If the new millennium is the time of tofu and veggieburgers, then the 1940s would have to be represented by a thick, juicy T-bone steak. Life these days is cast in terms of political correctness, non-violence, and fashion from the thrift store; by contrast, the ’40s were for white men only, and you’d better have been packing some heat along with that $400 suit and fedora you were wearing.
Earl Swagger has just had the Medal of Honor bestowed on him by a beaming Harry Truman in the opening scene of Stephen Hunter’s new novel, Hot Springs. The war is over, silver jets fly in the sky, and a new invention called television is showing up in department store windows. Why then, is this Marine hero sitting in a White House bathroom pointing an auto-matic pistol to his head? The mental journey this bitter soldier makes to find inner peace is anything but peaceful. He is approached by the young, ambitious, and newly elected prosecuting attorney of Hot Springs, Arkansas. The city is lawless, run by a British born mob boss late of New York City, a hot spring of prostitution, gambling, entertainment, and booze. He’s been so successful that a certain Benjamin Bugsy Seigel is checking out his operation in hopes of transplanting the concept to an unknown desert town named Las Vegas. Earl, along with a retired FBI agent and a small group of young law enforcement officers, must take on this well entrenched and very well armed group of gangsters. Elliot Ness had it easy compared to these guys.
An experienced master of the high-testosterone thriller, Hunter does a great job of evoking the time period; the fact that the ’40s is a decade synonymous with tough guys on both sides of the law makes it easy for him. You expect his characters to be hard drinking, hard loving men’s men.
Stephen Hunter is a skilled storyteller, familiar with his settings, his characters, and his genre. If you like tough thrillers, you’ll like Hot Springs.
James Neal Webb has a gray fedora hanging on a hat rack in his living room. He hasn’t worn it in years.
If the new millennium is the time of tofu and veggieburgers, then the 1940s would have to be represented by a thick, juicy T-bone steak. Life these days is cast in terms of political correctness, non-violence, and fashion from the thrift store; by contrast, the…
A Ballad of Love and Glory rides the waves of war and the bloom of lovers’ passion, intertwining real events of the Mexican-American War with a vividly imagined relationship between a forlorn Irish immigrant soldier and a grieving Mexican curandera, or folk healer.
In her fourth novel, Mexican American author Reyna Grande explores a little-known aspect of the Mexican-American War. After the annexation of Texas in 1845, hostilities between the United States and Mexico approached a boiling point due to a land dispute near the Rio Grande. At the time, foreign-born soldiers, primarily from Ireland, Germany and Italy, made up nearly half of the U.S. Army. After the American invasion of Mexico, many of the soldiers deserted the army in favor of Mexico’s cause as they resisted further land takeover and domination by the U.S.
In Grande’s detailed and well-researched novel, Irish Catholic immigrant John Riley, who is based on a real figure, deserts the U.S. Army in 1846. Enticed by the promise of better treatment, more pay and acres of land, John joins the Mexican Army, leading a growing battalion of deserters under Saint Patrick’s banner. They become known as the San Patricios.
Meanwhile, after Texas Rangers murder her husband, Ximena Salomé uses all the healing skills her grandmother taught her to bring comfort and relief to the many soldiers felled by each brutal battle. Her fate becomes inextricably bound with John’s while saving the life of one of his fellow soldiers, and in time, longing leads them to each other’s arms.
Grande’s novel highlights the abuses that American immigrants suffered at the hands of Yankee soldiers, in addition to the atrocities of war and all the maddening political and military machinations that go along with it. Although A Ballad of Love and Glory lags in pace or falls into cliche at times, it also often excels at making history palpable and real, not dry and unimpassioned but lively and full of the emotions the people of the past surely felt.
A Ballad of Love and Glory lives up to its title as it pays tribute to the heroism of everyday people called upon to defend their honor as well as their lives.
A Ballad of Love and Glory lives up to its title as it pays tribute to the heroism of everyday people called upon to defend their honor as well as their lives.
Patrick O’Brian’s publisher is saying Blue at the Mizzen may be the last in his superb series of historical fiction, and we can only hope that is not so. Still, we have to admit that it could not last forever. After all, O’Brian is well into his eighties, and the subject matter the Napoleonic wars has, with this 20th novel, come finally to an end, with Napoleon safely on St. Helena and Aubrey and Maturin fomenting revolution in Chile and sailing the frigid seas off Cape Horn. Without the backdrop of the French wars, O’Brian’s characters (assuming that he sticks to historical accuracy) would be about to enter two generations of peace. And while there is much peacefulness in this work, it relies on the electric excitement generated by the sudden appearance of an enemy on the horizon.
Perhaps, then, it is time to assess the whole series, of which this book is a worthy member. There is nothing unique in a series of genre fiction in which you could read any single book intelligibly or could view the whole series as a sustained narrative, nor in the addictive quality of this massive work. After all, people get addicted to genre writers from Danielle Steele to Zane Grey. What makes us want to give one of these books to every reading friend, to stay up all night with the latest installment, to reread the whole series in between new books, even to read the cookbook based on the series (anyone for soused pig face)? Well, you have to admire the manifest quality of O’Brian’s work. His erudition, for example, extends to the natural history of mammals, insects, and birds, to the ethnography of more cultures than I can count, to astronomy and navigational mathematics, to vintages of 18th-century wines, to naval tactics and practices, and to the truths of the human heart. We grow to know these fictional characters and to admire their foibles and courage so much that they become old, valued friends. And here, I suppose, is the secret of O’Brian’s art: that his genuine hard work at mastering and relating to us a body of arcane knowledge makes us trust him enough to listen to what he has to say about friendship, patriotism, courage, and love.
This is a work of genius, and in the face of its inevitable end, I can only think with pleasure at the now 20 volumes on my shelf. ¦ J.
W. Foster is an attorney in Columbia, South Carolina, and an avid sailor and equestrian.
Patrick O'Brian's publisher is saying Blue at the Mizzen may be the last in his superb series of historical fiction, and we can only hope that is not so. Still, we have to admit that it could not last forever. After all, O'Brian is well…
By now, Karen Joy Fowler’s husband knows what to expect when his wife starts writing a book, like the bestselling The Jane Austen Book Club or the Booker Prize finalist We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She will lament, “Oh, it’s never been so hard,” and he will remind her: “You did say that last time. And the time before that, you know.”
“Is it possible that every book is harder than the one before?” Fowler wonders, speaking from her home in Santa Cruz, California. “Or do you just not remember? I don’t have an answer to that question.”
As she does in her writing, Fowler laces her conversations with curiosity, humor and reflection. You can practically hear her good-natured wheels turning as she discusses her latest novel, Booth, an immersive, behind-the-scenes account of the years leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865, by way of an investigation into the family of assassin John Wilkes Booth. The Booths were a famous theatrical family celebrated for their Shakespearian performances, especially father Junius and brother Edwin, whose 1893 funeral was described as one of “the most remarkable ever held in New York City” by the New York Times.
“As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”
Despite such a wealth of source material, and despite her husband’s reassurances, writing this book was particularly difficult for Fowler. Her despair over gun violence in the United States prompted her to choose this topic, but she didn’t want to focus on the assassin. Instead, she was interested in exploring the culpability and guilt of the Booth parents and siblings. How to achieve this delicate balance, “from the words, to the conception, to the way the book was organized,” was something Fowler “grappled with on nearly every page.”
Now she passes that same conundrum along to her readers. “I would not have written this book if John Wilkes had not killed Abraham Lincoln,” she says. “As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”
Even the book’s title is problematic. “It actually should be Booths—plural,” Fowler says, “but that’s just so hard to say. I knew that at least in America, if you saw a book entitled Booth, you would think this is a book about John Wilkes Booth. Which is exactly what I didn’t want you thinking!”
This is one of the primary reasons why the novel doesn’t depict Lincoln’s shooting in real time. “I didn’t want to imagine what John Wilkes Booth was thinking [in that moment]. First of all, I can’t—my imagination doesn’t stretch that far. But it’s still very painful to see that turning point in our history, to wonder what might have been.”
One passage in the novel, in fact, enumerates the many close calls with death John Wilkes had throughout his life, even before he carried out his tragic deed. “It was something that really struck me when I did the research,” Fowler explains. “[His death] would have been devastating for his family, but so much better for everyone else.”
The Booth clan has long fascinated Fowler, and she has featured various family members in three short stories, including “Standing Room Only,” which is about time travelers who journey to witness Lincoln’s death. A science fiction fan, Fowler was frustrated by the many stories she read in which time travelers seem to go undetected by those they encounter. “I thought, obviously not, it won’t be that way at all,” she says. “They’ll just be like tourists everywhere. I live in a tourist town, and I can spot the tourists. And then I went from that to thinking, well, there will be destination holidays, and one of them, unfortunately, will be the Lincoln assassination.”
Research, she muses, “is probably the closest we will come to time travel,” and from the start of creating Booth, she had mountains to sift through. A godsend came in the form of biographer Terry Alford, author of Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, which Fowler calls “magnificent,” and the forthcoming In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits. Alford’s biography features unique details, so Fowler reached out to ask a few questions. “He’s been researching this family for 30 years, and he sent me piles of research that would’ve taken me months and months to find on my own, if ever,” she says. “It was just mind-bogglingly generous.”
John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838, the ninth of 10 children. In 1822, his parents, Junius and Mary Ann Booth, emigrated from England to Bel Air, Maryland, where they bought 150 acres and moved a small log cabin onto the property. Junius, an alcoholic who was at times mentally unstable, was often away on tour, leaving his wife—with the help of enslaved men and women—to tend to farming and maintaining the home. The family faced poverty, hunger and disease; four of the 10 children died. Fowler portrays these ordeals with startling immediacy, especially from the perspective of young Rosalie, who watches “the household collapse into madness” and communes with the ghosts of her dead siblings.
Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth
“I’ve had dreams about the place,” Fowler says. “In my dreams, the barn is there, and the slave cabins are there. It’s clearly a metaphor for doing research. The property [in my dreams] was beautiful, but I had a sense of menace, that something was very wrong and that it was a dangerous place to be.”
Junius eventually had a larger home, named Tudor Hall, built on the property. It’s now a museum on a fairly small lot surrounded by other houses. “There’s a lovely group of people who maintain it,” Fowler says. “It seems the ghosts have been purged.”
The name Tudor Hall is something of a touchstone, since Fowler’s love of historical fiction was inspired by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. “I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense,” Fowler says. “Wolf Hall was so powerful that somehow Hilary Mantel has persuaded me that this is how you write a historical novel.”
Indeed, readers will feel as though they’re watching events transpire in real time, with different sections told from the perspectives of not only Rosalie but also brother Edwin and sister Asia. Information about Edwin was plentiful due to his acting career, but Asia also left behind a valuable resource. In 1874, she wrote a secret memoir about her infamous brother, though it wasn’t published until 1938, long after her death. Fowler calls Asia “an incredible woman, but hard to like. . . . I would probably have wanted to make her more likable if her own words hadn’t condemned her in certain ways.” (For instance, although Asia disapproved of John Wilkes’ crime, she blamed Lincoln for going to the theater that night.) Photographs of Asia, however, continue to bewilder the author. “Nobody talks about Asia Booth without mentioning what a beauty she was,” Fowler says, “and you look at the pictures, and you just think, what are they talking about?”
Rosalie, in contrast, remains a cipher, with few details available. She never married and had some sort of “infirmity,” widely commented on but never specified. “Every time Rosalie’s name comes up, you hear, ‘What an invalid she is, poor Rose,’” Fowler laments. But these gaps in Rosalie’s history proved useful. “There was a little more freedom to imagine who she might be. She’s pretty much made up, although the things that happened to her are not. I cannot tell you how delighted I was to discover that she had a romance with a lion tamer!”
“I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense.”
Although Fowler says she is always on the hunt for such “small details that I hope will bring the world more to life,” she also keeps a bigger picture in mind. When she first began to write Booth, she was primarily focused on issues of gun violence, but the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump caused a shift in the story’s significance. “I wasn’t really thinking about the Civil War, the ongoing legacy of white supremacy and the various ways in which that war has just never ended in this country,” Fowler says. “And yet, as I wrote, those things seemed more evident to me than the fact that John Wilkes Booth had a gun.”
By the time of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Fowler had completed her manuscript. “To watch the Confederate flag being carried into the Capitol was just terrifying and heart-wrenching, having just immersed myself in what that flag meant,” she says. “I couldn’t turn the television off. I sat and watched the footage in real time, and just couldn’t believe it.”
There’s a similar sense of horror in Fowler’s visceral descriptions of how various Booth family members react to the news of John Wilkes’ horrific act: “Edwin’s first thought is not a thought, more like a blow to the head, a sense of falling, the crashing of the sea in his ears. His second thought is that he believes it. He wishes he didn’t.”
There were several post-assassination details that Fowler had to omit from the novel—such as the fact that Ford’s Theatre collapsed during Edwin’s funeral, killing 22 people. “Maybe there needs to be a second book,” she says. “Something short—a slender, poetic novel dealing with their later lives.”
After all, Fowler says, “History is full of fabulous stories.” Fabulous, provocative, challenging and necessary—such is the story of Booth.
Photos of Karen Joy Fowler by Nathan Quintanilla
In her eighth novel, Karen Joy Fowler offers a wholly original perspective on American history through the story of John Wilkes Booth’s family.
Set in England during World War II, Jennifer Ryan’s The Kitchen Front follows four very different women as they compete in a cooking contest sponsored by “The Kitchen Front,” a BBC radio program. The winner will earn a slot as the first ever female co-host of the show. The contestants include war widow Audrey; her sister, Gwendoline, the wife of a wealthy older man; kitchen maid Nell; and Zelda, a skilled chef. Ryan’s excellent use of historical detail and gifts for character and plot development will draw readers in, and after they finish this heartwarming novel, they’ll be able to discuss engaging topics such as female agency and women’s roles during wartime.
Focusing on life at the fictional Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland, Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant is a sly, compassionate portrayal of the culinary world. Owner Jimmy Han, whose father made the Duck House a success, is making plans to move on to a flashier restaurant. The novel’s intricate plot involves members of Jimmy’s extended family, as well as a wide range of Duck House staff. Love affairs, back-of-house drama and a restaurant fire all figure into the entertaining proceedings, and questions concerning community, identity and class will inspire great reading group dialogue.
Donia Bijan’s The Last Days of Café Leila tells the story of Noor, who goes home to Iran after spending many years in America. In Tehran, her father, Zod, runs the family business, Café Leila. The return compels Noor to come to terms with her troubled marriage and reassess her life. At the heart of the novel lies Café Leila and the comfort it provides through food and camaraderie. Bijan’s nuanced depiction of modern-day Iran offers abundant subjects for book club discussion, including family ties, immigration and Iranian history.
In The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux by Samantha Vérant, talented chef Sophie Valroux works hard in hopes of one day heading up a world-class restaurant. But when her culinary career falls apart and her beloved grandmother in France has a stroke, Sophie is forced to reevaluate her life, her values and her love for cooking. Brimming with delicious recipes, Vérant’s novel is a compelling tribute to food and family. Themes of female independence, foodie culture and the nature of the restaurant business make this a sensational selection for book groups.
Reading groups will savor these delectable food-themed novels.
There’s a saying you might have heard: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Fortunately, two authors—one veteran, the other new to fiction—have ignored this warning and written novels about classical music, and we readers are luckier for it.
The Great Passion by James Runcie, author of the acclaimed Grantchester Mysteries, is a beautiful coming-of-age novel set in 18th-century Germany. In 1726, 13-year-old Stefan Silbermann is mourning the death of his mother. His father makes arrangements for Stefan to attend a music school in Leipzig, an especially useful education for a boy whose family’s business is building and repairing church organs. At school, lonely Stefan is tormented by the other students, finding solace only in singing and in the presence of the demanding but empathic choir director, Johann Sebastian Bach.
Stefan’s heavenly singing voice and sensitivity endear him to Bach, who enlists Stefan as a soloist in many of his cantatas. But Stefan remains deeply unhappy, and when he runs away from the dorms, Bach invites him to live at the Bach family home. There, Stefan basks in the warmth of domestic life, assisting Bach’s children with chores and working as a copyist for the great composer.
When another tragedy strikes, this time in Bach’s family, Stefan is a firsthand witness to the way grief can be a catalyst for musical genius, watching and then performing in the work that will become one of Bach’s most celebrated compositions, “The Passion According to St Matthew.” Stefan’s exposure to Bach’s creativity, family and devotion to God is the restorative balm that the young man needs in order to move forward with his life.
On the other end of the spectrum is Brendan Slocumb’s debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, a fast-paced thriller about a young Black violinist and his search for a priceless instrument, set against the backdrop of systemic racism within the world of contemporary classical music.
Ray McMillian has a dream of becoming a concert violinist, and nothing will stand in his way: not his unsupportive mother and uncles, his disinterested teachers or the industry’s inherent racial bias. When Ray’s beloved grandmother gifts him with her grandfather’s violin, it brings him a step closer to his dream, and when the instrument is revealed to be an extremely rare and valuable Stradivarius, his star really begins to rise.
Ray is on the verge of attending the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow when the prized instrument is stolen and held for ransom. Suspects range from members of Ray’s own family, eager to claim the insurance money, to his musical rivals in Europe. Even the descendants of the family who once enslaved Ray’s great-great-grandfather are claiming the instrument belongs to them. As Ray travels the globe, not sure whom he can trust, music remains the only constant in his life, supporting him no matter the situation.
Despite their differences in literary styles, locations and eras, these novels are connected by more than just their musical themes. Resilience is a powerful presence in both stories, whether in the face of personal pain and grief or against the constant pressures of embedded prejudices. Music is the conduit through which two young men learn to overcome loss and fight against insurmountable odds, offering not only a reason to live but also a way to thrive.
Classical music is a powerful force in new novels from James Runcie and Brendan Slocumb, inspiring their heroes and illuminating the way forward.
At the onset of the Civil War, Mississippian Gawain Harper is ambivalent about the Southern fight for independence, preferring instead to focus his efforts on teaching English at a school for girls. The Confederacy is a bad dream that he dismisses as a short-term aberration of history, until two things occur that bring the reality of the war home to him: First, his school is forced to shut down because of the war, and, second, the father of the woman he loves makes it clear that Harper will never marry his daughter unless he volunteers for military service. Gawain Harper learns what so many before and after him have come to realize: That the turning points in a person’s life are invariably capricious in nature and almost never subject to the will of the person most affected. With no job and perhaps more importantly no marital prospects, Harper joins the Twenty-First Regiment of Mississippi and marches out of the small community of Cumberland, Mississippi, to find not so much glory as peace of mind.
For the most part, Howard Bahr’s new novel, The Year of Jubilo, is about Harper’s return to Cumberland after the war. The author writes with such precision and passion about the devastation that greets Harper, it makes you wonder if Bahr, a war veteran who saw combat in Vietnam, created his main character with more recent history in mind. Bahr is a gifted writer who adheres to the dictum advanced by one of his literary heroes, William Faulkner namely, that the best writing is always about the conflicts of the human heart. Although Bahr’s story is firmly rooted in the Civil War, it is the quality of his writing, his ability to define characters by their actions as much as by their thoughts, that distinguishes this novel.
Bahr’s debut novel, The Black Flower, earned him the 1998 Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Year of Jubilo should earn him more accolades and, hopefully, an even wider audience.
At the onset of the Civil War, Mississippian Gawain Harper is ambivalent about the Southern fight for independence, preferring instead to focus his efforts on teaching English at a school for girls. The Confederacy is a bad dream that he dismisses as a short-term aberration…
Imagine that countless statues all over New York City share the likeness of one young, beautiful woman. In The Magnolia Palace by Fiona Davis, that woman is Lillian Carter, who, after her mother’s death of the Spanish flu, ends up working at the Frick mansion, which is now home to the revered art museum of the same name. The novel moves between Lillian’s story and that of Veronica, a model who, nearly 50 years later, finds herself following a mystery via secret messages in the mansion.
In each of your novels, architectural history comes so clearly alive! Tell us a bit about your research process. Did this new book challenge or evolve your process in any way? Did it lead you anywhere especially surprising? When it comes to research, the first thing I do is get a good look inside the building and then interview experts on the subject and the era. For The Magnolia Palace, I was able to get a wonderful behind-the-scenes tour of the Frick Collection in January 2020, from the bowling alley in the basement up to the top floor where the servants slept.
Usually I’d make several return trips as I write the first draft, but the city went into lockdown, making that impossible. So I was thrilled to discover that the Frick’s website includes a wonderful floor plan with a 360-degree view of each of the public rooms. If I needed to check out what artwork was above the fireplace in the library, for example, I could find the answer with just a couple of clicks. Thank goodness, as otherwise I would’ve been really stuck.
When you pass by or enter an incredible old building, what’s the first thing you look for? I’m always curious as to what has changed over time. How does the building compare to the one that was originally constructed? How has the neighborhood changed over the decades? It’s those contrasts that help me decide what time periods might work best for a novel. As I walk by, I can’t help wondering about all of the people who walked its halls, all of the ghosts that remain.
Obviously a sense of place plays a huge role in your work, from libraries and hotels to mansions and museums—and of course, the whole city of New York. What details do you seek out to bring these spaces into such vivid relief? I’m always looking for the strange details, the ones that are fun to describe because they will surprise the reader. It might be the grimace of a gargoyle over a doorway or the catwalks that span the enormous windows of Grand Central that end up drawing my attention and making it into the novel. We New Yorkers often think we know these places so well, but it’s amazing how little we “see” as we wander the streets.
How did you decide on the title The Magnolia Palace? Titles are tough for my novels, as I’m looking for a title that’s not too on the nose but which describes the location nicely and has resonance within the plot. That’s asking a lot. Choosing titles for each book is a team effort involving my editor and my agent, and they’re often the ones who have the best ideas.
For this novel, I realized the gorgeous magnolia trees outside the Frick would be a nice touchstone, one that I could bring into the story with the search for the (fictional) Magnolia diamond. And Dutton’s art department came up with that gorgeous cover with the magnolia blossoms—it was perfect.
“I can’t help wondering about all of the people who walked its halls, all of the ghosts that remain.”
The art in this novel is impressively catalogued. How did you choose which pieces to highlight in the novel? What do you think they add to the story? The scavenger hunt scenes, with clues that lead to several pieces in the Frick art collection, were really fun to write. I tended to choose works of art that have interesting backstories, ones that further illuminate what’s going on with the characters on the page. For example, the woman who sat for the George Romney painting that’s included in the scavenger hunt led a scandalous life as a mistress and a muse. When Veronica comes upon it and learns the history, it deepens how she feels about being made into an object of art as well.
I love the dimensions of these women—Lillian and Veronica, as well as Helen Frick, daughter of Henry—and wonder how you built the complexities of each of them. Where did you find inspiration for these women? And more broadly, how do you choose what types of women will occupy and make their marks on the buildings at the heart of your novels? As I research, I’m looking for women from history who accomplished great things but have since been forgotten. The inspiration for Lillian came from the carving of a nude woman over the entrance to the Frick. The model who posed for it was Audrey Munson, who achieved great fame in the 1910s but met a tragic end. She was gorgeous and successful and then suddenly an outcast, and I knew I wanted to include her story in the narrative.
The more I read about Helen Frick, the more I adored her. She was acerbic and smart, yet she was mocked in the press for her eccentricities. As a writer, I wondered what would’ve happened if Audrey and Helen crossed paths in real life, and the plot developed from there.
Then, once I decided to set part of the book in the 1960s, I thought it would be fun to have a character who is also a model, as a way to compare and contrast how women’s roles have been valued (or not) over time, and Veronica bubbled up out of that.
“We New Yorkers often think we know these places so well, but it’s amazing how little we ‘see’ as we wander the streets.”
What is your process for writing braided narratives? How do you know when they’re working well together? Once I know who the main characters are, I brainstorm scenes and create each timeline separately. Braiding them together is the toughest part, as each novel contains an element of mystery, and I have to make sure I don’t give away a clue too soon in one timeline and thereby destroy the tension in the other.
It’s always a mess at first, but once I have it down on paper, I’m eager to start writing the first draft. I write one timeline first all the way through (usually the older one), then the other, and then do a read-through to see if they work together. There’s still a lot of tweaking to be done, but by then the structure is usually pretty solid.
What is your ultimate day in New York City? Which museums or special places are especially dear to you? I’ve called the city home for 35 years now, and it’s full of wonderful places. The Frick Collection is dear to me, to be sure. I also love grabbing a pastry at Café Sabarsky at the Neue Galerie, or heading to the Campbell Bar at Grand Central for a cocktail. Hitting all three in one day would be a dream.
What are you reading now? I’m excited to start Ann Patchett’s latest book of essays, These Precious Days. She’s such a champion of authors and booksellers and is masterful working in both fiction and nonfiction. She’s probably as close to an author superhero as there is.
Photo of Fiona Davis by Deborah Feingold
Bestselling author Fiona Davis transforms New York City’s architectural history into winning fiction, and her latest, The Magnolia Palace, builds upon the secrets of the Frick Collection in a delightful blend of emotion and adventure.
Whoever said that nonsense about girls being full of sugar and spice and everything nice couldn’t have imagined Marie Antoine and Sadie Arnett, the binary star at the center of Heather O’Neill’s When We Lost Our Heads. These perversely fascinating characters are filled with guile and bile and many things vile, and even though it’s virtually a certainty that they are star-crossed, it’s impossible to tear one’s gaze away.
Marie is the beautiful daughter of a Victorian-era sugar baron; her childhood friend, Sadie, was born the odd one out into a political family of social climbers. If anything, Sadie’s ambition is to be, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s words, “a social climber / climbing downwards.” The two girls form a peculiarly strong bond in the opening of the book, just before the act that will separate them for years: They accidentally murder one of Marie’s household maids.
Rich sugar barons’ daughters don’t go to jail, not in Montreal, not back then, so the equally culpable Sadie gets pegged for the crime and is sent off to England to a school for “difficult” girls. Over the next few years, the temporarily separated pair evolve into the bewitching sociopaths who will ignite the fuse for the book’s latter-half powder keg.
Bound inextricably by murder and money, the Antoine and Arnett families navigate an unsteady truce that ultimately leads Sadie’s brother, Philip, to become a suitor for Marie’s hand. Circumstances change rapidly, though, and it dawns on Marie that—for her, at least—marriage would be tantamount to slavery. “Freedom and power,” she realizes, “were one and the same and were interchangeable.” The interfamily schism seems irreparable, and scandal ensues. Rather than retreating from the gossip, Marie leans into it, while on the other side of town, the recently returned Sadie stokes the flames with an incendiary novel whose protagonists are loosely (and transparently) based on herself and Marie.
All this personal drama plays out against the background of women’s suffrage, workers’ rights and the economic inequality that characterized the Gilded Age. It comes as no surprise that society and the sociopaths are on a collision course, but O’Neill is sufficiently deft to keep the reader in suspense as to where and how that inevitable impact will occur.
With explicit echoes of Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution, this is not a book for the faint of heart or Victorian sensibility, but it does encompass a fair amount of sugar . . . and spice.
Heather O’Neill’s perversely fascinating characters are filled with guile and bile and many things vile, and it’s impossible to tear one’s gaze away.
When I was a kid, I had fantasies of what life must be like to live inside a museum. What stories and secrets of art might I discover? In The Magnolia Palace, Fiona Davis textures such imaginings, setting her novel inside the Frick mansion and alternating between two storylines in 1919 and 1966.
The novel opens in a moment of loss: A famous model named Lillian Carter, who has posed for countless sculptures that adorn New York City landmarks, loses her mother to the Spanish flu in 1919. While Lillian is trying to navigate the complexities of the world, she finds herself caught in an imbroglio, and she runs from the scandal straight to the Frick family home. There she becomes the private secretary to Helen Frick, the challenging daughter of the man who would later transform his mansion into a museum.
Lillian’s story unfolds alongside that of Veronica Weber, a British model in the 1960s who, during a photo shoot at the Frick Collection, gets snowed in and finds herself on quite an adventure.
Within this home and museum, Davis builds a whole world that’s rife with secrets and stories. The novel moves at an engaging pace, with questions waiting to be answered at each turn. Davis knows exactly how to structure a story and how to switch between timelines; even if sometimes you aren’t quite ready to make the jump, you must, in order to find out how it all connects.
A captivating story whose characters are richly drawn, The Magnolia Palace pays particular attention to those who might go unnoticed: the deaf private secretary, the museum intern, the organ player. We discover their private lives and public exposures, which reveal the daily messiness of human lives, the construction of the self and the truths we try so hard to hide.
The title of Nina de Gramont’s second novel for adults, The Christie Affair, has a double meaning. The first is Agatha Christie’s notorious disappearance in 1926, and the second is the affair her husband, Archie, is carrying on with Nan O’Dea (the real mistress’s name was Nancy Neele), the suspiciously omniscient narrator. But in the end, the story isn’t really about either of these affairs; it’s about motherhood.
A long list of authors has imagined what really went on when Christie left her husband and young daughter for 11 days in December 1926. In de Gramont’s telling, Christie’s leaving is prompted almost as much by her despair over her mother’s death as it is by her fury at her husband’s cheating. As for Nan, her life was blighted after being banished to a hellish Irish convent for “fallen” women when she became pregnant at 19. Nan’s baby daughter was taken from her, and her goal ever since has been to find her child, or get revenge, or both.
Tying Nan’s anguish with Christie’s disappearance is part of the book’s allure, but even a reader superficially familiar with the famous author’s biography can see that de Gramont’s novel is heavily fictionalized. Christie never discussed what she’d been up to those 11 days, not even with her own daughter, and this creates a lacuna for a novelist to fill up with some outlandish stuff. Indeed, at one point the story becomes a Christie-esque murder mystery: Who has poisoned that jolly newlywed couple in the hotel where Nan has chosen to hide out, and why?
Few of the characters are particularly likable in The Christie Affair, but all are fascinating. Archie is one of those entitled, upper-crust British military men who prides himself on not understanding the minds of women, children or even small dogs. Trauma has made Nan duplicitous. Christie, in her own way, is as arrogant as her husband. When she discovers that basically all of England is searching for her, she decides to extend her holiday a few more days and work on a new book. She figures her own 7-year-old daughter won’t mind, since she has a nanny.
Despite these liberties and embellishments, de Gramont doesn’t let her story stray too far from the basic facts, so the ending’s a bit of a letdown for Nan. Still, The Christie Affair is an enjoyable entrant to the canon of “Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance” novels.
Nina de Gramont’s The Christie Affair is an enjoyable entrant to the list of “Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance” novels.
The holy grail of historical fiction is to recreate a real moment in history so that we, secure in our reading chair, surrounded by 20th century comforts, can taste it. Like all searches for a holy grail, it never works perfectly, and usually doesn’t work at all, producing second-rate genre fiction that is neither real history nor a well written novel. We can be thankful for exceptions, however, and this is one.
Mallinson is an active duty colonel with the Royal Hussars, and knows whereof he speaks. This is his first published novel, but none of it has a freshman feel. He tells the story through the eyes of Matthew Hervey, cornet and later lieutenant of a cavalry regiment in the Napoleonic wars. We first meet Hervey at the end of the Peninsular Campaign, when the British and their allies have Napoleon on the ropes and he is about to take his short vacation to Elba. The novel takes us from the Peninsula to Ireland, where Hervey is an officer of an army of occupation, and finally, as Napoleon breaks out of exile, to Belgium.
Mallinson presents his hero as competent and brave, but also a real person and something of an antihero. In the novel’s opening scene our man takes a French battery and gets arrested on the field of battle for this act of valor.
Mallinson is careful to maintain a sensitivity which some might find unusual in a professional soldier. There is very little blood-and-guts until the battle itself. Hervey finds himself in relationships with young women with whom the usual consummation is impossible. He has a mystical interlude with a French nun, and a flirtatious friendship with an Irish peasant girl. When he finally gets his chance with Miss Right, his diffidence almost sinks his chances. But only almost. For this is a novel where the hero gets the girl and lives through the carnage of the bloodiest European battle of the century, and the British win the day if only by the skin of their teeth. Wellington set the casual, graceful tone of this work when he used a term from the race track to describe what was, after all, perhaps the most important battle in European history: It was a close run thing. John Foster is a reviewer in Columbia, South Carolina.
The holy grail of historical fiction is to recreate a real moment in history so that we, secure in our reading chair, surrounded by 20th century comforts, can taste it. Like all searches for a holy grail, it never works perfectly, and usually doesn't work…
The Fencing Master is a mystery set in the mid-1800s, when Queen Isabel II was on the Spanish throne and a revolution was in the making. There is an interesting analogy throughout between the art of fencing (context), the more symbolic art of love (theme), and the art of political revolt (place). All are subtly tied together. The fencing master, Jaime Astarloa, is nearing retirement. Before his death, he has one goal: A fencing move from which there is no parry, or countermove. He calls it the Holy Grail, the thrusting move for which there is no defense. Other characters include a gambler, womanizer, and member of the Queen’s court; a disillusioned priest turned journalist; a snobbish man of noble birth whose family has run out of money; a piano teacher who once dreamed of greatness and is sadly in love; and a beautiful, mysterious woman. These characters are the mystery and to tell more would almost give the mystery away.
The Fencing Master is the story of a man’s life, of passion, of making a difference. It is a mystery of the life in every day. Feelings and intuition cannot be grasped and examined like a piece of art. Yet, as the fencing master learns, they can be analyzed in hindsight like a good match of foils: deliberate thrusts, deliberate feints. In the beginning, we find only a fencing master searching for the perfect thrust, who wishes to live his last days in peace, reliving only the joys of his past, finding macabre consolation that his days are numbered, and making his humble way by teaching the passing gentleman’s art of fencing in a disillusioning new world ruled by revolvers and firearms. Quickly, though, he realizes that life will not grant him any such peace in his old age. As with many a man’s sleepless nights and the answer to many of life’s mysteries, a single thought begins them all: There was a woman . . . Clay Stafford is a writer and filmmaker living outside Nashville.
The Fencing Master is a mystery set in the mid-1800s, when Queen Isabel II was on the Spanish throne and a revolution was in the making. There is an interesting analogy throughout between the art of fencing (context), the more symbolic art of love (theme),…
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