Elise Valmorbida interviews 26 board member Wendy Sacks Jones about her gripping debut novel, The Candidate’s Husband, published December 2025 by SRL, the world’s first climate-positive publisher.
Elise: You’re a journalist with a background in broadcasting. Your first job was with the Slough Observer—which I’m going to hazard gave you plenty of great material for your fictional regional newspaper The Humberside Citizen. You’veworked in a range of roles at the BBC, reporting on education and politics. You’ve written for the Guardian, Huffington Post and various education publications. You’ve also completed an MA in creative writing. So clearly you have an insider’s experience of regional newspapers, media, education, government—and different kinds of writing. Please tell us about how this experience plays out in your novel.
Wendy: Going along with the old adage of ‘write what you know’ does make sense to me, although other novel-writing approaches are of course available. But yes, years of working in journalism and observing politics and education (I was BBC education correspondent in the late 80s and 90s) did throw up a lot of ideas. And I do feel that the real world is so full of rich possibilities, that I can’t imagine ever wanting to write fantasy – although a mildly dystopian setting is something I could see myself getting stuck into. Then again, you could say the world we live in is itself full of signs of dystopia, so maybe it’s not such a stretch.
Elise: It’s not just good material that makes for powerful storytelling. It’s the writerly stuff: clever plotting and pacing, verbal precision, interesting characters, strong editing… The Candidate’s Husband has all of this. Where did this book come from? Where did it start and why did you write it? How did you write it?
Wendy: Muchas I envy writers who can knock off a book in six months, I’m not one of them. I knew the sort of book I wanted to write – a book about the political and the personal and with a strong feminist theme. But I started and ditched two novels before turning to The Candidate’s Husband in late 2018. The first draft was finished by the start of lockdown, but I knew it wasn’t right, and I went off to work on other projects. Then I returned to it, got some very insightful feedback (it’s always worth listening to what other writers think, even if you reject much of it), and two complete redrafts followed.
Elise: What was the toughest part about bringing your novel into the world?
Wendy: Selling it! I was prepared for writing and editing being tough, but what I completely underestimated was getting the publishing world interested in what I’d produced. But I’m resilient – the journalist in me perhaps. I wrote to dozens of agents and independent publishers and was told more than once that they weren’t interested in politics. (How can anyone not be interested in politics, I naively wondered.) I was represented at different stages by two agents and one of these, the talented Amy St Johnston then at Aitken Alexander, came up with the tagline ‘Behind every successful woman stands a resentful man.’ In the end I went with a very small indie and a huge international audiobook company, a slightly odd pairing, I know.
Elise: Despite sitting alongside you on the 26 Board,it was unexpectedly during lockdown that I feel I really got to know you. Together with Fiona Thompson and Sue Evans, we produced Threads of Time, a crowd-funded anniversary book for prison-stitching charity Fine Cell Work. Tracy Chevalier, Louis de Bernières and Esther Freud were contributing writers, along with a strong cohort of 26ers. Which role on that project did you enjoy more: being a writer or an editor?
Wendy: Oh I loved working on Threads of Time and I’m so pleased to see it’s still selling. It’s difficult to say whether I enjoyed more the writing or the editing. I’ve done quite a lot of straightforward 26 editing – and I do recommend it to all 26-ers as a usually simple and satisfying way to contribute to projects – but editing a complex book like this was demanding and something I’d never done before. My bit of the writing, which involved interviewing an inspiring ex-prisoner and FCW stitcher, was by comparison simple and joyful.
Elise: When it came to The Candidate’s Husband, what did you enjoy more: the writing or the editing?
Wendy: With my novel, I think I preferred the editing, or re-writing as it really was. That was when I discovered what the book was about and who my characters were.
Elise: This is a very political novel. It gets under the skin of party politics, work politics, male/female politics… Please tell us about your interest in, er, politics!
Wendy: As a journalist in news and current affairs, politics was my bread and butter, and I guess I’m still the sort of nerd who listens to political podcasts for pleasure. But politicians are deeply unpopular, perhaps more now than ever, and that got me thinking about what being in the public eye does to people personally: particularly how women cope with the vitriol and misogyny and the pressure when things go wrong. Men seem to hang in there even when the evidence against them is blatant. But politics exists in the workplace too (and even in gentle organisations like 26…) and I worked at the BBC for decades, so I feel quite expert on that front. Overall then, politics is about people and their human interactions – people behaving badly, stupidly, occasionally heroically. What better subject matter can there be for a novel?
Elise: From the regional newspaper office, to the comprehensive school, to the demobbed port, to the Russian oligarch’s estate, not to mention the “wastelands of Humberside”, all of which make up this fictional candidate’s political seat, Hull is in the DNA of this book. Why Hull?
Wendy: I wanted somewhere distinctly unglamorous. I knew I didn’t want to write about Cabinet ministers having affairs or anything sprinkled with Westminster glitter. Politics starts in the grass roots where politicians have to develop a relationship with their local media. And so I opted for Hull, where I spent three years as a student – a place with the plain-speaking grittiness that northern port cities often have. I went back there in 2017 when it was UK City of Culture and knew I had to set a novel there. That said, National Geographic magazine recently rated Hull as one of the best cities in the world to visit in 2026. I promise I’m not in the pay of the Hull Tourist Board.
Elise: We’ve said this is a very political book, and it is, but I’d say this is equally a book about marriage. Are Kirsty and Rick in love, are they in competition, are they compatible, what does it mean to be married after all these years? This is really a story about two people and their relationship, isn’t it?
Wendy: It certainly is.Are they still in love? Possibly. In competition? Yes. Compatible? Definitely not. This is a couple who arguably should never have married – their values are very different – but they fell in love and now more than twenty years later they’ve learnt ways of dealing with each other’s foibles and on the surface seem still reasonably happy. At least that’s the position at the start of the book…
Elise: Who’s your personal favourite character (and why)?
Wendy: I feel it should be teacher Kirsty, my idealistic but slightly flawed politician, and yes of course I want readers to root for her. But I think I faced the biggest challenges developing journalist Rick, selfish, devious, misguided as he is, and I can’t help myself feeling some sympathy for him. I’d also like to offer a small shout-out for Clive, the truly awful newspaper editor in the book. I took various dubious characteristics from the many editors I’ve worked for over the years, multiplied them severalfold and added a bit of poison that wasn’t in any of them, and that’s Clive.
Elise: You say you’re already under way with novel no.2. Can you tell us anything about that?
Wendy: This one is set in south London where I’ve lived for a long time. It has another possibly ill-matched couple at its heart and although neither is a politician or a journalist, they find themselves battered by political storms. But I’ve only just finished the first draft and as I now know, books do change in the editing.The Candidate’s Husband, a new novel by Wendy Sacks Jones, is available from the publishers and all good bookshops. Also on audible.
– Elise Valmorbida