Harry Whittaker wrote the final installment in the Seven Sisters series under enormous pressure. Lucinda Riley, who died of cancer two years ago, is currently one of Finland’s best-selling authors.
The eighth part was supposed to tell the story of Papa Salt, the mysterious adoptive father of the sisters, and weave together the plot of the entire series.
The *Seven Sisters* series has been a huge success. All in all, 1.2 million copies of Lucinda Riley’s books have been sold in Finland. Worldwide sales are more than 30 million copies.
Readers of the *Seven Sisters* series all over the world were thirsting for the last part, which would reveal everything.
So it’s no wonder Harry Whittaker’s hands were sweating when he started his writing career. The pressures were so hard that you couldn’t even think about them.
– If I had stopped to be horrified by the situation, I would have just burst into tears. So I decided to write a novel for just one person, my mother.
The schedule was crazy. Harry Whittaker started writing in October 2021, a few months after his mother’s death. He was given a year to finish writing the novel.
One could imagine that writing in the midst of grief would be difficult, if not impossible. Writing Whittaker helped though.
– Writing was a blessing. I was able to keep my mother close to me because I was constantly having internal conversations with her. I was able to keep him alive in my mind.
It was only after the writing contract that sadness struck.
– It was a dark time. I no longer had contact with him, recalls Whittaker while visiting Helsinki at the book fair.
There were no notes
Harry Whittaker succeeded in what his mother had asked him to do. He wrote the more than 800-page novel *Atlas, the story of Papa Salt* (Fin. Hilkka and Tuukka Pekkanen).
However, it was not easy.
First, Harry Whittaker had never written a novel before. He had only written children’s books together with his mother. Second, there was no draft script or notes of any kind for *Atlas*.
The only guidelines were the 30 strips Lucinda Riley had written years ago for a Hollywood production company for a TV series about the sisters.
Lucinda Riley suffered from joint pain that made writing difficult. That’s why he used to dictate his novels into a tape recorder.
He walked along the Irish moors (Irish-born Riley had a house not only in England but also in Ireland) and spoke whole stories into a tape recorder, which the assistant transcribed cleanly. Only then did we start working on the text.
– He never took any notes. The whole universe was in his head. I would have liked to live in his imagination, what a wonderful place it would have been, says Harry Whittaker.
Nothing came of imitating my mother
Mother and son were close, so Whittaker would always read the *Seven Sisters* scripts and they would discuss them. Thorough knowledge of the previous parts of the series helped in writing the last part.
Even so, writing 800 pages was hard work.
Especially the first hundred pages came out sticky. Whittaker tried to imitate his mother’s writing style, but nothing came of it.
– I questioned every word and comma, so the writing did not progress. From page 101 on I didn’t try anymore and that’s where the story started to drag.
*Atlas* reveals the full story of the siblings’ mysterious adoptive father, which begins in 1920s France. The book tells why Papa Salt had to be so mysterious throughout his life, and where his millionaire fortune came from. The miraculous twists and turns of *Atlas* weave together the fairy-tale lives of the siblings.
Since the novel constantly refers to past events and people, reading the previous books makes it easier to follow the plot.
Even Harry Whittaker had trouble knowing the large gallery of people. Messages and questions started trickling in from *Atlas* translators around the world.
Someone noticed that one sibling’s eye color had changed in the middle of the story. Another pointed out that Moon’s sister Tiggy couldn’t drink tea with milk because she was vegan. Whittaker had to go through all the places in the book where the sisters ate or drank, and come up with a vegan option for Tiggy.
When *Atlas* was then released worldwide that same day in May, Harry Whittaker was horrified. What if he’s ruined his mother’s life’s work?
However, the reception was mostly positive. Millions of readers got answers to the questions raised by the series. In addition, the story is a guaranteed fairy tale for adults from start to finish.
In the future, there will be my own novel
After successfully completing the job, Whittaker plans to continue working on his mother’s books. Lucinda Riley already started rewriting her old production herself.
In the 1990s, she published a few novels under the name Lucinda Edmonds, which did not achieve significant success. After finding a new style of writing, he decided to update his old novels as well. The work was left unfinished, so Whittaker will finish it as well.
Whittaker, who works as a radio host and actor, is also writing his own novel. It’s still in progress, but its genre is far from romantic entertainment.
– I think that in the future I will be able to spend my time well with these two very different book projects.