Jo Morey: 'I love novels that blur boundaries and genres'
BY Maya Fernandes
2nd Jul 2025
Jo Morey was awarded a place on our Breakthrough Mentoring Programme for Disabled Writers in 2022. We caught up to discuss the release of her debut novel, The Night Lagoon – out this week from HarperCollins.
Read on to discover the inspiration behind The Night Lagoon, her approach to exploring hearing loss through fiction and her summer reading recommendations.
You were mentored by Chloe Timms as part of our Breakthrough Mentoring Programme for Disabled Writers. How did studying with us impact your approach to writing?
I’m a pantser, not a plotter so working with Chloe really helped me get organised and focus in on some of the intricacies of my messy first draft of The Night Lagoon. Her attention to detail was brilliant, and she asked some useful and challenging questions of my characters and scenes. She held a mirror up to complex issues I’d perhaps been avoiding and really pushed me to be a better writer.
The Night Lagoon is an intoxicating mystery that follows a woman trapped in an increasingly volatile relationship in the remote Belize jungle. How integral was the setting of the Central American jungle to the plot of the novel and where did the inspiration for the location first arise?
It’s often said that setting is character, and in The Night Lagoon the setting is perhaps the main character. Belize is such an incredible country, and I knew its beaches and jungles would make fantastic locations for Laelia and Ellis’s stories and the ‘shaken paradise’ that develops. I’d travelled there about fifteen years before I started writing the novel and returned for research and to chat to Mayan healers, medicine men, orchidologists, and SCUBA instructors. I also worked with Belizeans including writer Joey Garcia who was so incredibly helpful and supportive in the editing stages.
Your protagonist, Laelia, deals with tinnitus and this plays a pivotal role in her ability to understand others and relive memories, creating a unique type of unreliable narrator. As someone who suffers with a hearing impediment in your everyday life, how did you approach exploring the effects of hearing loss through fiction?
I love novels with unreliable narrators (arguably, all of them are in some way unreliable). The hearing loss and tinnitus Laelia suffers was something I weaved in during later drafting. I wanted to enhance her feelings of isolation and detachment, and realised my own experience of hearing loss was a great way to do that. I found writing about it to be incredibly cathartic and early readers have really engaged with the character and enjoy learning about what it feels like to be hearing impaired and about the social disconnection and miscommunication that comes with it.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors trying to write within the mystery/thriller genre?
Read widely across all different genres. Find books you love and read them again. It’s often in the second reading you find the true learnings around structure, plot, and character. And just go for it. If you think you’ve got an original idea and you’re passionate about it, that will push you through.
Your novel has been described as the perfect beach read. Do you have any summer reading recommendations?
I love novels that blur boundaries and genres. I love Where the Crawdads Sing and The Paper Palace; both are so immersive in setting and perfect to read in the sun. Last summer, I read The Waters by Bonnie Jo Campbell which also totally captivated me by the pool. Favourite recent reads have been The Grapevine by fellow debut author, Kate Kemp and Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods.
What is your writing routine?
An ideal writing day would be heading down to my desk before anyone else is awake (I have two young boys and two dogs who like a lot of attention). I’d grab a coffee and let the words tumble out until the sun comes up. My writing seems to flow better at this time of day before I’ve turned on my phone or had to hold a conversation, and everything feels faster. I use afternoons to work out, take the dogs for a walk and do admin tasks. Sometimes I’ll write again in the evenings with a glass of wine or a cup of herbal tea. But honestly, most days have little routine, and I snatch moments of writing time whenever I can – I like writing in cafes and at my beach hut where I can escape from everyday responsibilities and the washing pile.
Finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I’m currently working on my second novel which is set on the North Island of New Zealand. It’s about a woman with postnatal depression who goes missing and her estranged, wayward sister who flies out from London to look for her. It’s about grief and motherhood, and grief in motherhood. It will be published in the summer of 2026 with HarperCollins. I’m trying to lean more into plotting this time around but my pantsing tendencies seem to be getting the better of me again.
Get your hands on a copy of The Night Lagoon.
The books linked in this blog can be found on our Bookshop.org shop front. Curtis Brown Creative receive 10% whenever someone buys from our bookshop.org page.