Nicky Pellegrino

“I got quite emotional when I started getting emails from readers to say they had enjoyed Tiny Pieces of Us…”

Of all my books it’s the one I felt most worried about releasing into the world. I didn’t want to let down the organ recipients and donor families I’d spoken to in my research for the novel, or my readers.

Ideas are everywhere when you’re a writer. I have so many of them that I don’t have time to turn into stories. But this one — sparked by something a friend told me about a family member — stayed in my head and insisted on being written. 

Tiny Pieces of Us is the story of a group of people who have had organ transplants and share the same donor. A novel like this requires an enormous amount of research. I needed to get the medical details right and to accurately reflect the experience of being seriously ill and having a transplant. It affects so many things about day-to-day life that you would never imagine. Over the course of my research, I formed connections, in particular with a heart transplant patient who was incredibly generous about answering my endless questions. There were also doctors and people involved in donor family and recipient support who helped me form the landscape of the story. 

I work with publishers Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand, Hachette Australia, and also with a team at Orion in the UK. This book was particularly challenging through the editing process – it went to three drafts. You might think, as it’s my twelfth novel, I’d get it right first time but no, the fixing process is always crucial and torturous. It’s the part I find most difficult. 

People think I’m prolific but to write a 100,000 word novel means huge amounts of time sitting alone in a room in front a computer. Even when I’m not in that room, often I’m inside my own head mulling over stories and characters. Mostly, writing is a very solitary challenge so I feel very strongly about the preservation of my creative rights, which give me the opportunity to make some income — if not an actual living — from the work I produce as an author. Readers tell me they love my books, and mostly I love writing them, but since commercial fiction doesn’t tend to qualify for bursaries and residencies, I’m reliant on what I can earn from royalties to fund the time spent working on them.

When international rights to my books are sold and the stories I’ve created are published in other countries, this forms an important part of the royalty equation for me. And it’s wonderful to know that the stories I write reach people all over the world. I love hearing from readers in far-flung places, places that I’ll most likely never travel to and it’s pretty cool receiving foreign language editions of my work. I’ve kept a copy of each and every one.”

Nicky Pellegrino is the best-selling author of twelve novels.