Ellery Lloyd- Favourite Things

Ellery Lloyd is the husband and wife writing couple Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos. Collette is a journalist and editor who was formerly content director of Elle (UK) and editorial director at Soho House. Paul is a novelist who has published two previous novels and is the program director for English Literature with Creative Writing at the University of Surrey. The couple first published a novel, People Like Her, under the pseudonym Ellory Lloyd in 2021 and their second novel, The Club, came out in March 2022 and became an instant New York Times Bestseller.

These are a few of Ellory Lloyd’s favourite things…

Osea 

Our second novel, The Club, is a murder mystery set at a celebrity members’ club on a private island just off the coast of Essex. I was editorial director of Soho House for a few years, and it was when I was working there — actually at the same time that Soho Farmhouse was opening its doors — that it occurred to me what a great setting such a place would be for an Agatha Christie-style locked room setup. But it wasn’t until we visited Osea in the Blackwater Estuary (owned by a record producer and home to a recording studio), a private island accessed via a tidal causeway, which has a ramshackle collection of Victorian cottages that you can pay to stay in, that the plot started to crystalise in our minds. It’s such an eerily beautiful, magical place, completely unspoilt and remote-feeling but only an hour-ish away from London.

Jane Mount’s illustrations

Jane Mount, an illustrator who renders book covers in her unique style, is commissioned by Reese Witherspoon’s team to paint each monthly Reese’s Book Club pick as a gift for the authors (we were the pick for March 2022). It hangs in our hallway and is a brilliant (and beautiful) reminder of the most extraordinary piece of luck — being one of her twelve annual recommendations is honestly like a lottery win, as it shot The Club straight onto the New York Times Bestseller List (where it remained for five weeks). It was a proper pinch-me moment. It’s also been optioned for television by a Hollywood producer, although if we told you who, we’d have to kill you (and our fictional body count is high enough without any more murders…).

London Library 

We have very different ideas of the perfect place to write; the only thing we agree on is that we can’t do it in the same room because we both attack the keyboard in the same way Animal from The Muppets plays the drums. I have Misophonia — essentially a really strong physical reaction to the sounds other people make without thinking such as chewing, tapping a pencil on a desk, coughing or sniffing — and so working in a café is absolute torture unless I’m in earplugs which makes me look quite odd. I do wish I could join Paul in the London Library though; it’s incredibly atmospheric and has lots of quiet corners and acres of old books to sniff (is it just me that does that?).

Google Docs 

When we first started writing together after our daughter was born (our debut is a thriller set in the murky world of Instagram influencers), we had a single word document that we would add our sections to and email back and forth. It was not a particularly sensible or expedient way of working. Once we’d finished a whole first draft, it dawned on me that a shared Google Doc would be the safest way to keep everything in one place and maintain some sort of version control, and that’s the way we’ve written since. The only problem is that, once we are at the editing stage (our novels are always written in different voices, with each of us taking a couple, but we both edit the whole thing) we can see the other killing our darlings in real-time.

Little Hermit Sphinx by Leonor Fini 

It was fashionable, for a while, that when people wrote these sorts of pieces to say that the place in London they returned to again and again was the Rothko Room in the Tate Modern. I’m afraid Rothko leaves me cold (sorry), but I could look at this painting for hours. Leonor Fini is a female surrealist (who, in fact did not consider herself a surrealist and hated the term woman artist), and the feline features heavily in her unsettling, dream-like, myth-suffused work. Painted in 1948, it’s a strange scene; the sphinx of the title, her eyes downcast, is framed by an open doorway to an overgrown, abandoned building, a human lung suspended from the lintel and skulls at her paws. It’s chillingly exquisite and has actually served as a jumping-off point for our third book.  

Enjoyed Ellory Lloyd’s favourites? Explore last week’s Favourite Things here.