The typical Anita Shreve novel, if there is such a thing, has a catastrophe at its core. Sometimes it's an old catastrophe, such as the schoolboy death that haunts a middle-aged reunion in A Wedding in December. Sometimes it explodes on the page in front of you, such as the widow's discovery of her dead husband's other family in The Pilot's Wife.

“I'm interested in the consequences of a single, reckless act,” Shreve says. “If a driver kills a pedestrian, or if a woman looks across a crowded room at the wrong man, there's a ripple-effect on the lives of the people around them.” The secret of herpopularity seems to be that she writes about ordinary people reacting to extraordinary events. An Anita Shreve novel is usually dark and rather pessimistic, though a little hope sometimes lingers. She does not do feelgood fiction. “Another theme in my books is what happens when you take a woman to the edge - how will she behave?”

Shreve is in London to promote her latest novel, Testimony. She is 62, very pretty and amazingly youthful, with an air of traditional New England reserve (she was born in Boston and still lives in Massachusetts) that has made some interviewers feel she is less than forthcoming. Descendants of the Puritans, however, do not care to spill their guts in front of strangers. “All this tell-all, self-help stuff is destructive of the soul,” she says. Testimony is partly about the toxic effects of showing and telling far too much. A group of students at a New England boarding school get drunk and have sex. Most nice children have a mad moment or two, and this incident might have passed unnoticed if one of the little blighters hadn't filmed the entire thing.

The resulting scandal threatens the children's prospects and the career of the headmaster, Mike. “Originally,” Shreve says, “I intended to tell the whole story from Mike's point of view, but there were certain things he could never know - for instance, how the mother of one of the students felt when she got the phone call.” The finished story is told by several voices. “I thought of it as a kind of update of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, in which each member of the family speaks.”

This is not as easy as it sounds, and the characterisations in Testimony show Shreve's technical expertise. Critics tend to turn up their noses at her work because it is accessible and popular - in 1999 The Pilot's Wife was chosen for Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, which, although it guarantees huge sales, also attracts deroga-tory grumbles from literary snobs. But if you look under the bonnet of one of Shreve's novels, the craftsmanship is impressive. She makes daring leaps in time and space to tell her story in the most compelling way. “I could hardly be called experimental,” she says. “But I do take pleasure in structural high jinks - can I find a way to tell that has an edge to it?”

Until she was 28, Shreve worked as a teacher, which might explain her gift for straightforward communication. She decided she wanted to write, and was soon editing a magazine in Nairobi. In her early thirties she was a successful New York journalist, and her first novel, Eden Close, appeared in 1989. Her personal life, meanwhile, was equally eventful. She married at 21 and divorced three years later. Her second marriage produced her daughter Katherine, now 28. Her third marriage produced Christopher, 19. In a twist that could have come straight from one of her novels, she first met her third husband, John, at summer camp when she was 13. They enjoyed a chaste romance, and then went off to grow up and marry other people. Years later, they met again and fell in love. You can see the blurb - “One golden summer ... two innocent kids ... a lost love that could not die ...”

Learning from experience is a recurring theme. “Kids now have no spare time,” she says. “Every second is filled for them. When I was small, my mother used to push me out of the door in the morning, and I was free to be by myself - to think, to wander, to collect tadpoles in the stream, whatever. It's a strong child today who can withstand the tumult and emerge contemplative. That makes me wonder about the writers of the future. Where will they come from?”

Shreve is an introspective writer, at home inside the heads of all kinds of people, from anxious middle-aged men to bolshie teenage girls. She avoids all fantasy and wish-fulfilment. “I'm a realist,” she says. “Or maybe it's more like trompe l'oeil.” This is the art of painting to create the illusion of reality - two dimensions mimicking three - and it describes the heightened, carefully controlled realism of Shreve's writing rather well.

Testimony by Anita Shreve
Little, Brown, 14.99 Buy the book here

The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival: Anita Shreve talks about her writing: October 10, 8:45pm
cheltenhamfestivals.com

Competition Winners

Last month we launched a competition to win lunch with Anita Shreve. The 20 winners are Alison Marlow, Northampton; Anita Skavydis, Shefford, Beds; Ann Macey, Newport, Gwent; Brian Shenton, Wembley; Brian Hackwell, Tunbridge Wells; Clare F. Hobba, St Albans; Julian Philpot, Maldon; Lorna Ferrier, Glasgow; Ian Lewin, Barnstaple, Devon; Jane Hayward, London; Michelle Valler, Steeple Aston, Oxon; Jean Marshall, Bushey, Herts; Nigel Tattersfield, Nailsworth, Glos; S. Brodribb, Southampton; Sarah Maxted, Berkhamsted, Herts; Susan Lawrence, Edinburgh; Tamar Hodes, Southampton; Christine Baelz, Carlisle; Valerie Joseph, London; Juliette Gammon, Abingdon, Oxon.

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