Nicholas Evans: The accidental poisoner

The novelist Nicholas Evans once declared, “Guilt is my subject,” said Decca Aitkenhead in the London Guardian. That was before the evening, in August 2008, when The Horse Whisperer author almost killed half his family. Since then, he says, “I’ve taken [my] research to a rather extreme degree.”

Evans and his wife, Charlotte, were staying with her brother and sister-in-law in Scotland, when Evans picked and fried some wild mushrooms for supper. Within 24 hours they were all in the hospital fighting for their lives. One by one they went into kidney failure. They survived, but remain on dialysis. Evans’s 29-year-old daughter, Lauren, recently persuaded him to accept one of her kidneys, but everyone else is still waiting for a donor.

Although Evans’s wife has forgiven him, family relations are not good. It doesn’t help that they can’t agree whose fault it was. “I did pick the mushrooms, but it was really two people, each thinking the other one knew what he or she was doing.” He won’t identify the other guilty party. “It’s really hard to talk about,” he says, pausing to consider his words. “I can’t go into this. It has caused us too much pain.” Can he see things improving? “I don’t know. Maybe when we’re all better. I think that will help enormously, when everybody’s got a transplant.”

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