HISTORICAL BOYS: Historical Fiction for Men and Women

New release: DAY OF FIRE, A Novel of Pompeii

2014-11-07T11:03:00.001-08:00

I'm proud to host a release day for A DAY OF FIRE: A Novel of Pompeii by bestselling authors Stephanie Dray, Ben Kane, Vicky Alvear Shecter, Kate Quinn, and others.

At the height of the Roman Empire, the lively resort of Pompeii flourished in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. When Vesuvius unexpectedly erupted in a terrifying explosion of flame and ash, the entire town was destroyed. Some of its citizens perished in the chaos, others escaped the mountain's wrath. These are their stories:

A boy who loses his innocence
An heiress in dread of her wedding day
An ex-legionary staking his entire future on a gladiator bout
A crippled senator waiting for death, until a tomboy rescues him
A young mother facing an impossible choice
A priestess and a whore seeking redemption and resurrection

Through these characters, six authors acclaimed for their historical authenticity bring to vivid life the overlapping fates of patricians and slaves, warriors and politicians, villains and heroes, who cross each others' path during Pompeii's fiery end. Who will escape? And who will be buried for eternity?

"An emotional roller-coaster that educates while it entertains."-- Parmenion Books

"Full of suspense, fear, and unexpected bravery." --Ageless Pages

"Each one of these authors deserves a huge amount of praise for putting this impressive piece of art together." --Steven McKay

To find out more, please visit here.

Meet the Authors:

STEPHANIE DRAY is a multi-published, award-winning author of historical women’s fiction and fantasy set in the ancient world. Her Nile series about Cleopatra’s daughter has been translated into more than six languages, was nominated for a RITA Award and won the Golden Leaf. Stephanie is a former lawyer, a game designer, and a teacher.

BEN KANE worked as a veterinarian for sixteen years, until his love of ancient history drew him to write fast-paced novels about Roman military life and gladiators. He is the author of seven books, the last five of which have been Sunday Times Top Ten bestsellers in the UK. Ben’s work has been translated into ten languages. In 2013 and 2014, dressed in full Roman military kit, he and and a group of fellow authors walked the length of Hadrian’s Wall, as well as over 130 miles in Italy, for charity, raising over $50,000.

E. KNIGHT is an award-winning, national best-selling indie author. Under the name Eliza Knight, she writes historical romance and time-travel. Her debut historical fiction novel, My Lady Viper, has received critical acclaim and was nominated for the Historical Novel Society 2015 Annual Indie Award.

SOPHIE PERINOT is the author of the acclaimed debut, The Sister Queens, about medieval sisters Marguerite and Eleanor of Provence. She holds a BA in History and a law degree. Her most recent novel about Marguerite of Valois, daughter of Catherine de Medici, was recently acquired by St Martin's Press.

KATE QUINN is the national bestselling author of the Empress of Rome novels, and two novels about the Borgia pope's mistress, The Serpent and The Pearl, and The Lion and The Rose. Her books have been translated into thirteen languages. She first got hooked on Roman history while watching "I, Claudius" at the age of seven, and wrote her first book during her college freshman year.

VICKY ALVEAR SHECTER is the award-winning author of the YA novel, Cleopatra’s Moon, based on the life of Cleopatra's daughter. She is also the author of two biographies for kids on Alexander the Great and Cleopatra. Her young adult novel. Pompeii, Curses and Smoke, was released in June 2014. She has two other upcoming books for young readers. Vicky is a docent at the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Antiquities at Emory University in Atlanta.

THE TUDOR VENDETTA releases on Tuesday, October 21

2014-10-19T11:29:00.001-07:00

Fall is an exciting time in publishing, as we near the holiday season and many of us escape the stress of shopping and parties by curling up with a book. I'm delighted to announce that The Tudor Vendetta, my third and final book in The Elizabeth I Spymaster Trilogy (Elizabeth's Spymaster in the UK) will be released by St Martin's Press in the US on October 21 and by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK on October 23, with several foreign-language editions scheduled to follow.

It is November, 1558. Elizabeth I has claimed the throne, but the first days of her reign are already fraught with turmoil, the realm weakened by strife and her ability to rule uncertain. When Brendan Prescott, her intimate spy, returns to court at her behest, he soon finds himself thrust into a deadly gambit against his foe, Robert Dudley. But the new queen has an even more perilous assignation for him when her trusted lady-in-waiting, Lady Parry, vanishes in Yorkshire. Sent from court to a crumbling manor that may hold the key to Lady Parry's disappearance, Brendan becomes the quarry of an elusive stranger with a vendetta - one that could expose both Brendan's secret and a long-hidden mystery that will bring about Elizabeth's doom.

Booklist calls The Tudor Vendetta "action-packed palace intrigue at its best" and Romantic Times praises its evocation of "Elizabeth's England in all its glory." I've loved taking this journey into Tudor England, which began nearly fourteen years ago when I first had the idea to write about a fictional squire with a secret past, who finds himself plunged into momentous events preceding the reign of the Tudor dynasty's most accomplished and enigmatic sovereign. The Spymaster Trilogy is as much about Elizabeth's early struggles and canny ability to wield power even when she had none, as it is about the young man who devotes himself to her service, risking everything to see her triumph. Exploring many vibrant personalities of the time - William Cecil, Francis Walsingham, Robert Dudley, and Mary I - as well as Brendan's fictional friends and foes has been a true delight. I hope you enjoy this final installment as much as I have writing it, and I thank you from my heart for your support and enthusiasm during this three-volume adventure into England's tumultuous Renaissance past.

I'll be on virtual tour for The Tudor Vendetta from October 20 to November 28. To catch up with me, please click here.

WHEN AUTHORS SAY STUPID THINGS

2014-10-17T18:36:00.003-07:00

I'm no stranger to putting my foot in my mouth on occasion. As a published writer, the demands on me, like all my ilk, have increased exponentially with the advent of social media. Facebook, Twitter, etc. are now required tools in a writer's arsenal, where we're expected to post interesting quips and book announcements on a regular basis, regardless of our ability to even hold a coherent conversation in public, let alone our willingness to do so.

It may seem strange to the rest of the non-writing world, but publishers actually audit our social media and website presence. This incipient intrusion into how we present ourselves is now an integral part of our publishing strategy; I've heard twice now during marketing discussions that my website has been "audited" and been offered suggestions as to how to improve it. Publishers don't do this to frustrate or irritate us; in fact, they have the best of intentions. Media attention has become inescapable, fundamental to any author who wishes to survive. As marketing budgets shrink and books compete amid a smorgasbord of other entertainment options, writers must keep up, expected now to not only entertain with words in their books, but also with their extraneous minutia.

It can therefore come as no surprise that like everyone else out there posting kittens, skateboard videos, pictures of recent vacations, and memes declaring everything from political affiliation to sexual preference and religious belief, authors can now and then find themselves screwing up. After all, we've all seen our share of "OMG!!! No, he didn't!" on non-writing people's posts. We've all cringed at that celebrity's faux-pas on Twitter or that politician's asinine comment on Facebook. No one is immune. We all put our foot in our mouths - or in our posts, as the case may be. And in this day and age of intense social scrutiny and viral spread, when we do, everyone else notices.

Writers are, by and large, a solitary breed. We have to be. It's not a choice; it's an occupational hazard most of us embrace. If I had a dollar for every time I've heard, "What a life you lead, sitting at home all day making up stories," I'd be sitting at home on my yacht in Cannes. People think we are privileged - and we are, because we get paid to make up stuff - but the day-to-day grind is hardly glamorous. Unless your idea of glamour is endless months of toil over a keyboard, trying to wrestle into words that brilliant idea in your head; eating pretty much the same sandwich every day, and looking up in a red-eyed haze at 5:30 when your partner comes home from work and comments, wryly, "No shower yet?" or the obsessive checking on the ranking of your most recent opus at various online sites, followed by crippling doubt when said ranking fails to hit the single digits and you know you're headed on the bullet train to failure and that day-job in a fast-food chain. Glamour has no part in it. To be a writer, you must have buns of steel to keep them glued to the chair every day and an excellent exercise regimen to avoid permanent carpal tunnel. We hunker down in our dens like mole people because that's where our stories are born. We eschew social outings that other folk spontaneously engage in - impromptu lunches or jaunts to the movies - because we're "under deadline," but more honestly, because we live in constant dread that if we deviate too much from the work-in-progress, the muse will desert us and then we'll really be on that train to fast-food hell. We don't mean to hide from the world, but we must. If we didn't, we'd never write another word. The world is too tempting. There is too much distraction, too many reasons to avoid the screen or page, and skip outside to play like a normal person.

But now, we are expected - no, required - to have a public presence. The more savvy among us elect to create an alternate persona that exalts our best qualities while concealing our less amenable ones. Because while readers may want to meet us, to exchange confidences, praise or criticism, they shouldn't know too much. It's not healthy or wise to show the world who we are in our entirety, because like every other industry that relies on another person's imagination and investment, writers need to disappear when someone is reading our book.

Which brings me in my long-winded way to the point of this post. Having watched in slack-jawed horror the debacle caused by bestselling author John Grisham's insensitive remarks during a recent interview, where he extolled his opinions of old white men who watch child porn and the unnecessary harshness of their jail sentences, I realized this is a perfect case of writer's foot-in-mouth. As rich and popular as Mr. Grisham is, and a lawyer to boot, so he really should have known better, he's still a writer. He doesn't get out much, or at least not as much as he probably should. He might actually believe what he said (writers are under no requirement to be pleasant, though it would behoove them to at least try) or he might have been handed a microphone and completely lost it. Whatever the case, he screwed up. Within hours, his mini-rant went viral; his Facebook and twitter accounts flooded with outraged remarks and avowals to boycott him evermore. His hard-working publicist no doubt had to flee to the nearest bathroom stall to hurl up his or her lunch before launching into full damage-control mode, because, you see, Mr. Grisham has a book dropping next week and well . . . to behave like a cretin at such a time is simply not done.

Will it affect his book's sales? I doubt it. In today's age of burn-fast-and-forget-it, by next week some other author, celebrity, or politician will utter a string of garbage and the blast of the white-hot spotlight will swerve on them. After all, Orson Scott-Card's unabashed cretinishness hasn't exactly hurt him, though the producers of the film made from his bestselling novel went to certain lengths to distance themselves from his racist, homophobic stance. Still, he has survived, and to my knowledge, his book sales have not taken a significant hit.

The simple truth is, most writers aren't designed for the world. We're built like special cars, fueled by the power of our visions, with high mileage in our particular neighborhood but poor efficiency on the highway, necessitating frequent coffee re-fills and fortifying pep-talks from our agents. We're not supposed to be touted into the arena to regale the public, because while we may be interesting in our own right, most of what we want to say, or should say, is in our books.

Then of course, there is that undeniable alternative: Some writers are not nice. They're rude, self-absorbed people whose opinions make 98% of the rest of the planet shudder. They are the dangerous ones, the feral in our breed, because you never know when they're let out of their den if they'll smile at you or bite.

So, publishers beware.

Random Reviews: SAVAGE GIRL

2014-06-16T13:32:00.001-07:00

Jean Zimmerman. SAVAGE GIRL.

The premise of Jean Zimmerman's Savage Girl is gripping: What would happen if a wealthy couple with everything they could possibly imagine came across a so-called "feral child" in a tawdry Nevada sideshow and decides to bring her back to New York and convert her into a society belle? With shades of Pygmalion crossed with the darker hue of Edith Wharton, Savage Girl posits this theory and adds another layer: What if all the men who show an erotic interest in the girl start to turn up dead and the disturbed son of the wealthy couple begins to suspect she may be a brutal killer, even as he sees disturbing signs within himself that he might be to blame?

There is no question that Ms Zimmerman is a masterful writer; her prose is beautiful and she brilliantly captures the unreliable voice of the couple's son, Hugo Delegate, who narrates the story. Hugo is both repelled and fascinated by Bronwyn, the "savage girl," whose past is slowly revealed as Hugo's suspicions and attraction to her deepen. The world of Gilded Age New York also comes to vivid, detailed life; we feel the hypocrisy and emphasis on lineage and social position as the curiosity-obsessed Delegates seek to put one over on their peers by turning Bronwyn into something she is not. Bronwyn fascinates in her contradictions - alluring yet remote, with a tendency to slip out after-hours to roam the streets, wearing a glove fitted with claws. However, her distance from the narrative voice and Hugo's preoccupation with a variety of other concerns dampen the plot's thrust, as he's distracted both by his own torment and his family's foibles. At times, there simply is too much story in this heady brew, diluting the lethal mystery at its heart.

Nevertheless, the experience of reading it turns compulsive, as the underside of the Gilded Age is torn asunder by the introduction of the wild within us all - a metaphor for how we seek to curb our baser instincts, forcing our repressions to find other, more unsavory ways to erupt. Hugo's confession turns chilling as we realize how far his family has gone and the terrible price exacted of them, while Bronwyn's own secrets lead to an excellent denouement. In the end, we find ourselves questioning: Who is truly the savage here?

Random Reviews: HOTEL DE DREAM

2014-06-14T10:22:00.000-07:00

I read voraciously and have been writing reviews for years, both on Goodreads, for Amazon Vine, and the Historical Novels Review. So, I decided to start a Random Review feature here on my blog where I'll offer select reviews of books I personally enjoyed. Most have a historical component, of course. Hope you enjoy!

Edmund White. HOTEL DE DREAM.

Edmund White is rightfully considered one of our finest living English-language writers, though his output is not as prolific as others in his cadre. Nevertheless, he has carved an indelible mark for himself in portraying both gay life and history in his works, his prose always luminous and his insights into the foibles of the human condition often profound.

In his deceptively slim novel, Hotel de Dream, Mr White re-imagines the final days of American literary phenomenon Stephen Crane, who is wasting away from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. Acclaimed posthumously for his work, Crane was only a one-hit wonder in his lifetime; and as he slowly suffocates from his illness, he labors to dictate his final novel - a strange, elegiac tale of a boy prostitute in 1890s New York and the staid, married banker whose obsessive love for the boy precipitates his own downfall. Woven in between scenes of Crane and his work-in-progress is the story of how Crane himself met a similar boy years before and how that fateful encounter haunts him still.

Portraits of Henry James and other literary luminaries pepper the pages - the depiction of pompous and reluctantly proper James is startlingly amusing - and balancing it all could prove exhausting, not to mention cumbersome, in the hands of a lesser writer. But Mr White commands his triple narrative with consummate style, giving his moribund protagonist a mordant wit that makes light of his dire circumstances, even as Crane reflects on the swift-fire passage of time and depths of passion to which we can descend, as exemplified by the boy's doomed suitor.

This is a brilliantly executed novel, brimming with respect for our flawed humanity. White's portrayal of the boy himself is masterful - a jaded youth of the streets who retains only a semblance of innocence yet remains utterly naive to the vicissitudes he unleashes. Likewise, White's evocation of the morals of a bygone era and stark class disparities in New York, where the wealthy rub elbows with the downtrodden and destitute, is vividly rendered, but never ponderous.

If you read only one work by Edmund White - and you should read more - let it be this one

Guest post from Eva Stachniak, author of EMPRESS OF THE NIGHT

2014-04-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Eva Stachniak, author of EMPRESS OF THE NIGHT: A Novel of Catherine the Great, the follow-up to her international bestseller, The Winter Palace.

I loved The Winter Palace, which recounts Catherine's tumultuous struggles through the eyes of a trusted servant with secrets of her own. In Empress of the Night, Eva returns to the grandiose, turbulent and dramatic life of Russia's most famous empress, now in the twilight of her long reign, as she is dying from a massive stroke and recalls the twists and turns, sacrifices and intrigues, that brought her to the throne. Catherine is a magnificent woman, but prey to capricious appetites and a hunger for power; and her trajectory from neglected foreign princess to czarina of the one of the most expansive and decaying empires of the world offers an astonishing, compelling look at the vagaries of fate.

Eva's work has been highly praised by readers and critics alike for her luminous prose and insight. Library Journal calls Empress of the Night "historical fiction fans will appreciate . . . this personal account of a formidable and, indeed, infamous ruler." and Book Reporter says, "As the reader, you’re left with an intimate, up-close look at the imagined life of Catherine the Great. It is, quite simply, wonderful."

Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Eva, who offers us this tantalizing glimpse into her inspiration behind the novel. To find out more about Eva and her work, please visit her website.

Ever since I decided to write about Catherine the Great, I knew that I couldn’t write just one novel about her; she was too big, too complex, her story involved too many people and too many key events. It was always a two book project. In The Winter Palace the readers watched Catherine through the eyes of Varvara, Catherine’s spy and confidante who was clearly captivated by her mistress, and thus not always reliable as a narrator. Empress of the Night turns its spotlight on Catherine herself.

Empress of the Night is a study of Catherine’s character. The novel begins in November of 1796, when Catherine is 67 years old and succumbs to a massive stroke. In the two days that follow, speechless and motionless, the most powerful woman in Russia is forced to witness how the intricate threads of her palace politics unravel around her. Her legacy, her plans for Russia’s future, the very fate of the monarchy are in danger. Grand Duke Paul, Catherine’s son, the man whom she grew to despise, is getting ready to assume control over the imperial court and Russia’s sprawling lands. He feels he no longer has to hide his hatred of everything his dying mother represents. After all he’ll soon become Emperor Paul II, the absolute monarch of All the Russias, answering only to God.

As a writer, I was drawn to the image of once powerful Catherine the Great facing her limitations, her powerlessness, her mortality. I wondered how much the historical Catherine understood from what was happening around her in these last two days and nights before her death, what she thought of the events that led her to this pivotal and tragic November morning when she felt the first pangs of pain. Of course we’ll never know how massive her stroke really was, how much consciousness she retained and for how long. One witness of these last two days and nights in the imperial bedroom recorded that Catherine tried to speak once. She lifted herself up a little, her lips moved, her throat produced some strange noises. In the end, all the dying empress managed was to grab her attendant’s hand and squeeze it.

This—I thought—was a commanding image. I took it for a permission to imagine that Catherine understood far more than those around her gave her credit for and began writing Empress of the Night.

Guest post from Laurel Corona, author of THE MAPMAKER'S DAUGHTER

2014-03-04T09:18:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to welcome Laurel Corona, a friend and colleague whose latest novel THE MAPMAKER'S DAUGHTER is now available. Set in 15th-century Spain, this beautiful and vivid novel explores the forgotten women of the Spanish Inquisition, as seen through the eyes of Amalia Riba, a converso forced to hide her religion from the outside world, She is the last in a long line of Jewish mapmakers, whose services to the court were so valuable that their religion had been tolerated by Muslims and Christians alike.

But times have changed. When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella conquer Granada, the last holdout of Muslim rule in Spain, they issue an order expelling all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. As Amalia looks back on her eventful life, we witness history in the making—the bustling court of Henry the Navigator, great discoveries in science and art, the fall of Muslim Granada, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. And we watch as Amalia decides whether to relinquish what’s left of her true self, or risk her life preserving it. This is a sweeping saga of faith, family and identity that shows how the past shapes our map of life.

Please join me in welcoming Laurel Corona, who offers us this interesting perspective on the famous Henry the Navigator.

Henry the Navigator and his “Gay Company”

When I was in grade school I always thought Henry the Navigator was the coolest figure in the Age of Exploration, but there were a number of things my teachers didn’t share, or didn’t know, about him. He was the first to kidnap Africans for economic gain and and bring them as slaves to Europe. He also never navigated, staying on dry land the entire time his ships went off to discover the world. And one last thing: he was almost certainly gay. Researching Henry for my new novel, THE MAPMAKER’S DAUGHTER, I ran across an early historian who said that the prince “spent his whole life in pure chastity, and went to his grave as a virgin.” Another said that "he did not wish to marry because of his great chastity." A third added that "he always lived so virtuously and chastely that he never knew a woman."

Of course “chaste” does not equal gay, so let’s dig a little further.

What might his brother, King Duarte, have meant when he wrote Henry to say he should avoid "giving pleasure to men" beyond what he could do in a "virtuous manner"? What does one contemporaneous historian mean when he describes Henry’s household as “habituated to the gay and spontaneous company of his servants,” adding that, “he was very attached to them”? This archaic use of the word “gay” always brings a smile to modern lips, but the point about Henry’s preferences is not contained in that word.

What does it mean that most of those Henry gave the chance to conduct highly lucrative slave raids in West Africa were young men raised from youth in his "câmara"? When his early biographers used this word, its most common meaning was bedroom, or by extension the private quarters of his palace, where it is apparent from the sources that many young men (and never a woman) were free to come and go in a manner befitting a prince’s most intimate friends.

In The Mapmaker's Daughter, Diogo Marques is one of Henry’s handsome young favorites who subsequently receives a commission to go slaving. My protagonist Amalia, not yet in her teens when she goes to Henry’s court with her father, wonders about this absence of females in the palace. Though later she will pay for her naivete, at the time she simply grumbles that if there were women around, someone might notice she had outgrown her clothes.

Biographers during his lifetime and the century afterward tiptoed delicately around the subject of Henry’s personal life for good reason. Sodomy was a grievous sin and a crime punishable by death. To make the heinousness even clearer, after execution (or as a means of it) the body of the accused had to be so thoroughly destroyed by fire that no trace remained. It was common to exhume the dead to desecrate their bodies if offenses of this and other sorts were discovered later. Obvious, honesty both during and after Henry’s lifetime was not consistent with building him into the national hero of Portugal, so biographers kept their silence.

And then there’s very phallic personal crest Henry designed, which would raise the eyebrows of anyone who has ever heard of Freud. It seems there is much more to Henry than the well-dressed prince looking to sea with a model ship in his hand.

Thank you, Laurel. To find out more about Laurel and her work, please visit her website.

Interview with C.J. Samson, author of DOMINION

2014-03-03T08:30:00.000-08:00

I'm honored and delighted to welcome C.J. Sansom, whose new novel DOMINION is now out in the UK and the US. An international bestselling author who is well known for his Matthew Shardlake mysteries set in Tudor England. C.J. is also the author of the evocative bestseller, Winter In Madrid, set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and is one of my favorite novels about that tumultuous and tragic period.

In his latest novel, Dominion, C.J. offers a chillingly realistic portrayal of alternate history, positing what might have happened had the Third Reich invaded and conquered the UK. Set in 1952, twelve years have passed since Britain has surrendered to Nazi Germany and the British people find themselves under increasingly authoritarian rule. But Churchill’s Resistance is not vanquished and as the defiance grows, whispers circulate of a secret that could alter the balance of the global struggle. The keeper of that secret is Scientist Frank Muncaster, who languishes in a Birmingham mental hospital.

Civil Servant David Fitzgerald, a spy for the Resistance and University friend of Frank’s, is given the mission to rescue Frank. Hard on his heels is Gestapo agent, Gunther Hoth, a brilliant and implacable hunter of men, who soon has Frank and David’s wife, Sarah, in his sights. This is a spellbinding novel in the vein of Graham Greene that dares to explore how in moments of crisis, history can turn on the decisions of a few brave men and women – the secrets they choose to keep and the bonds they share.

Please join me in welcoming C.J. Sansom.

Please could you tell us about your inspiration for writing Dominion.

Everyone who studies history seriously considers counter-factuals – if a particular event, or decision, had gone differently, what would the effects on history have been. And of course one intriguing theme is, what would have happened if Britain had been defeated or surrendered in 1940.

What drew you to the particular era that your book depicts? What are some of the challenges and/or delights about writing about this time?

As well as the Tudor era, I have always been very interested in European and British history before, during and after the Second World War, and Winter in Madrid is also set within this broad period. Dominion, is setting in Britain in 1952, the year I was born. Although it is an alternate history and many things are different, I try to catch the atmosphere of 1950s Britain in such things as the general drabness, the intense social conservatism, but also the importance of personal integrity as epitomised in characters like David and Sarah. It was very interesting to create characters rooted in a time which I can just remember, as well as little details like the fact that everybody smoked, and it was routine for dogs to do their business in the street! One of the challenges, which I would have had even writing about the real world rather than on alternate history, is that events and political figures are still, just, within range of memory, as are the political ideas. I knew I would get criticism for my portrayal of how some political figures and political parties respond to defeat, but I believe these to be plausible, or would not have protrude as I have.

You are very well-known for your Shardlake mysteries set in Tutor England, as well as a previous novel set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Winter in Madrid. What promises did you use to transport yourself (and readers) to another time period? How do you go about research and incorporating it into fiction?

That is the $64,000 question for a historical novelist. I am fortunate in that I am a historical nerd, and have spent much of the last forty years reading and thinking about history. I don't have the knowledge of a professional academic, but think I am fairly well-rooted in the mid-sixteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Whenever I have chosen the exact topic I'm going to write about, I always research the particular subject as carefully as I can, including looking at original documentation from the period wherever possible. This takes 2 to 3 months and I'm sure that much of each novel is written in my subconscious during that time. Then when I write, I always try to strike that essential balance between burdening the reader with a mass of historical facts, and giving the flavour of the time. That's the key thing, having the character and stories integrated with "the world of the piece."

Do you believe your historical fiction conveys a message or theme relevant to our world today? If so, what do you think it is? If not, how do you think readers can find common ground with the characters in your story?

Everyone, I think, who writes historical novels – or, for that matter, factual books, does so from the perspective of their own time. I don't think there is such a thing as a general "message" or "theme" in historical fiction – everyone writes from the point of view of their own ideas, conscious or unconscious. I am sure my own books reflect my own position on the democratic left. The only book where I have deliberately conveyed a message is Dominion, where the message is how easy, and how dangerous it is to fall into politics defined by nationalism. As for common ground with the characters, their to a difficult balance has to be drawn, between someone intelligible to the modern world but with the different mindset of another time. This is much easier for the 1940s than the 1540s!

Can you tell us about your next project?

I am going back to Tudor England and the Shardlake series, with a book called Lamentation which will be set around the jockeying for power between religious and political factions at the court of the dying Henry VIII, and which will prominently feature his last wife, Catherine Parr. It will be the last in the series set during the reign of Henry VIII, but I hope to to continue it under his successors.

Thank you, C.J. To learn more about C.J. and his work, please visit his website. C.J. is also on virtual tour through the blog world until March 14.

UK release for THE TUDOR CONSPIRACY

2014-01-16T10:13:00.000-08:00

THE TUDOR CONSPIRACY releases today in the UK. To celebrate the book's release, I will be on a virtual blog tour from January 16 to January 28. Hope you can join me! I'll update these links as the tour progresses.

January 16 - For Winter Nights. Review and Q&A.

January 17. Sir Reads a Lot. Review.

January 18. Reading Gives Me Wings. Q&A.

January 19. Life Between Pages. Review.

January 20. A Fantastical Librarian. Q&A.

January 20. Kincavel Corner. Review and Q&A

January 22. Historical Honey.

Named one of Daily Soap's Top 7 Reads

January 23. SJA Turney's Blog of Random Miscellany.

January 24. Parmenion Books.

Guest post and Giveaway from Elizabeth Fremantle, author of QUEEN'S GAMBIT

2013-08-10T18:31:00.004-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Elizabeth Fremantle, author of QUEEN'S GAMBIT, a sumptuous account of the life of Katherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII who survived the murderous king and went on to endure an ill-fated marriage to Thomas Seymour.

In Queen's Gambit, Kate Parr's story is entwined with that of Dorothy, or Dot, her maidservant, as well as several supporting characters, all of whom are complex and depicted as people whose very existence within the treacherous politics of court dictate both their behavior and their survival. Kate's voice is compelling; a widow with a secret, she attracts the unwanted affections of the ailing king and must sacrifice her magnetic attraction to gorgeous Seymour in order to be queen, only to find herself plunged into an increasingly desperate gambit that requires all her courage and perseverance. Her transformation into a crusader for the Reformed Faith at a time when Henry himself frowns upon it, having retreated into the solace of his Catholicism despite his break with Rome, pits the queen against enemies eager to see her fall. Witnessing her mistress's struggles while contending with her own, is Dot, who emerges as the novel's most engaging character, her wit and keen perspective on her role in the scheme of life at court lending her a unique voice that makes us truly care about what happens to her. Dot, in fact, ends up carrying the story, as Kate Parr becomes mired in her battles and unmitigated desire for Seymour. An adolescent Princess Elizabeth also makes several appearances, stealing the show, as usual, with her self-absorbed antics. I especially liked a scene when Dot overhears Elizabeth conversing rather carelessly with a bewildered Jane Grey.

Tudor aficionados and those who love historical fiction will thoroughly enjoy Queen's Gambit; the inevitable comparisons to Hilary Mantel's work aside, this is by far a more accessible account of the Tudor court, written by an author who's mastered her craft and has deep respect for her subject matter.

GIVEAWAY: Simon & Schuster is kindly offering one free copy of Queen's Gambit. To enter the giveaway contest, please add your comment below this post. Thanks and good luck!

Now, please join me in welcoming Elizabeth Fremantle.

Why Katherine Parr?

I am often asked why I chose to write about Katherine Parr and it is true she seems one of the less interesting when compared to her more glamorous predecessors. But scratch the surface of her story and a dynamic, charismatic woman emerges. She may not have been born a princess to make a great alliance, nor did her life come to a truly dramatic climax with execution, but she was a highly intelligent well-loved woman and an astute political operator who understood how to play the game of power in a dissembling court, using her position to support religious reform at great personal cost. This is a woman who managed to out-fox her powerful adversaries and survive a plot on her life. She was an author too, publishing two books at a time when to publish at best risked ridicule and at worst might seriously compromise a woman’s virtue. She was clever enough to wait until after Henry’s death to publish her second book, a highly political and unashamedly reformist tome. She might not have become known as the wife who ‘survived’ had she not had the sense to wait.

There is much to admire about Katherine Parr’s dynamism, intellect and ability to survive as well as the fact that she was married no less than four times. But one of the things that most appealed to me about her story was that she was also flawed. She made a disastrous decision in the name of misguided romance with devastating consequences, and it is this picture of a truly accomplished woman becoming a fool for love that fascinated me. The contradiction in her character makes her, for me, so very human and relatable to us today. Who doesn’t know of a clever woman who has fallen foul of romance?

Author photo: Paola Pieroni

But my story is not just one of a remarkable queen. I was determined to explore another view of the Tudor court through the character of Dot. Dot, who serves as Katherine’s maid, is largely of my imagination. We know almost nothing about the woman Dorothy Fountain who served as maid to Katherine Parr’s stepdaughter Margaret Neville during her second marriage. We know she remained with the family serving Katherine Parr when she was Queen, that she was left four pounds a year in Margaret’s will and that she married a man named William Savage who might have been a musician.

It is not much to go on and for the purposes of QUEEN’S GAMBIT I have made Dot lower born than she was likely to have been in reality, as I wanted to offer a different perspective on the court – a 'below stairs' view. I was keen to explore the kind of life an ordinary women like Dot might have had in the period. In the novel, she is visited by exceptional circumstances and comes to move in an elevated world, her experience of it is different to those born into the nobility.

Dot gave me the chance to look at loyalty and true friendship between women, allowing me to show Katherine as a woman who was both loyal herself and inspired great loyalty, even in an uneducated young woman well beneath her in the social scale. Literacy and education was something entirely beyond such a woman’s reach and in Dot I wanted to imagine her as having an intellectual curiosity, striving to educate herself against the expectations of her age. As an adjunct to this I touch on the possibilities for social mobility that were beginning to open up (it must be said mostly for men) in the renaissance period.

Through the eyes of these two women whose lives intersect and yet are so different, I hoped to convey something of what it was like to live in the court of history’s most notorious tyrant, Henry VIII.

Thank you, Elizabeth. To find out more about Elizabeth Fremantle and her work, please visit her website.http://www.elizabethfremantle.com/

Q&A with Beverly Swerling, author of MOLLIE PRIDE

2013-07-26T09:33:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Beverly Swerling, the acclaimed author of numerous, marvelous historical novels, including her trilogy on old Manhattan, City of Dreams, City of Glory and City of Promise, as well as the stand-alone Shadowbrook; a recently released historical ghost story, Bristol House; and her first reissue in e-format, MOLLIE PRIDE. Beverly has been praised for her attention to detail, her deft hand with character and plot, and versatility within the genre. Publisher's Weekly has praised her work as "sweeping. . . readers will be captivated by [her[ intricate plot, colorful characters and convincing descriptions . . . ."

Please join me in welcoming Beverly Swerling
.

Q: Please tell us about your inspiration for writing MOLLIE PRIDE.

I suppose every historical novelist at some points toys with the idea of writing something set during that terrible and earth-shaking drama that was WWII. Certainly I had the idea for years. For me all fiction is about characters, so the essential thing was to come up with a lead character who would play some role in that war. That doesn't sound too difficult, but for a long time I couldn't find a peg--something to hang my story on--that felt at least somewhat fresh and new.

Then one day I was playing around with opening lines, and thinking about the almost frantic mood of the roaring twenties. In no time I had a paragraph I really liked: "A lot of crazy things were happening in America in 1926. While a breathless nation watched, a couple dressed in jodhpurs and helmets tangoed from Santa Monica to Los Angeles; a high school student put forty sticks of gum into his mouth, sang Home Sweet Home, and drank a gallon of milk between verses; a guy called Shipwreck Kelly spent a large part of his life sitting on top of flagpoles; and from Harlem’s Cotton Club to Hollywood’s Brown Derby, everybody danced. For fun, for profit, for kudos – and sometimes just to stay alive."

Q: What drew you to the particular era that your book depicts? What are some of the challenges and/or delights about writing about this time?

Once I'd written that paragraph, next thing I knew I had the Prides, Harry and Zena, who made a bare-bones living following the marathon dance contests that were part of the general 20's nuttiness. And I had their adorable six-year-old daughter, Mollie, who anchored their act with her rendition of the Charleston.

If you follow that timeline for a few years you're into the golden age of early commercial radio. Why not make Mollie a child star on radio! And from there… Well, what about the role of radio in WWII? It was huge. This was the first time war was happening in people's living rooms. And there was the other side, the spies dropped behind enemy lines who took their lives in their hands to broadcast coded messages.

Bingo, I had my WWII book.

Q: What process did you use to transport yourself (and readers) to another time period? How do you go about research and incorporating it into fiction?

In the matter of WWII, the issue is finding the thread you want to follow when so much is happening. I had settled on radio and that helped to keep me focused, but like all my books, it's always about more than what it's about. People don't stop loving and laughing or hating and plotting just because there's a war on.

Q: Does your historical fiction convey a message or theme relevant to our world today? If so, what do you think it is? If not, how do you think readers can find common ground with the characters in your story?

I think it's because of our world today that I decided to encore MOLLIE PRIDE as a Kindle E-book. We live in a time of many challenges, and sadly our country sometimes feels painfully divided. But the real values never change, though they might go underground for a time. America was also deeply polarized before the onset of WWII. In fact the majority of the nation didn't want us to get involved. Perhaps because they didn't realize how truly evil Nazism was. And the Great Depression was causing terrible suffering for so many. But when the challenge ultimately came, ordinary people were compelled to step up and do heroic things and they did them.

Love, honor, duty… those aren't just words for Mollie and the people she loves. And the stakes were incredibly high. So in the end I didn't open the story with that paragraph I quoted about the crazy things happening in 1926. I opened it with a prologue that takes place in Washington DC, in1946, and the threat of the death penalty for high treason…

As for making the characters in historical fiction meaningful for today's readers, I think that requires the writer to be absolutely honest. Sitting down at the computer, as has been said before, and opening a vein. You've got to let real life happen on the page, and show what really motivates the people in your fiction, their fears and their desires and their longings… Emotions of that sort don't change much from decade to decade, or even century to century. That kind of truthful writing is what I've tried to achieve with Mollie and the people around her. When the book was first published in 1991 many readers felt that emotional connection to Mollie. I'm hoping that will happen for those who meet her now.

Q: Can you tell us about your next project?

I'm working on something called 37 SIN EATERS' STREET. It's a Back-and-Forth-in-Time book that takes place in Prague in the 1940's, and New York City today. In that sense it's not unlike my recently published, BRISTOL HOUSE. And I've used that kind of dual period template in two earlier books: WOMEN'S RITES and A MATTER OF TIME. They are both scheduled to make their E-Pub Encore appearances later this year.

Thank you so much, Beverly. To find out more about Beverly Swerling and her work, please visit her website.

THE TUDOR CONSPIRACY is available!

2013-07-17T11:29:00.000-07:00

THE TUDOR CONSPIRACY, the second novel in the Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles is out in paperback! Taking place a few months after the events of The Tudor Secret, Brendan Prescott, a spy in Princess Elizabeth's service, returns to court during the reign of Bloody Mary and plunges into London’s treacherous underworld to unravel a dark conspiracy that could make Elizabeth queen—or send her to her death.

I'll be on both a physical and virtual tour, and hope to see you at one of my events. Click on the banner below for all my blog tour stops, which run from July 16 to August 27.

To purchase the book, you can find links to online stores here or better yet, visit your local indie. If they don't have it, they can always order it for you. I'm happy to send signed bookplates, as well. Just write to me via my Contact page on my website with your address.

Thanks for all your support! I hope you enjoy the book.

APPEARANCES:

* July 18. 7 PM. Books, Inc. Berkeley.

* July 23. 7 PM. Bookshop West Portal, San Francisco. Launch Party for The Tudor Conspiracy. Wine, cheese and cake will be served. Open to everyone!

* July 25 - 28. Guest Faculty at Book Passage's MysteryWriters Conference, Corte Madera.

* August 1. 6 PM Mechanic's Institute Library, San Francisco. Season finale event. Flamenco music and dancing; tapas and Spanish wine will be served.
* August 7. 7 PM. A Great Good Place for Books. Oakland

* September 21. 1 PM. Orinda Books.

VIRTUAL TOUR

Guest post from Gillian Bagwell, author of VENUS IN WINTER

2013-07-10T13:35:00.005-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Gillian Bagwell, author of Darling Strumpet, The September Queen, and her latest release, VENUS IN WINTER, which tells the extraordinary story of Bess of Hardwick, one of the Elizabethan era's most formidable women. As a young woman at the glamorous court of King Henry VIII, Bess finds a treacherous world she must quickly learn to navigate. The fates of Henry’s wives convince Bess that marrying is a dangerous business yet she finds the courage to wed not once, but four times. Outliving two husbands and securing her status, when she is widowed a third time she is left with a large fortune and even larger decisions—discovering that, for a woman of substance, power and possibilities are endless.

Please join me in welcoming Gillian Bagwell, who offers us this post on Tudor jousting.

Tudor Jousting Tournaments: Pageantry, Excitement. and Danger by Gillian Bagwell

There may be few things more blood-poundingly exciting to watch than two armored men on horseback thundering toward each other, lances leveled with the intention of sending each other sprawling into the sawdust before a cheering crowd.Tournaments developed as training for war, when close fighting between mounted knights was the way battles were fought, and the original medieval tournaments were often melees involving opposing groups of men who clashed on open ground, frequently resulting in real battlefield injuries.

By the Tudor era, jousting tournaments were purely sporting events, and the participants and spectators were royalty and nobles, the only people who could afford the expensive and highly-trained horses, spendid armor, and backup personnel that were necessary. But though by the sixteenth century jousters weren't trying to kill each other, the tiltyard was still a very dangerous place. On June 30, 1559, King Henri II of France was severely injured during a tournament when his opponent's lance splintered and penetrated his visor, piercing his skull. Despite the efforts of his surgeons, he died on July 10.

Jousting in the 16th century

The following day, probably before news of Henri's death had reached England, Queen Elizabetjh and her court were enjoying a tournament at Greenwich, one of eight held during the first seven years of her reign, including a two-day extravaganza held shortly after her coronation. The competitions provided an opportunity for her courtiers to impress her and win the queen's favor. Her favorite Robert Dudley and his brother Ambrose were prominent participants.

Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII, was renowned for his love of jousting, which enabled him to display his athletic prowess. The tournaments held during the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the famous eighteeen-day meeting of the English and French courts, required wagons of lumber and acres of satin, damask, and sarcenet to build a tiltyard. The numerous and elaborate costumes for Henry and his knights and their attendants, armorers, saddlers, stablemen, and heralds cost 3000 pounds, at a time when a maidservant earned about three pounds a year and ten pounds could buy two coaches and two coach horses.

IIronically, it was a jousting injury that was partly responsible for Henry becoming the obese and ill-tempered tyrant of his later years. In 1524, he escaped a fatal injury similar to the one that killed the French king, when he forgot to put down his visor and the Duke of Suffolk, who couldn't hear the cries of "Hold!" struck Henry above his right eye with his lance. The lance didn't break his skull, but it did bring on migraines .

Gillian Bagwell

A more serious accident occurred on January 24, 1536, when Henry was thrown from his horse during a tournament at Greenwich, and the heavily armored horse rolled over him. He was unconscious for two hours, during which it seemed likely that he would die. The fall aggravated a varicose ulcer on his leg, and for the rest of his life he was crippled and tortured by the pain of an ulcer that never healed. It's also thought that the fall may have caused an injury to the frontal lobe of his brain, resulting in personality changes including paranoia and depression.

Henry never jousted again. The shock of the event may also have contributed to Anne Boleyn's miscarriage of a baby boy, who might have been her salvation. Instead, only three months later, Henry had her arrested, tried for treason, and executed.

Thank you, Gillian! VENUS IN WINTER is in stores now. To find out more about Gillian and her work, please visit her at her website.

Guest post by Nicole Galland, author of GODIVA

2013-07-03T18:26:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome back Nicole Galland (author of I, Iago and The Fool's Tale; among others), whose latest novel GODIVA offers us a fascinating, unique look at the infamous nude rider. According to legend, Lady Godiva lifted the unfair taxation of her people by her husband, Leofric, Earl of Mercia, by riding through the streets of Coventry wearing only a smile. It's a story that has endured for nearly a thousand years. But what would drive a lady of the court to take off everything and risk her reputation, her wardrobe, even her life—all for a few peasants' pennies? In this daringly original, charmingly twisted take on an oft-imagined tale, Nicole exposes a provocative view of Countess Godiva and her ride into infamy, turning the legend into an unexpected adventure of romance, deceit, and intrigue.

Please join me in welcoming Nicole Galland.

Godiva: The Naked Truth

When I first encountered Godiva, the countess of Mercia, I thought she should merely play a cameo in a novel I was already working on. But I diligently research even my minor characters, and when I submerged myself in Godivation, I realized she deserved her own novel.

Nicole Galland

I was captivated by the discrepancy between real history and the “Godiva legend.” Briefly, the latter goes like this: Earl Leofric of Mercia mercilessly taxed the people of Coventry, ignoring his wife’s pleas to give them tax relief – until he declared if she rode naked through the streets of Coventry, he would lighten the tax. Astonished, she did it, and Leofric, indeed, lowered the tax.

Besides the obvious dozen question this anecdote raises (why would an earl encourage his wife to do something so random? and so humiliating? and then reward her for it? to his own detriment?)… this story, upon examination, falls apart for a simple fact in British history: Godiva owned Coventry, and under Anglo-Saxon law, she was the only person who could tax it. Under Norman rule, when the story was first written down nearly 200 years later, then yes, the Coventrians would have been taxed by Leofric. But before the Norman Invasion, things didn’t work like that.

Maybe this means Godiva never made the ride at all. But why would such a specific, well-developed (and bizarre) story – filled with everything from domestic sarcasm to Christian piety – spontaneously pop into being so many decades after the fact? As with most legends, it may have been based on something that really happened, but which over time was skewed and misinterpreted so that it became a tale tailored to a particular audience.

So I decided to do the same. With history to bolster my own take on the legend – namely the existence of the heregeld, a detested national tax that was used solely to fund the king’s private military – I decided to tell the story so that it would speak to a modern audience, in an age of military strife, tax dissension and arguments about the role of government… but also an age of strong, liberated women who are celebrated, not punished, for demonstrating they are forces to be reckoned with. I’ve enjoyed the double challenging of bringing Godiva into the 21^st century while rooting her accurately (at last) in the 11^th. She’s leapt the millennium surprisingly well – without even using a saddle.

THE QUEEN'S VOW out in paperback!

2013-07-02T10:07:00.003-07:00

THE QUEEN'S VOW, my novel about Isabella of Castile's youth and tumultuous rise to power, is out today in paperback! I'm going to be on a physical and virtual book tour this month, with two added dates in August and September for my appearances. I hope to see you at one of my events, as I really enjoy meeting readers. If you can't make it, you can always follow my virtual tour from July 2 to August 6. Click on the banner below for all my tour stops.

To purchase the book, find links to online stores here or better yet, visit your local indie store. If they don't have it, they can order it for you. I'm happy to send signed bookplates, as well. Just write to me via my Contact page on my website with your address.

Thanks for all your support! I hope to see you soon. And I hope you enjoy the book.

APPEARANCES:

* July 10. 7 PM. San Francisco Public Library.

* July 11 - 12. ThrillerFest, New York City. http://www.thrillerfest.com

* July 18. 7 PM. Books, Inc. Berkeley. http://www.booksinc.net/Berkeley

* July 23. 7 PM. Bookshop West Portal, San Francisco. Party with C.W. Wine, cheese and cake will be served. Open to everyone! http://www.bookshopwestportal.com

* July 25 - 28. Guest Faculty at Book Passage's Mystery Writers Conference, Corte Madera. http://ww.bookpassage.com/mystery-writers-conference

* August 1. 6 PM Mechanic's Institute Library, San Francisco. Season finale event. Flamenco music and dancing; tapas and Spanish wine will be served. http://www.milibrary.org

* September 21. 1 PM. Orinda Books. http://www.orindabooks.com

VIRTUAL TOUR

Exclusive Excerpt from THE CORPSE READER by Antonio Garrido

2013-05-24T09:38:00.001-07:00

I’m delighted to offer an exclusive excerpt from an upcoming historical novel out May 28. THE CORPSE READER by Antonio Garrido is inspired by Song Cí, who was considered to be the founding father of CSI-style forensic science in thirteenth-century China. This historical thriller is drawing comparisons to The Hangman's Daughter for its absorbing details of another time and received the Zaragoza International Prize for best historical novel published in Spain in 2012.

In ancient China during the Song Dynasty only a select few ever reach the coveted title of "corpse reader," a forensic elite force which, even at the risk of their own lives, has a mandate that no death go unsolved and no crime go unpunished. Cí Song is the first of those elite few. Envied for his pioneering methods, and persecuted by his peers, he arouses the curiosity of the emperor himself, who assigns Ci to track a series of heinous crimes that threaten to destroy the imperial court. But as Ci delves deeper into the mysterious deaths, there are those who will do anything to silence him—forever.

Excerpted from THE CORPSE READER by Antonio Garrido

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Cí got up early that morning to avoid running into his brother Lu. He could barely pry his eyes open, but he knew that, like every morning, the paddy field would be awake and waiting.

He got up and began putting away his bedding, smelling the tea his mother was brewing in the main room. He entered the room and greeted her with a nod. She replied with a half-hidden smile that he noticed nonetheless, and he smiled in return.

He adored his mother almost as much as he did his little sister, whose name was Third. His other sisters, First and Second, had died very young from a genetic disease. Third was the only one who had managed to survive, though she remained sickly.

Before breakfast, he went over to the small altar the family had erected in memory of his grandfather. He opened the wooden shutters and inhaled deeply. Outside, the first rays of sun were filtering delicately through the fog. The breeze moved through the chrysanthemums in the offering jar and stirred the spirals of incense rising in the room. Cí closed his eyes to recite a prayer, but the only thought that came into his mind was this: Heavenly spirits, allow us to return to Lin’an.

He cast his mind back to when his grandparents were still alive. This backwater had been paradise to him then, and to his brother Lu, who was four years his elder, his hero. Any child would have worshipped Lu. Lu was like the great soldier in their father’s stories, always coming to Cí’s rescue when other children tried to steal his fruit rations, always there to deal with shameless men who tried to flirt with his sisters. Lu had even shown him how to win a fight using certain kicks and punches. He’d taken him down to the river to splash around among the boats and to fish for carp and trout, which they’d then carry home in jubilation. He had also shown Cí the best hiding places from which to spy on their neighbors.

As Lu got older, though, he became vain. At fifteen, he was stronger than ever, as well as boastful, and was unimpressed with anything other than a good right hook. Lu began organizing cat hunts so he could show off in front of the girls. He’d get drunk on stolen rice liquor and crow about how he was the strongest in the gang. He became so arrogant that even when girls were making fun of him he thought they just wanted his attention. Eventually, all the girls began avoiding Lu, and Cí gradually became indifferent to his former idol, too.

In spite of everything, Lu had generally managed to steer clear of any serious trouble, apart from the occasional black eye from fighting or from riding the community buffalo in the water races. But when their father announced his intention to move to the capital city of Lin’an, Lu, who was sixteen at the time, refused to go. Lu didn’t want to move to any city; he was happy in the countryside. In his eyes, the small village had everything: the paddy field, his braggart group of friends, even a few local prostitutes for his amusement. Although his father threatened to disown him, Lu refused to back down. So that year the family split up: Lu stayed in the village and the rest of them moved to the capital, in search of a better future.

Cí had found it difficult adjusting to Lin’an life, though he had a routine. He was up every morning with the sun to check on his sister. He’d make her breakfast and look after her until their mother came back from the market. Having wolfed down his bowl of rice, he’d go to classes until midday, and after that he would run all the way to the slaughterhouse to help his father in his job clearing away carcasses. In the evening, after cleaning the kitchen and praying to his ancestors, he studied the Confucian treatises for recitation in class the next morning. Month after month this was his life. But one day, everything changed. His father left the slaughterhouse and got a job as an accountant for the prefecture of Lin’an under Judge Feng, one of the wisest magistrates in the capital.

Antonio Garrido

Life improved rapidly. The salary his father was now earning meant that Cí, too, could give up the slaughterhouse and dedicate himself to his studies. Thanks to excellent grades, after four years in school Cí was given a junior position in Judge Feng’s department. To begin with, he was given straightforward administrative tasks, but his dedication and attention to detail set him apart, and the judge himself decided to take the now seventeen-year-old under his wing.

Cí showed himself worthy of Judge Feng’s confidence. After just a few months he began assisting in taking statements, interviewing suspects, and preparing and cleaning the corpses of anybody who died under suspicious circumstances. It wasn’t long before his meticulousness, combined with his obvious talents, made him a key employee, and the judge gave him more responsibility. Cí ended up helping with criminal investigations and legal disputes, and thus learned both the fundamentals of law and the basics of anatomy.

Cí also attended university part time, and in his second year Judge Feng encouraged him to take a preparatory course in medicine. According to the judge, the clues to a great many crimes lay hidden in wounds. To solve them you had to develop not a magistrate’s but rather a surgeon’s understanding of trauma. Everything was going well until, one night, Cí’s grandfather suddenly fell ill and died. After the funeral, as was dictated by Chinese custom, his father was obliged to give up his job as well as the house they had been living in, since the owner, Cí’s grandfather, was dead. Without a home or work, the family had to return to the village, the last thing Cí wanted to do.

They came back to a very different Lu. He had built a house on a plot of land he’d acquired, and he was the boss of a small crew of laborers. When his father came knocking at his door, the first thing Lu did, before he would allow him to cross the threshold, was make him get down on his knees and apologize. He made their father sleep in one of the tiny bedrooms, rather than give up his own, and treated Cí with the same disinterest. Soon after, when Lu realized his younger brother no longer worshipped him and cared only for books, Cí became the target of all Lu’s anger. A man showed his true value out in the fields, Lu maintained. That was where your daily rice came from, not from books, not from studying. In Lu’s eyes, his younger brother was a twenty-year-old good-for-nothing, just one more mouth to feed. Cí’s life became little more than a series of criticisms, and he quickly came to hate the village…

A gust of wind brought Cí back to the present.

Going back into the main room, he ran into Lu, who was at the table beside their mother, slurping his tea. Seeing Cí, he spat on the floor and banged his cup down on the table. Without waiting for their father to wake up, he grabbed his bundle of work things and headed out.

“No manners,” muttered Cí, taking a cloth and wiping up the tea his brother had just spilled.

“And you should learn some respect,” said his mother. “We’re living in his home, after all. The strong home—”

“I know, I know. ‘The strong home supports a brave father, prudent mother, obedient son, and obliging brother.’” He didn’t need to be reminded of the saying. Lu was quite fond of it.

Cí laid the table with the bamboo place mats and bowls; this was supposed to be Third’s job, but recently her chest illness had been getting worse. Cí didn’t mind filling in for her. According to ritual, he lined up the bowls, making sure there was an even number of them, and he turned the teapot so that its spout pointed toward the window. He placed the rice wine, porridge, and carp meatballs in the center of the table. He cast his eyes over the kitchen and the cracked sink all black with carbon. It looked more like a dilapidated forge than a home.

Soon, his father hobbled in. Cí felt a stab of sadness.

How he’s aged.

Cí frowned and tensed his jaw. His father’s health was deteriorating: He moved shakily; his gaze was lowered and his sparse beard looked like some unpicked tapestry. There was barely a shred left of the meticulous official he had been, the man who had bred in Cí such a love of method and perseverance. Cí noticed that his father’s hands, which he used to take such care of, were anemic looking, rough and callused. He imagined his father must miss the time when his hands had to be immaculate—the days he’d spent examining judicial dossiers, doing proper work.

Cí’s father sat at the head of the table, motioning for Cí and his mother to sit as well. Cí went to his place, and his mother took her seat on the side closest to the kitchen. She served the rice wine. Third didn’t join them because of her fever.

“Will you be eating with us this evening, Cí?” his mother asked.

“After all this time, Judge Feng will be delighted to see you again.”

Cí wouldn’t have missed it for anything. He didn’t know why exactly, but his father had decided to curtail the mourning period and return to Lin’an. Cí was hoping Judge Feng would agree to take him back into the department.

“Lu said I have to take the buffalo up to the new plot, and after that I was thinking of stopping in on Cherry, but I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

“Twenty years old and still so naive,” said his father. “That girl has you wrapped around her finger. You’ll get bored of her if you carry on seeing so much of each other.”

“Cherry’s the only good thing about this village,” said Cí, eating his last mouthful of food. “Anyway, you were the ones who arranged the marriage.”

“Take the sweets I made with you,” said his mother.

Cí got up and put the sweets in his bag. Before leaving the house, he went into Third’s quarters, kissed her feverish cheeks, and tucked her hair back. She blinked. Cí took out the sweets and hid them under her blanket.

“Not a word!” he whispered.

She smiled, too weak to say anything.

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Guest Post and Giveaway from Ben Kane, author of SPARTACUS: REBELLION

2013-05-15T10:03:00.000-07:00

It's an honor to welcome back my friend and fellow author Ben Kane, as he celebrates the release of the second book in his dramatic account of Spartacus, the slave who led a massive rebellion and changed history. In SPARTACUS: REBELLION, Spartacus has already done the impossible—escaped from slavery, created a mighty army that has challenged Rome and defeated the armies of three praetors, two consuls, and one proconsul. Now the road home lies before them but danger gathers on the horizon. One of Spartacus's most powerful generals has defected, taking his men with him, and in Rome, an immense force is being gathered against him. Spartacus wants to lead his men over the Alps but others have a different plan. They want to march on Rome and bring the Republic to its knees. Rebellion has become a war to the death.

As with his first installment Spartacus: The Gladiator, Ben has created a pulse-pounding adventure that is rich with detail and characterization. The Daily Express says, "Burly prose highlights the pain, brutality and chaos of ancient combat" and the Historical Novel Reviews says, "Kane succeeds in drawing a convincing picture of how it might have been, which is what a good historical novel should do."

Please join me in welcoming Ben Kane, who offers us this guest post about how he came to write about this iconic figure as well as a giveaway of ONE copy of each of his Spartacus books. This giveaway is open to US and Canada only. To enter, please comment below. A winner will be drawn at random on May 30.

How I Came To Write About Spartacus

Ben Kane

It’s a funny thing, but the idea for writing about Spartacus came about by chance. In March 2009, I was talking with my agent about ideas for books. I had already set my mind upon a series set during the second (Punic) war between Carthage and Rome, but we were talking about other possibilities as well. I won’t mention them, because I haven’t written the books yet, but Spartacus came up. It sounds naive but in that moment it was as if someone had switched a light bulb on in my head. I had watched the famous Kubrick movie once as a boy, and it had made a great impression on me. (I should add that we didn't have a TV when I was growing up, or I am sure that I would have seen it more than once!) I had had cause to read about Spartacus in the previous few years. As many of you know, Marcus Licinius Crassus was the man who put down Spartacus’ rebellion in 71 BC. He is also a character in my first novel, The Forgotten Legion. That day, the plan for a set of novels about Carthage and Rome won out, but the idea didn't go away.

In early 2010, I started hearing a lot of news about an upcoming TV miniseries called Spartacus: Blood and Sand, starring a then little-known Australian actor called Andy Whitfield*.This set me to thinking about Spartacus’ story all over again. I did some more research on the man, and became even more enamored of his achievements, and amazed by how close he had come to getting away. He was someone who was subjected to a great injustice, and he didn't take it lying down. Instead, he fought back ― in the process shaking the mighty Roman Republic to its core. Although the reasons for Spartacus’ fame have quite modern roots (he was resurrected as a symbol of the small man’s fight against oppression in the 18th and 19th centuries), his name is one of the most well-known from ancient times. Thrilled, I went as far as writing the plotline for a novel and submitting it to my UK publishers. Sadly, but perhaps sensibly, they were keen that I concentrate on my other novels.

I went back to work, finishing the novel Hannibal: Enemy of Rome. The itch to write Spartacus became a lot worse over the subsequent months, however, and I kept badgering my publishers. I am pleased to say that eventually, they gave in! I started writing Spartacus’ story in mid-December 2010, and I had it finished by mid-June 2011. The story just burst out of me. At about 100,000 words (the normal length of my novels is about 145,000 words) I knew there was no way this amazing man’s story would fit into one volume. Cap in hand, I went back to my publisher. This time, they were quick to agree to a second book. The first volume immediately became Spartacus: The Gladiator, while I named the second Spartacus: Rebellion. That book also took me little more than 6 months to write. In all, I lived, breathed and dreamed Spartacus for more than a year. It was the most amazing experience, and I was very sad to end the story. I actually dreaded writing the final battle (most everyone knows what happens, but I won’t mention it just in case), but when the time came, the writing flowed so well. Working up to 16 hours a day, I wrote more than 15,000 words in 8 days. By the end, I was totally drained, but it had been a fantastic experience. It is my sincere hope that readers will get as much enjoyment out of reading the books as I did in writing them.

*Andy was a mesmeric actor, who totally made the role of Spartacus his. Tragically, he died before the rest of the series could be made. His role was taken over by the actor Liam McIntyre.

Thank you, Ben! Best of success with the book. To follow Ben on his virtual tour, please go here. To find out more about Ben and his work, visit his website. And don't forget to comment below to enter the giveaway.

Q&A with James Forrester, author of ROOTS OF BETRAYAL

2013-05-10T09:23:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome back James Forrester, whose second novel ROOTS OF BETRAYAL was published this week. Following the harrowing adventures detailed in Sacred Treason, Forrester's first installment of this exciting series set in the reign of Elizabeth I, Catholic herald William Clarenceaux is now the custodian of a highly dangerous document. When it is stolen, Clarenceaux suspects a group of Catholic sympathizers and soon enters a nightmare of suspicion, deception and conspiracy. Conflict and fear, compounded by the religious doubts of the time, conceal a persistent mystery. Where has the document gone? Who has it and who really took it? And why? The roots of betrayal are deep and shocking: and Clarenceaux's journey towards the truth entails not just the discovery of clues and signs, but also the discovery of himself.

Please join me in welcoming James Forrester.

You are well known for your non-fiction work. What inspired you to turn to historical fiction? What can you tell us about your reasons for writing THE ROOTS OF BETRAYAL?

At the most fundamental level, it has to do with the messages we send out when writing history, and the limitations of non-fiction. I play around with non-fiction more than most people. I devise new ways of analysing historical evidence, and I find new ways of disproving myths. I also come up with new theories and forms of how to write history – from treating the past as a ‘foreign country’ that we can visit to writing an objective diary of a year, day by day. BUT – but, but, but – no historical form or theory allows you to say what you want to say about humanity as you see it through your own eyes. Non-fiction history is always primarily about someone else, someone in the past. If you want to write history that expresses something in your heart, you have to turn to fiction, plays or poetry. And plays and poetry don’t sell.

The first book in the trilogy, Sacred Treason, was partly inspired by some documents I came across in the course of doing some historical research for the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts in the nineties. More important, however, was a woman who… How shall I put this? Well, to be honest, she encouraged me to think of her in romantic ways. I am a happily married man, so it created problems. However, the problems that arose for me in the modern world weren’t half as bad as those I’d have had to deal with in Elizabethan or Puritan times.

This is what got me thinking about the whole historical fiction thing. Using the past as a magnifying glass, we can expose aspects of our daily lives in different ways. Adultery in the modern world is today unworthy of a newspaper column inch (unless you’re royal) but in the 1650s you could be hanged for it. Treason today is almost laughable – but you could be tortured to death for it in the 1580s. And heresy, which today no one blinks an eye about, could result in your being burnt at the stake in the sixteenth century. The backdrop of the past can be used to say things about humanity in a bigger and more vibrant way – and historical fiction can be used to say things about your own life that are true. Put those two things together, and there you have it. There were truths that that I was keen to explore that could never have been fitted into a non-fiction history book, and they were important and dramatic enough to warrant them being set in dramatic times.

As for The Roots of Betrayal in particular,I wanted to create an atheistic character to set as a foil against my religious hero, known as Clarenceux. One night I went round the corner to my local pub and there was a good friend of mine in the bar. The way he was standing, legs slightly apart, reminded me of a pirate standing on the deck of a ship – and as I looked at him and he smiled back, the character of Raw Carew was born. Just as Clarenceux is loosely based on me, then Raw Carew is loosely based on my friend. And plenty of other people from this village are to be found behind the masks of the faces of his pirate crew.

Tell us about the time period in which your book is set. What drew you to this particular era? What are some of the challenges and/or delights about writing about this time?

The Roots of Betrayal is set in 1564. The doubts about the religious change in England – from Catholicism to Protestantism (but not as far as Puritanism) allow the historian to talk about a wide spectrum of things that really mattered to people, about the challenges of the world and how people understood their place in existence. At the same time people were just about becoming able to think that there is no god, and so atheism is something we can stir into the mix.

There were some great historical characters too. I loved writing the dialogue between Sir William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, in which each is trying to outwit the other.

In my day job as a historian I research and write about England in many time periods, over the last thousand years. The attractions of the 16th century are that it is sufficiently familiar that people can visualize the period easily (portraits, TV shows), and they can pretty well understand the English of the time when you want to quote it (it’s much harder for the medieval period - Latin and French). There are many more things that can be safely taken for granted about life in the sixteenth century (for example, widespread ability to read (25% men in 1600, 10% women), or to communicate with someone by letter). These things are very difficult to keep out of a medieval novel because you have to explain to the reader, who automatically assumes that literate people could and would write a letter, that they normally would not even think of doing it (because they could read but not write, or they did not have vellum or ink, or did not have the means to send the letter, etc). It’s also a period in which I did a PhD, so I’m very happy writing about anything to do with medicine, nursing and ill-health for the period.

What process did you use to transport yourself and your readers to another era? How do you go about your research and incorporating it into fiction?

I don’t do any research. With four history degrees, years working in archives, and a lifetime engaged in historical enquiry, it’s more important for me to LOSE facts rather than gain them. I need to get rid of the bits of the past that are unnecessary to my storytelling. This is the main thing: the books are not about the past; they are about us now. They are set in the past but they are about me and the people I know, and the things I feel, and the ambitions and desires I have (for myself and for others). If I wanted to write about the 1560s, I would write a history book (and I have – The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England). My novels, in contrast, are rather are about me expressing myself, not about the past, or recreating the past. You know yourself: the passions we write about are our passions and (in the broadest sense), what turns us on. We don’t try to recreate the enormous fun and amusement had by the masses of people who flocked to see people hanged or to bet on the cockfights, or rushed to see the dogs and bulls killed at a bull baiting. What matters in historical fiction is what matters to us in the here and now. When I am writing fiction, I don’t want to be a slave to a period in which cruelty, hierarchy, misogyny and racism were all seen as justified in the eyes of man and god. I have to deal with that quite enough in my non-fiction!

Does your historical fiction convey a message or theme relevant to our world today? If so, what do you think it is? If not, how do you think readers can find common ground with the characters in your story?

Oh, this is a good question, especially now that I’ve expressed where I’m coming from in my fiction. Yes, there are moral, sexual and relig

ious dilemmas through the book – throughout all three books. I suppose the big story in my historical fiction is this: there is only one true virtue and that is loyalty - but everything in life conspires to make people stray from the path of loyalty. In this book, enmity does, love does, desire does, fear does, sadness and loss do, the state does, vengeance does, protective instincts towards a child do, a refusal to accept responsibility does. Loyalty to one person/thing forces you to be disloyal to another. And yet any disloyalty is to alienate yourself from part of your earlier world. In my opinion, making these difficult decisions is what makes us human. That is what my fiction is about.

I could set my stories in any period and say much the same things. But because of the public reactions to disloyalty in an age which saw loyalties tested to the extreme, the second half of the 16th century is the best.

Can you tell us about your next project?

The Clarenceux Trilogy is finished. The third and final volume, entitled The Final Sacrament, came out in the UK last year and will be published by Sourcebooks in the USA in Fall 2013. My current project is a 3-part TV series based on my second Time Traveller's Guide (Elizabethan England), which will be aired in the UK in April, and then I hope will be shown elsewhere in the world. My next non-fiction book is entitled ‘Centuries of Change. Basically it asks which century of the last ten saw the most change, in the Western World. My next novel is going to be completely off-the-wall, utterly different from anything I’ve ever written - or ever read , for that matter. It covers one man's life - but over 600 years. More than that I can’t say at the moment. It’s a secret. But I’ll tell you over a pint when next you visit England!

Thank you, James! We wish you the best success with The Roots of Betrayal. To find out more about James Forrester and his work, please visit his website.

Guest post by M.J. Rose, author of SEDUCTION

2013-05-07T09:00:00.003-07:00

I'm honored to have M.J. Rose as my guest today. In addition to being my good friend, M.J. is the author of SEDUCTION, her haunting new novel about Victor Hugo's desperate search to contact his dead daughter and the frightening effects that his quest exerts on a modern-day young woman who travels to Jersey Island to seek refuge from her grief. This is one of my favorite novels of the year; long known for her mastery of paranormal suspense in such novels as The Reincarnationist and The Book of Lost Fragrances, M.J. has crafted a vivid, exquisitely Gothic tale about immortality, passion, and the lengths we all might go to for love.

Please join me in welcoming M.J. Rose, who offers us this post about the writing of her new book:

When Seduction comes out on Tuesday, readers who buy the hardcover and open it will find, what I hope, will be a surprise. The endpapers show my hand written manuscript of the book along with the pen and the ink I wrote it with.Why did I write 122,833 words in ink?

M.J. Rose's hand-written manuscript

I love challenges, but to tell the story of Victor Hugo’s experiments with séances in his own voice? What kind of crazy idea had I come up with? Surely it was lunacy to even attempt it.I don’t have literary illusions. I had just fallen in love with Hugo’s story and wanted to tell it. What fascinated me was how much had been written about his life as a statesman, poet and author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, but how little had been written about a certain part of his personal life: his dabbling with hashish, his preoccupation with reincarnation and the more than100 séances he’d conducted during a two year period while he lived on the Isle of Jersey.

During my research, I hadn’t once stopped to think that in order to tell the story of Hugo’s seduction by the spirit world, I would have to find his voice.But there I was. Finally ready to write, sitting at a computer in a very 21^st century world trying to conjure a mid 19^th genius. For weeks I was stumped.

Then I had a revelation. I didn’t need to invoke the genius, just the man. I had read Hugo’s letters. I knew that the eloquence and brilliance of his poetry and prose didn’t always exhibit itself when he was writing to people close to him. Sometimes he was an extraordinary man saying ordinary things to his family.That was the Hugo I needed to find try to find. The one who was relating a tale to an intimate. Not writing for the ages. Not trying to be brilliant – just attempting to reason out an unreasonable time in his life that had disturbed him. But I still couldn’t do it. The cold keyboard, the sound of the mechanical clicking, the icons at the top of the page, the spell check. All of it was a gulf between me and the man I needed to channel. I decided it was hubris to even attempt to write this novel. Absurd to try. And yet, I couldn’t give up.

Carl Jung said that often coincidences aren’t coincidences at all.

One day in fit of frustration I got up from my desk in a huff and managed to tip over a jar of pens. One was an old fountain pen. It rolled and fell on the computer. I stared at it for a moment.

What if…

I found a bottle of ink. Filled the pen. Then pulled out a simple notebook and started to write. Not the way I write, on a computer, but the way Victor Hugo would have written over one hundred and fifty years ago. Pen on paper. I began. And as the ink flowed… the words flowed.

I don’t remember writing this book. Each day when I sat down and uncapped my pen I disappeared into the world of the novel. Three notebooks and 122,833 words later, I finished Seduction.

Seduction is the first novel I have written by hand. Perhaps the last. Definitely one of the most fascinating journeys that I’ve ever taken.

I do very much hope it proves fascinating for you as well.

Thank you so much, M.J. We wish you all the success in the world with Seduction. To find out more about M.J. and her novel, or enter her special giveaway, please visit her website. And tomorrow, May 8 at 3:30 Eastern time, MJ will be chatting about her novel and offering a giveaway on Booktrib.

Guest post by Anne Easter Smith, author of ROYAL MISTRESS

2013-05-06T14:09:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Anne Easter Smith, whose novel ROYAL MISTRESS was published this week.
Set in the ever-popular Plantagenet era, Anne offers us the rarely told story of Jane Shore, mistress to Edward IV, the daughter of a goldsmith who rose to fame and danger in the king's volatile court. Romance Reviews Today says the novel is a "Perfect 10": Beautifully written . . . entertaining and informative."

Please join me in welcoming Anne Easter Smith, who brings us this fascinating guest post about Edward IV’s Women.

I know we are all mesmerized by Richard III at the moment, but as a king, his brother Edward IV was far more influential, being that he reigned for more than 20 years from 1461-1483 (give or take the 10 months he was in exile), and Richard reigned for only two (1483-1485). So, I set out to make Edward more prominent when I chose Jane Shore as my protagonist in Royal Mistress. Of course, he had appeared in three of my other four books, and I had formed a pretty good idea of who he was after all those years of researching the York family during the Wars of the Roses. It’s astonishing how much larger than life he became as I wrote about him. Had he lived today, he would probably have been a celebrated professional athlete or maybe a movie star--with the requisite trophy girlfriend on his arm.

He brought England out of a hundred plus years of war--first with France and then with his cousins, the Lancaster branch of the Plantagenets. Finally, in the 1470s and early ‘80s, England was able to concentrate on building up its economy at home, while the merchant class was thriving. Trouble was, Edward was really better sitting on a horse and leading his men to battle than sitting on his throne leading politicians, and I think he got bored. By the time he was in his mid-thirties he was overweight and indolent. However, he never lost his lust for the opposite sex. Although the names that have come down to us of his known mistresses number a mere five, Edward and his chamberlain were reputed to enjoy the pleasures of unsuitable young ladies on occasion during their forays into the city of London.

Sir George Buck, in his “History of the Life and Reign of Richard III” published in 1646 and who was the first historian to try and rectify the bad reputation the Tudors had foisted on Richard, mentions a little known first mistress of Edward, Catharine de Claringdon, but he is the only one who has. However, the other four women are well documented. I shall skip over his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, as for most of Edward’s reign she was his acknowledged wife, although he did fall hook, line and sinker for her and thus marry her in secret to get her into bed, knowing she was really not a suitable consort for the king of England.

Edward IV

So who were the three mistresses of whom Edward himself remarked that one “was the wiliest, another the merriest, and the third the holiest harlot in the land.” We are not sure which order the first two (and let’s throw Elizabeth Woodville in that timeline, too) came, but they were written about in 1460s, the early part of Edward’s reign.

We do know that Jane Shore was Edward’s last mistress, beginning in the mid 1470s and still in favor when he died, and the one Edward described as the “merriest.” Poor Eleanor Butler, nee Talbot, ended her life in a nunnery, which might suggest why Edward nicknamed her his “holiest” concubine. By process of elimination, the “wiliest” must have been Elizabeth Lucy, nee Wayte, often called the elusive mistress. We think she was born in 1445, three years after Edward, and was the daughter of a landowning family from Hampshire. She became the wife of a knight named Lucy and was widowed young. She gave birth to two of Edward’s known bastards: Elizabeth, born circa 1463, who ended up marrying a Thomas Lumley; and Arthur “Wayte” in 1465 or 1467, who was finally recognized at court, surprisingly by King Henry VII, and rose to become Viscount Lisle. Why Elizabeth was wily, we aren’t sure, but she was never mentioned after 1467, giving rise to the supposition she may have died giving birth to Arthur.

The more interesting of the early mistresses is Lady Eleanor Butler, nee Talbot, daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury. This was no commoner, and her sister was the duchess of Norfolk, and both were known for their beauty. She married Sir Thomas Butler, heir to Lord Sudeley, at age fourteen or thereabouts, whose pedigree had connections to royalty. Sir Thomas died in 1461 leaving her childless and a wealthy widow. It was when she appealed the Crown’s confiscating her inheritance that she petitioned the lusty Edward in person and was soon being pursued by the handsome young king. But did he or did he not promise her marriage in order to get her into his bed--commonly known as a pre-contract? That is the question that had enormous ramifications for Edward’s son and heir at the time of his death in 1483. Let me explain.

Today, there is nothing binding between a man and a woman promising to marry. We call it an engagement and is usually the precursor to the actual binding of the couple in matrimony. In medieval times, the promise of marriage followed by intercourse was tantamount to a binding commitment or marriage and recognized by the church. After Edward’s death, his brother Richard of Gloucester became Protector of his nephew, the boy king Edward V, who was awaiting his coronation. During those precarious weeks in May and June 1483, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, one Robert Stillington, stepped forward and declared he had been witness to a pre-contract between Edward and Eleanor BEFORE Edward secretly married Queen Elizabeth Woodville, making Edward’s marriage with the queen was bigamous and thus bastardizing all the offspring of that union.

Ah, you say, but Richard of Gloucester had designs on the throne and probably paid the bishop to come forward with this preposterous story. Why did he wait until Edward was dead to announce his information to the world? Why didn’t Eleanor Butler come forward at the time of Edward’s announcement of his marriage to Elizabeth in 1464; surely she had a better claim to that marriage certificate? We have to remember that this was in medieval times and women had no power, especially a woman like Eleanor who had no father or husband or brother to step forward for her. It would be her word against Edward’s and Edward was the king. What about the good Stillington? He knew how to feather his nest: Was it coincidence that at the beginning of the year of Edward and Eleanor’s pre-contract, Stillington held only a couple of minor ecclesiastical appointments and was keeper of the Privy Seal, but later that same year he was given a handsome annual salary, and when the marriage of Edward and Elizabeth was revealed, Stillington became Bishop of Bath and Wells. Hmmm, a possible reward for keeping his mouth shut?

Anne Easter Smith

When all hope was lost to Eleanor by the marriage of the king to Elizabeth, she retired into a convent and died there in 1468. Poor “jilted” Eleanor. Edward managed to ignore the whole episode until it came back to bite him in his posterior--posthumously. Edward’s final--and he is said to have declared favorite--mistress was Jane Shore, the subject of Royal Mistress. Unfortunately, for Jane she was still in favor when Edward suddenly died, leaving our heroine without a protector. She had left her husband and been ostracized by her father, and she could have been reduced to penury and ridicule had Edward’s chamberlain and friend Will Hastings not taken her under his wing.

But I don’t want to spoil the drama that was Jane Shore’s rise and fall. You’ll have to read Royal Mistress discover that for yourself! All I will say is that she was witness to some of the most compelling events in 15th century English history, the lover of three powerful men, and the unfortunate scapegoat of my favorite king, Richard III. Jane’s story has inspired plays, poems, ballads and prose down the centuries, and her nickname was always The Rose of London.

Thank you, Anne. We wish you the best of success with this new novel! To discover more about Anne and her work, please visit her website.

Guest post from Jennifer Epstein, author of THE GODS OF HEAVENLY PUNISHMENT

2013-04-22T09:19:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Jennifer Epstein, author of THE GODS OF HEAVENLY PUNISHMENT and the highly acclaimed, The Painter from Shanghai. Set in World War II, depicting one of the war's most devastating events and its aftermath, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment is an vivid, evocative novel told through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl, Yoshi, who is on her way home when American bombers shower her city with napalm—an attack that leaves one hundred thousand dead and half the city in ruins. In the days that follow, Yoshi’s old life blurs beyond recognition, leading her to a new world marked by destruction and shaped by those considered the enemy, included a downed bomber pilot taken prisoner; a gifted architect who helped modernize Tokyo’s prewar skyline and is now charged with destroying it; and an Occupation soldier with a dark secret of his own. Each will shape Yoshi’s journey as she seeks safety, love, and redemption.

Please join me in welcoming Jennifer Epstein, who offers us this guest post on That Pesky Line Between History and Fiction!

One of the most frequent questions I get as a historical novelist is: “How much of what you write is really history?” It’s a good question. And an important one, I think--especially given how discomfort-making the blending of fact and fiction can be. It’s sort of the literary version of mixing beer and liquor: for some people, even the idea makes them queasy.

I discovered this myself while writing my first novel, The Painter from Shanghai (W.W. Norton 2008). As a former journalist--with both a BA and an MA in Asian Studies--I take both facts and history very seriously. At first even I was a little anxious about fictionalizing a real-life character from a different culture and era. But the story of prostitute-turned-post-Impressionist Pan Yuliang seemed ideal for a novel, since even in her native China there is very little documentary evidence about her life. In fact, when I began researching her in 1999, most people seemed to rely mainly on another fictionalized biography—one published anonymously during the ‘80’s. Even academics, I noticed, would refer me to this unattributed, novelized version for lack of better source material.

As my research progressed, though, I began to notice something else: namely, a reluctance by some of the sources I approached to be associated with a fictionalized history. No one said so in so many words. But there was a clear pattern of dropped email chains and unreturned calls from various professors and scholars of the “straight” history world to whom I’d reached. Having never encountered such reticence in my previous field of journalism, I found it somewhat baffling at first. But an early review for Painter shed some light.

Writing for the scholarly Asian Review of Books, editor Peter Gordon had many nice things to say about my novel. In the end, though, he admitted that the idea behind my novel unnerved him: “The problem is that the real Pan keeps on getting in way….one continually wonders how much is real and how much dramatized…. The result is that The Painter From Shanghai sits at the intersection of biography and fiction, a place which I personally find somewhat uncomfortable.” Which led me to ponder: where, exactly, is that intersection? Or rather: what rules should be followed when mixing “real history” with writerly imagination?

For myself, at least, it’s actually pretty straightforward. There is no question that truth is important, and it is a period writer’s responsibility to get the details right wherever and whenever possible. But in the end, a novelist’s first job is to tell a good story. To craft a compelling yarn, peopled by characters her readers can not just picture but inhabit--live and breath, see and sigh and even smell through. And while reassuringly fact-checkable, names, dates and places alone simply don’t provide a broad enough palette to do that: to truly “flesh out” historical moments—e.g., drape them in human skin--sometimes one simply must fabricate.

Recognizing this, the rules I’ve set for myself are simple. I research my projects intensely, get all my facts straight, and resolve to do my best to stick to them. I am allowed, however, to take historical liberties that are at least somewhat plausible—in other words, don’t contradict broadly-accepted historical fact. For instance, in fictionalizing Pan Yuliang’s story I have her meet the Chinese revolutionary Zhou Enlai at Lyon University, and then again later on in Shanghai. There’s actually no historical proof the two ever really met. And yet the fact that these two real figures were in Lyon and Shanghai at the same time, and definitely knew people in common, made it seem credible to me that they might have met. Moreover, introducing Zhou as a character was a way to give readers a taste of the time’s political fervor and excitement, which was one of my goals as a novelist. And so, I picked him for my palette. The same rationale wouldn’t have worked for every character from the period, however. For instance, seating Mao Zedong at Pan’s table at Les Deux Magots would have been taking it too far, since anyone familiar with the story of China’s revolutionaries in Paris would know he wasn’t part of that cliché.

Similarly, in The Gods of Heavenly Punishment I’ve added a fictional bomber (Cam Richards) to the heroic band of Doolittle Raiders who flew our first strike against Japan. Confession: no one by that name ever existed. Still, almost everything that happened to Cam Richards did happen to a Doolittle Raider, with the exception of where his bomber crashes. In my novel, this happens in Japan-colonized Manchuria, which is not a stretch most readers would notice. Besides, I needed my heroine—who visits a Japanese settlement in Manchuria shortly after the crash—to receive an item that had belonged to Cam’s wife. So overall, I figured I was within my rights to move Cam’s doomed bomber further North than any of the Doolittlers actually flew. It would not have been within my rights, however, if I decided to add, say, a third nuclear bombing at the end of the Pacific War. For one thing, it would add nothing to the story I was trying to tell. But there’s also the fact that most people stop mid-page and think: “Wait, that didn’t happen.” Then they’d probably wonder why I wrote it, and whether other historical facts in my book were fabricated. At which point I’d be guilty of a far greater authorial sin than veering from history: losing my reader.

So to the extent that there are rules about mixing fact and fiction without bilious results, they probably boil down thus:

1* Be factual whenever possible.

2* Don’t mess with the really big stuff.

3* Above all, tell a really good story.

That said, sometimes fictional narrative can play into historical truth in unexpected ways. One of my own more memorable research moments in Painter occurred over the Chinese lover I wrote into Pan’s early years in Paris. When my factchecker asked how I’d come across this character, I told the truth: that he was based on a painting of Pan’s, of a strong young man holding Chinese soil in his hands. I’d imagined him as a fellow artist, one of the Chinese students fermenting revolution in smoky Left Bank cafes. Also, someone younger than she was (I thought she’d like that). “But where did you read about him?” asked my researcher, who happened to be Chinese. She went on to tell me that there’s a man who fits the same profile as my character who lived with Pan for years in Paris, and now lies buried next to her in Montemarte. For a moment I just stared at her. Then I burst out laughing. Well, what do you know, I thought. In this one case, at least, my fiction had led me straight to the facts.

Thank you, Jennifer! Best of success with The Gods of Heavenly Punishment. To learn more about Jennifer and her work, please visit her website

Q&A with Teresa Grant, author of THE PARIS AFFAIR

2013-04-12T12:07:00.001-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Teresa Grant, author of THE PARIS AFFAIR. Set during the Napoleonic era - one of my favorite times in history - shortly after the battle of Waterloo, this is a lavish mystery and adventure novel surrounding a lost child and family secret, featuring the suave intelligencer, Malcom Rannoch, and his intrepid wife, Suzanne, who must race against time and the crumbling world around them to discover the truth of the child's whereabouts.

Please join me in welcoming Teresa Grant.

Please you tell us about your inspiration for writing THE PARIS AFFAIR.

When I wrote about Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch at the Congress of Vienna in Vienna Waltz, I knew I wanted my next two books in the series to be set around the battle of Waterloo (Imperial Scandal) and then post-Waterloo Paris (The Paris Affair). I loved writing about Waterloo, but I was equally excited to tackle its aftermath. The Bourbon Restoration and the White Terror are such a fascinating time. Knowing the setting, it made sense for the plot to revolve around the attempts of the Ultra Royalists to exact vengeance on those who had supported Napoleon after his escape from Elba. I got the idea of an agent who had worked for the British using secrets to blackmail them into helping him escape Paris and supporting him in style in England. And then, because I think stories are stronger with a personal element, I thought of Malcolm’s murdered half-sister Tatiana Kirsanova and what the implications would be if one of those secrets concerned a secret child she had left behind in Paris. Thematically, a number of the characters are trying to reclaim a lost heritage in one way or another.

What drew you to the particular era that your book depicts? What are some of the challenges and/or delights about writing about this time?

I was initially intrigued by the Regency/Napoleonic era through Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. I think it’s such a fascinating time period, on the cusp between the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, between the classical and romantic eras, between the Les Liaisons Dangereuses generation and Victorian repression. The ferment of the French Revolution ripples through despite the efforts of some politicians to turn back the clock. In many ways those tensions came to the fore in the post-Napoleonic era when politicians and diplomats redrew the map of Europe. My protagonists, Malcolm and Suzanne, are both intelligence agents, and there are so many wonderful opportunities for spy stories in this era, both James Bond adventure and the sort of intricate chess games and moral dilemmas John le Carr’s dramatizes so brilliantly. So many different sides, so many different factions within sides. The French under Napoleon had been bent on conquest, but they had also brought much-needed reforms to many countries. Some liberal Spaniards saw supporting the French in the Peninsular War as the quickest route to progressive reform.

And after the Napoleonic Wars, a number of the victors wanted to turn the clock back to before the French Revolution and saw any hint of reform as one step away from blood in the streets. Friends easily melt into enemies and back again. Napoleon’s longtime foreign minister Prince Talleyrande later became prime minister under the Bourbon restoration, Joseph Fouche who had been ruthless in using terror against enemies of the Bonapartist government was equally ruthless in going after Napoleon’s supporters who were proscribed from the amnesty after Waterloo. In the midst of breakneck adventure, a love affair can have political consequences, a tactical decision can shatter a friendship, it can come down to a question not of whether or not commit betrayal but only of who or what to betray. It’s a fun era to research because a lot of material is available - letters, memoirs, diaries, newspapers, novels of the time. There’s a fascinating cast of real historical figures to explore: Talleyrand, Fouche, Talleyrand’s niece Dorothee and her sister Wilhelmine of Sagan, the Duke of Wellington, the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh, the scandalous Lady Caroline Lamb. To the extent there are challenges, it’s sometimes it can sometimes be difficult to find sources that focus specifically on the Regency/Napoleonic era as distinct from what came before and after.

Even say typing in a search in Google images, if one puts 19th century Paris, most of the images will be from the later 19th century, but if one puts 18th century Paris the images may be too early.

What process did you use to transport yourself (and readers) to another time period? How do you go about research and incorporating it into fiction?

I love reading letters, diaries, and memoirs of people who lived through the events I’m writing about. I love to travel to the area I’m writing about, but that isn’t always financially and logistically feasible (I was pregnant and had a baby while writing The Paris Affair). If I can’t visit the place in person, I look at a lot of pictures and talk to friends who have been to the area. I also find historical films are incredibly helpful, as long as one knows enough about the era to know where they have taken liberties :). I find having a theater background very helpful in terms of thinking of my book in scenes and acts.

To bring the setting alive, I try to put myself in the scene. First one has to know how a character would be dressed, then one has to imagine what it would be like to be moving about in a corset and a long skirt, or a cravat and waistcoat. I try as much as possible to show my characters interacting with their environment rather than just giving detached descriptions. It’ll often make lists of what I can use in a setting for each of the five senses.

I think most historical fiction says something about the time in which it is written as well as the time in which it is set. The issues surrounding power dynamics, political factions, the rights of small countries versus larger ones, the moral ambiguity of spying, and the challenges of bring about social change are all relevant in the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath and today. Also, my central couple, Malcolm and Suzanne Rannoch, are both intelligence agents. A lot of what they deal with juggling being a diplomatic couple and also spies, investigators, and parents is remarkably similar to similar to a modern couple struggling to balance family and the demands of careers.

Can you tell us about your next project?

I’m currently finishing up the next book in the series, provisionally titled The London Gambit. It’s set in London in December 1817. Malcolm and Suzanne have taken up residence in Britain and have a second child. Malcolm has left the diplomatic service and gone into Parliament, but you cannot really leave the spy game. Their friend, playwright Simon Tanner, climbs through their library window one night, rain-drenched and bloody, clutching a manuscript. Malcolm and Suzanne are drawn into a mystery involving an alternate version of Hamlet that may or may not be by Shakespeare, a mysterious secret society, Irish rebels, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Lord Byron.

Thank you, Teresa. Best of success with The Paris Affair. To find out more about Teresa's work, please visit her website.

Q&A with Lauren Willing, author of THE ASHFORD AFFAIR

2013-04-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Lauren Willig, bestselling author of The Pink Carnation series, whose novel THE ASHFORD AFFAIR debuts today. Set in the 1920s and modern-day Manhattan, this enthralling tale of two women and the family secrets that bind them moves from the inner circles of WWI-era British society to the broad expanses of Kenya. Lauren has been highly praised for her novels and The Ashford Affair is no exception, with Library Journal starring its review, saying: "[A] nuanced story teeming with ambiance and detail that unfolds like African cloth, with its dips and furls and textures, woven by a master storyteller."

Please join me in welcoming Lauren Willig.

Please you tell us about your inspiration for writing THE ASHFORD AFFAIR.

THE ASHFORD AFFAIR was one of those books that popped up out of the blue. I wasn’t meant to be writing about 1920s Kenya; I was scheduled to write another novel set during the Napoleonic Wars. But one rainy afternoon in the fall of 2010, a friend sent me a copy of Frances Osbornes’s The Bolter as a gift. It wasn’t just that I was fascinated by the rackety life of British expats in Kenya; I was deeply struck by the author’s comment, in the preface, that she hadn’t known that the Bolter (aka Idina Sackville) was her great-grandmother until she was in her teens. The family had kept the relationship under wraps.

At the time, my own grandmother was very ill, and it struck me, forcibly, how much we assume and how little we know of our own family members and their pasts. What if a modern woman were to discover that nothing about her family was as it seemed? Once the idea struck, it wouldn’t go away. I put the next Napoleonic book on hold, read up on Edwardian England, World War I, and 1920s Kenya, and launched into the story that would eventually become THE ASHFORD AFFAIR.

What drew you to the particular era that your book depicts? What are some of the challenges and/or delights about writing about this time?

If you had told me two years ago that I was going to write a book set entirely in the twentieth century, I would have made rude noises of incredulity. After nine novels all set during the Napoleonic Wars, I had always assumed that if I were to jump century, as it were, I would go back in time to the seventeenth century, the era of my abandoned doctoral thesis, or perhaps even earlier than that. The twentieth century was just so… modern. In particular, I’ve always avoided World War I, with its gas masks and trenches and mechanized warfare.

I had no idea what I was missing.

Periods of flux and change make for larger than life characters and great fiction—and the World War I era doesn’t lack for either. One of the delights of writing about World War I England and 1920s Kenya was that I came to the topic knowing so little (despite a brief stint in grad school TA-ing a class on colonial Kenya—but that’s a whole other story!). My research was a journey of discovery, fresh and exciting, and I hope that fascination with the time period, with the quirks and characters I was discovering, came across in the book itself.

What process did you use to transport yourself (and readers) to another time period? How do you go about research and incorporating it into fiction?

I’ve always found that the best way to get a sense of the time is to read the firsthand accounts of those who lived it: letters, diaries, novels, memoirs. (Allowing, of course, for the tendency of memoirs to shift the truth about to exculpate the author!) Fortunately for me, the denizens of the early twentieth century were not chary with their prose. I found a wealth of material that I was able to draw on to understand how my characters would have perceived and reacted to various places and events. Rupert Graves’s World War I memoir, Goodbye to All That, left a deep impression on me (and my characters), as did Beryl Markham’s account of her days as an aviatrix in Kenya. Many of their experiences, as well as those of others, found their way into the lives of my characters.

For those wanting to read more on the topic, I have a truncated bibliography up on my website.

THE ASHFORD AFFAIR zigzags back and forth between a modern woman in 1999 and the life of her grandmother in the 1910s and 20s. When we meet my modern heroine, Clemmie, she’s running late to her grandmother’s ninety-ninth birthday party, harried and coffee-stained, on track for a partnership at a prestigious law firm—but at the cost of lost friendships and a broken engagement.

I know many women like Clemmie, women who have been told, by teachers and mothers, that they’re meant to go out and grasp with both hands all that the previous generations of women have been denied, who achieve and achieve and achieve, and wake up one day—usually at one a.m. in the office with half-filled coffee cups scattered around them—to ask, “How did I go wrong? Why is this making me so miserable?” With all of the discussion these days of leaning in, leaning out and work/life balance, I think there are many who will find Clemmie’s experience particularly relevant.

Can you tell us about your next project?

I’ve been hopping time periods. In August, the tenth book in my madcap Napoleonic-set spy series, THE PASSION OF THE PURPLE PLUMERIA, hits the shelves. Set in Bath in 1805, a chaperone turned spy and a former Colonel in the East India Company’s army join forces to find a pair of missing school girls and a legendary cache of missing jewels—unless someone else finds them first….

I am also very excited about my next major stand- alone novel (still untitled) which will be coming out in the spring of 2014. This new stand-alone goes back and forth between 2009 and 1849, as a modern woman, raised in New York, is drawn back to the suburbs of London when she unexpectedly inherits a house from an unknown great-aunt. In the old house on Herne Hill, she discovers a lost Preraphaelite painting hidden away in the back of a wardrobe. As our modern heroine hunts down the provenance of the painting—and the fate of the man who painted it—she discovers a tale of forbidden love and a hushed up family scandal with reverberations through the generations.I had such fun researching the early days of the Preraphaelite movement—and, of course, coopting Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a side character!

Thanks so Lauren and best of luck with The Ashford Affair. To find out more about Lauren and her work, please visit her website,

Q&A with Guy Gavriel Kay, author of RIVER OF STARS

2013-04-03T23:18:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome Guy Gavriel Kay, whose new novel RIVER OF STARS was published this week. I've long been a devoted fan of Mr Kay's work; his adaptations of history through the prism of fantasy offer breathtaking new landscapes that feel both familiar and utterly unique. In his new novel, he returns us to historical China, following the events detailed in his previous novel Under Heaven. This time, it is four centuries later, and we journey into an epic rendering of a dynasty on a collision course with fate, featuring prideful emperors, battling courtiers, bandits and soldiers, nomadic invasions, and a woman who fights in her own way to find a new place for women in the world – all inspired by the glittering, decadent Song Dynasty.

Please join me in welcoming Guy Gavriel Kay!

You are considered a master of historical fantasy, melding history and fiction into a unique setting. What inspired you to write within this particular arena? What are some of the challenges and/or delights about writing a fictionalized version of a historical era?

First of all, thank you. Good interview tactic to start with a compliment! The problem with answering a good question is that it takes, not a village, but an essay. I have written speeches and essays on what I see as some of the core strengths of this blending of history and the fantastic. You can find some of them on http://www. brightweavings.com under 'GGK's Words'.

I like grounding and controlling my art with research. I like not piggybacking on real lives, pretending I know what Justinian and Theodora were like in private. I like being able to sharpen chronology and themes. I enjoy the idea that even readers who know the history I am working with may feel suspense as they read because the books serve notice from the outset that they are inspired by, but not identical to the actual history. Pleasures for me are many, mostly in the research stage. I enjoy that enormously: reading widely, corresponding with some brilliant people who become friends, just learning things. There is a reward for me in finding themes, motifs, inspirations in the past and alchemizing them into a novel that doesn't 'cheat' by pretending to any literal knowledge. Elements of the fantastic also validate the beliefs of people in another time and place, take us away from modern 'smugness'.

I feel ethically and creatively liberated working this way. I know there are writers (and filmmakers) who say, essentially, 'It is just a novel (or a film') as an anything-goes excuse. I am not challenging their own work concept, merely expressing my own. I don't think there is anything 'just' about a novel. I think power and importance can reside in them. And I find a great deal of strength in what one critic called a 'quarter turn to the fantastic' - and I am happy to see more and more people discussing and exploring these issues.

Tell us about your reasons for writing RIVERS OF STARS? What drew you to this story?

I suppose I began learning bits and pieces of the 11th-12th c Song Dynasty as I read and interacted with scholars while researching and writing Under Heaven - which is inspired by events in the Tang period, 350 or so years before. I have an ongoing fascination, something of a recurring theme, regarding the power of the past to affect us, the way it 'doesn't go away'. Faulkner's 'the past is not even past' (paraphrasing). The Song, in many ways, was a period shaped by an intense reaction to the past of China, and felt perfect to me as a chance to delve deeply into a motif I love. In addition, there are some glorious figures that emerge from any reading of the period, and I made full use of some of these as inspirations for my protagonists and supporting characters. I am always drawn to times and places of transition, flux, the great chaos these sometimes cause - and this story is locked into that, too. The many and varied layers of conflict gave me the complexities I seem to be drawn to exploring.

What process did you use to transport yourself (and readers) to your realm? How do you go about your research?

I have always believed a writer needs to know far more about his or her material than ever gets into the book. The reader needs to be made intuitively, subliminally confident in their 'guide'. This means, for me, a horror of 'info dumps' that operate mainly to declare, 'See, I did some googling!' Details need to slip in as quietly and naturally as possible, and there are various narrative devices that make that possible if you do know your source material well. I would never, ever presume to say I am anything like a scholar in the periods of history I have worked with, but I do spend a lot of time on it, and in some targeted areas, I suppose I do end up knowing an awful lot. A few years ago I could have bored you, big time, on Byzantine mosaic technique, or where the best horse in a chariot racing quadriga was placed (it is actually a dispute! I checked with modern harness racers, along with historians!) So I suppose the answer is I start with research, and I take my time. I think that idea of a 'trusted guide' is important. As readers we are forming responses to a work below the conscious level, along with our surface reactions.

Do you believe your novel conveys a message or theme relevant to our world today? If so, what do you think it is? If not, how do you think readers can find common ground with the characters in your story?

This is tricky. I dislike didactic novels, and I always prefer to 'get' you with a stiletto in the ribs, quietly (you don't even know you're being stabbed), than with a heavy hammer to the head (alliterative or not!). I do have themes, motifs, for each novel and some that recur in various forms. I need reasons to spend as long as I do with a story, and a reason for readers to spend as much time with me as a big book demands. So the answer, 'entertainment' isn't quite enough, for me. Of course I want you awake half the night turning pages, but - foolishly or otherwise - I also want you thinking about the book after, remembering it when you encounter something in your reading or your life, afterwards.

So, yes, I do have themes and elements that I feel are deeply relevant to our times in each book, but I am reluctant to spell these out. And there's something else: very often, since every novel is a journey of discovery for me, the evolving narrative and characters show me themes I have obviously been preoccupied by, but hadn't known when I began. Small example: River of Stars has a motif of how a relationship with a parent shapes a child. I didn't plan or anticipate that. It also has a sibling relationship I am very happy with, and I didn't have that as a note or purpose at the start. Despite what I said at the top of this answer, books are organic for me, in some ways I write them and discover why I am writing them and I think readers, on their own journey through a book, can respond to that process, consciously or subconsciously.

Can you tell us about your next project?

Never can, because I just about never know. The only time I ever knew what the next book would be was when I began Under Heaven. I'd had a Chinese-inspired book in mind, and a trunk full of research books, when I went with my family to the south of France in 2004 to begin researching and writing it. I was, as I have been describing it, hijacked by the past of Provence (our fourth long stay there, but first in many years) and the ideas and themes for Ysabel became more and more insistent. So I eventually stopped fighting those, shifted gears, and wrote a Provence-inspired book there. But did know what would follow when that one was done. Otherwise, as now, I don't know. Can be an anxious feeling, in fact it usually is, but some stress and anxiety I can be good for an artist. Think oyster, seed, pearl. Or at least a writer dreaming and hoping he ends up with a pearl.

Thank you, Guy. Best of success with River of Stars! To find out more about Guy and his work, please visit his website.

Guest post by Evan Ostryzniuk, author of OF FATHERS AND SONS

2013-03-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

I'm delighted to welcome back Evan Ostryzniuk, whose second novel in the English Free Company series set in the medieval ages, OF FATHER AND SONS: Geoffrey Hotspur and the Este Inheritance, is published this month. In this latest installment, Geoffrey and his companions travel to Italy and the land of the d'Este family, where the death of the marquis of Ferrara has left his eleven-year-old son as sole direct heir. Led by the skilled but reckless Geoffrey Hotspur, an orphan-squire and ward of the mighty Duke of Lancaster, the Company finds itself mired in the dangerous struggle between the Este heir and his rivals, confronting Geoffrey and Niccolo with the same question of, when does the boy become the man?

Please join me in welcoming Evan Ostryzniuk!

The Este Inheritance and the War for Ferrara

The conflict that lies at the heart of my novel Of Fathers and Sons: Geoffrey Hotspur and the Este Inheritance was the civil war in the Marquisate of Ferrara fought during 1394-95 between two branches of the Este family. Internecine wars were common in the Middle Ages, but the struggle for the small but strategic territory in northeastern Italy was especially important for reasons ranging from the geopolitical to the cultural.

By 1394, a very fragile balance of power was keeping the peace in northern Italy, but tensions among the great and lesser city-states were running high. The absence of central authority combined with rapidly growing wealth and a sophisticated military culture had resulted in regular conflict between city-states. Meanwhile, the smaller city-state played the alliance game in order to survive, and few were more adept at this than the Este clan of Ferrara. The Este lords of Ferrara had been clever enough to remain friendly with its neighbors and the great powers for most of the 14th century, but this success also relied on an unbroken line of experienced marquises and stability within the clan. Twice the condominium amongst the branches of the family broke down during the century, which nearly cost the entire family its inheritance! However, as clever as the Este were, they did not always learn the lessons of their own history.

When the Marquis of Ferrara and head of the Este clan Alberto died in 1393, he left as his sole heir his son Niccolo, who was not only just ten-years-old, but also of illegitimate birth. Sure, the Roman pope okayed the whole deal in exchange for a few florins, but it was still a chink in the armor of the senior Este clan. However, knowing that the great powers might exploit the power vacuum in Ferrara and plunge the region into war, Niccolo’s regency council arranged for Florence, Venice, Padua, and Bologna to guarantee the right of Niccolo to rule.

However, while the regency council was taking care of external threats, they ignored internal ones. Some of the strengths of the late Alberto were his ability to centralize power, gather intelligence, exploit economic opportunities, and create an effective clientele, but this constantly shifting dynamic produced winners and losers. The losers included the city of Modena, which had been recently taken over by the Este, and several old and powerful vassal families in Ferrara, who resented the nouveau riche type that had grown rich under Alberto.

The straw that broke the camel’s back in fuming Ferrara was one of the aspects of the senior Este rule that made it unique. For several years the Este had been experimenting with feudal client relations, meaning that they wanted to get the most out of their vassals. Traditionally, vassalage, or the feudal system, was an exchange of obligations – a vassal pledged to serve the lord loyally in exchange for land. The ritual by which this was done was called ‘investiture’, whereby the vassal would kneel before the lord and vow to serve him faithfully. The catch for the lord was that he had to give away some of his wealth. During the course of their long rule the Este had created many categories of vassals, from city shop-keepers to wealthy barons. By the time of Alberto’s death, the senior Este branch had to manage over 700 of them! So, in order to accelerate the consolidation of power with Niccolo, the regency council, as instructed by Alberto in his will, decided that all Este vassals must undergo investiture at once. Usually, investiture was reserved for new vassals, heirs who had come of age, and rebels who wanted to return to the fold. For long-standing loyal vassals to be essentially stripped of their feudal contract and be obliged to kneel before a mere boy was considered to be an outrageous innovation.

The young Niccolo’s challenger for the Este Inheritance was his uncle Azzo, an old condottiere. His decision to seize the marquisate was not born out of simple greed. As played out in my novel, Azzo had a myriad of issues to contend with, ranging from the political to the personal. In addition, he had to create and effective fighting force out of the disparate elements of disgruntled vassals, small-time opportunists, and the hired companies that formed the core of any late medieval Italian army.

Niccolo’s situation was no less complex. As titular ruler, he should stand at the head of his army and defend his right to rule. As a minor, he was not prepared to take on this role and so was dependent on a regency council that may or may not have his interests at heart. He needed to defeat his uncle, yet preserve family unity. He needed to show that he was not a puppet in the hands of a deceitful cabal, but someone capable of ensuring the fidelity of his subjects. In short, he needed to demonstrate his prowess as the legitimate, strong and determined ruler, despite his age and lack of experience. How the boy went about achieving this lies at the heart of my novel.

Thank you, Evan. Best of success with the new book! To learn more about Evan Ostryzniuk and his work, please visit his website.