Author Francesca Segal found the perfect escape during lockdown

In the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, author Francesca Segal was an “empty vessel”, not really thinking, reading or writing properly.

At one point, she was taking “one of those Covid walks where I was looping round and round around my house – the same pavement, crossing the road like a crazy person when someone was coming towards me.” Then she got a call from her editor, asking how she was and whether she was working on anything.

After learning that there wasn’t anything in the pipeline, the editor encouraged Francesca to be ambitious and this got the author thinking again. She began plotting her escape from the difficulties of lockdown.

While she could not travel, the novelist created Tuga, a fictional tropical island to which she could disappear. “I really suddenly had this lightbulb moment and understood that writing fiction means that you can create the world that you inhabit,” she says. “I could go anywhere I wanted.” She describes this as a “magic portal”, something we all could have done with at that time.

That magic portal took Francesca to the world’s remotest island – she even plotted the longitude and latitude of Tuga whilst creating it. From there, she tells loves stories, highlights issues around female healthcare and talks a lot about tortoises. She has even gone behind the scenes at London Zoo, meeting with experts to make sure that fake reptiles placed on Tuga are realistic and met with the world expert in giant tortoises in Cambridge.

There are also subtle but important Jewish themes throughout the work too – the Island features people with Sephardic roots, a moshav and an etrog. However, one thing was central: “It was really important to me to create somewhere that was going to be joy-giving and a really deliberate radical reaching for and leaning into joy.”

The Tuga novels are a trilogy. The first, Welcome to Glorious Tuga, introduces the reader to vet Charlotte Walker and the rest of the cast of characters, of which the island is undoubtedly one. Book two, Island Calling, released in June, moves things forward as the story of Dr Walker, her family and new friends from the island continues.

As well as simply wanting to focus on something bright during miserable and disorientating times, there was another reason Francesca built the small world of Tuga. “I’ve always been really fascinated by community,” she explains. “I’m so interested in people living collectivist, connected lives together.”

She adds that “once you have the island, that kind of shapes the character of the people who live there. So, the clearer the island became, to me, the clearer the kind of people became who would live there”.

You can’t help but wonder whether growing up in the close-knit north-west London Jewish world effected how Francesca writes about community. “I’m probably shaped by a fascination with community and all the positive – the beauty and the support of that, and also the inherent comedy and claustrophobia and gossip,” she concedes, while also admitting to loving gossip. (Don’t we all?!)

The influence of living in a close community is highlighted by Francesca’s sister and baby niece unexpectedly walking into the coffee shop where we were meeting, just before we start our conversation. It’s the type of thing that might have happened in Betsey’s café on Tuga!

While Francesca Segal is successful in her own right, it’s impossible not to ask her about her father Erich, the great author (best known for Love Story) and classicist who passed away in January 2010. She says the impact of her polymath parent was “incalculable”. She explains that “one of the greatest gifts of having a parent who does the creative work you aspire to is just the gift of seeing that it’s possible.” She adds:

“I don’t think anyone can underestimate the power of having a parent who pays the gas bill by writing fiction, because it makes you feel like it’s a serious profession.”

Francesca describes growing up in a home that was a “library” and debating the etymology of words over meals. “The only reason you were ever allowed to leave the dinner table in the middle of a meal was to check the etymology or the definition of a word,” she recalls, before conceding “my dad was always right.”

Becoming an author was something of an inevitability after growing up in such an environment. “I have never wanted to do or be anything else,” she says.

Francesca had written two novels and a memoir before landing on Tuga. The latest work is fun, enjoyable escapism, with plenty of serious points woven in. Being more of a thriller kind of girl, the books are not the normal type of fiction I read. However, at the end of long, tiring days, I found myself keen to return to Tuga. I wanted to be overcome by its humidity, its politics and its quirks. I wanted to disappear into its seclusion. Frankly, I wanted to catch up on the latest gossip.

The pandemic might be over, but the world remains a disorientating and often depressing place. The first two books of the Tuga trilogy serve as a great way to step away from it all and are a perfect summer read.

Because sometimes we all need to sail away, if only for a little while.

Welcome to Glorius Tuga (£5.48, paperback) and Island Calling (£12.99, hardback) are published by Chatto & Windus