'The Ferryman' guides its author to world of literary success

The Ferryman by Claire McFall. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Claire McFall says she is astonished by how well the Chinese version of her book The Ferryman has done in China; In January nearly 1 million copies had been sold. In Scotland, the figure was about 10,000, which she regards as excellent, given how small Scotland is.

"It's incredible that the book is so popular in China, but the idea carried in the novel is universal. People love stories about love and being rewarded for being determined. So even though there seems to be much cultural difference between China and the UK, underneath it's the same."

In January McFall was in China to sign a contract giving a Chinese company film rights to the novel. The book is about the journey of a 15-year-old girl, Dylan, led by her "ferryman", Tristan, after she dies in a train accident. Dylan has to traverse a wasteland full of scary demons before can she reach the place where her soul can find rest.

"I want Chinese audiences to see the bleak, harsh but meanwhile gorgeous wasteland, and meanwhile I want to see how Chinese people present the wasteland and add to their concept about it," McFall says.

As a teacher in Scotland, she says, she had to spend an hour and 50 minutes driving through a wasteland as she traveled to and from school.

One day in a dream she jumped on a crowded train, and in the dream when she woke she found everybody else was gone, so after she woke up in reality she wrote down the dream in her notebook, and developed it into a book. On her way between home and school, she would spend the driving time making up what happened in the story, and in three months she finished the novel.

By the time The Ferryman was published in Britain in 2013 she had finished nine stories and her agent chose this one. However, in the first draft, McFall created a sad ending: the hero and heroine went into two different worlds, and it was suggested that she change the ending to a happy one, both of them returning to reality as human beings.