Before I Say Goodbye

1. I once rubbed shoulders with Brad Pitt. Yes, I literally rubbed my shoulder against his as he passed me in a VIP room at the premiere of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch. I managed to get into the VIP room because I was working in PR after getting my English degree at Royal Holloway, University of London. I live about a 40 minute train ride north of London in the UK. 2. I got attacked by a kangaroo. Okay, ‘attacked’ might be a bit of an exaggeration. It tried to jump on my back while I was in Australia. Why was I in Australia? I was writing an article for the travel magazine I edited, a job I got after impulsively quitting PR one day. Sure, I loved the PR world, especially all the parties I attended while sipping champagne and eating all the canapés the stick-thin models bypassed. But I’d always dreamed of writing so quit my job to retrain as a journalist. 3. I wrote my first novel The Atlas of Us (Before I Say Goodbye in the US) after doing a short Open University course. That course was the OU’s Starting Writing Fiction course (now offered for free here), which I did while working for the university in the department responsible for co-producing popular series with the BBC such as Frozen Planet and Coast. I then went on to work in the OU’s social media team before leaving all that behind to pursue writing full-time! 4. I love dogs. My first dog was a one-eyed Jack Russell called Archie. He has a starring role in The Atlas of Us, though when he got a copy of the novel, he didn’t seem too bothered. A sniff, a huff then back to chewing his paw. He sadly passed away but now we have Bronte, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel who rules the roost in my house alongside my daughter Scarlett. In fact, those two are both King and Queen of the Buchanan household, me and my husband their humble servants. ​ 5. I'm addicted to lip salve. It’s been an addiction of mine since childhood. I own about a hundred different lip salves but can never seem to find one when I desperately need to. One of my friends believes this addiction suggests psychotic tendencies. I disagree. But who knows, one day I might write a novel about a lip salve-addicted serial killer...

Melody trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama, where she won the James Bridie Gold Medal for Acting in 2009, and was a Spotlight Prize nominee in that same year. For her performance as the female lead, alongside Mark Rylance, in Farinelli & the King, she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Olivier Awards 2016 and won the Clarence Derwent Award 2016. She has appeared in an episode of BBC’s Call The Midwife.

Maggie is a British actress and voice artist, born in York, raised in Cyprus and she is fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and Greek – giving her a wealth of accents to help bring characters to life. She began her career in forces radio, working later for the BBC and independent stations. Maggie has narrated over a hundred audiobooks and won an AudioFile Earphones award for her reading of Blood Red Horse by K.M. Grant.