was more work than I had expected. It was also more satisfying than I had expected.

What Nobody Tells You About Publishing Your First Book

Marketing is at least fifty percent of the job, and it begins before the book is finished. This is the thing I wish someone had told me with real emphasis. By the time your book exists, the window for building the audience that will receive it is already partially behind you. Your network — the people who already know you, who are interested in what you think, who will share something because they trust you — is your first and most important audience.

Imposter syndrome, I can confirm, does not disappear when the book becomes real. If anything, it shifts shape. Before publication, the fear is that you will be exposed as not good enough. After, it becomes something stranger: a difficulty believing the thing actually happened, a waiting for someone to point out a fundamental error in the proceedings.

The difference between done and perfect is the difference between a book that exists and one that does not. I revised The Eucalyptus Tree to the point where I could say, honestly, that I had given it everything I had at this stage of my development as a writer. That is the only version of done available to anyone.

Every Voice That Gets Through Makes the Next One Easier

I believe this with some conviction. The published Malagasy voice in English-language literary fiction is rare enough that its existence changes something — not dramatically, but structurally. It shifts what editors have seen, what readers have encountered, what other writers from similar backgrounds believe is possible for them. That is not grandiosity on my part. It is the mechanism by which literary culture actually changes: one book at a time, each one making slightly more space than it found.

If you are reading this from a background similar to mine — Malagasy, Francophone African, from a diaspora whose stories have not yet found consistent space in British publishing — I want you to know that the difficulty is real and the path is navigable. There are organisations worth knowing about, like Spread the Word, which supports London-based writers and has some of the most useful development resources available for emerging authors navigating exactly this terrain.

And if you are reading this simply because you are curious about the book, or about the world it came from, I am glad you are here. Come and find The Eucalyptus Tree at the store on my website. It is the best version of something I have been trying to say for a very long time.