Elizabeth Kostova’s gripping debut novel, The Historian (2005), explored the legend of Dracula, undoubtedly contributing to the cultural craze that has now evolved into full-blown vampire mania. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, focuses on French Impressionism, which raises the question: should readers brace themselves for all-out Monet madness? Probably not, but one thing is certain: The Swan Thieves will keep readers entertained and inspire them to reflect on some profound subjects—like the nature of genius, the power of romantic love and the purpose of art.

Kostova’s lush second novel ranges across two centuries in its exploration of love and madness.

Andrew Marlow, an amateur painter and accomplished psychiatrist, lives a solitary, structured life—until he begins treating renowned artist Robert Oliver, who was arrested for attacking a canvas in the National Gallery of Art. Marlow’s quest to understand this troubled genius leads him into the lives of the women Robert loved, including the enigmatic dark-haired beauty who haunts him.

This hefty novel travels from the East Coast of the U.S. to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th. In a recent interview from her home in the mountains of North Carolina, Kostova, in a quiet, measured voice, discussed the challenges of writing a novel that spans time and place.

“I haven’t written much about American places before this, and it was really wonderful. . . . It’s surprisingly challenging, I think, to write about your own time and place. I know that’s what most writers do, but I had somehow shirked it for years.”

Also difficult, says Kostova, is writing about visual art. “It is a very challenging subject, and as usual, I didn’t make it easy for myself, but I like these challenges.” She adds, “It’s so hard to convey a painting in words, and you’re partly relying on your reader’s recognition of certain styles and images.”

Asked what it was about French Impressionism that so captured her imagination, Kostova explains, “I was really drawn to it. And again it’s just one of those topics, like Dracula, that we’re so familiar with that I wanted to see if I could make something fresh out of it. I know that, personally, I had the experience of getting really tired of Impressionist painting because we see it everywhere, and it looks so pretty and tame, and it’s poorly reproduced on all kinds of objects, so I thought this might be interesting to go back and really look at some of those paintings again. And when I started going back to museums and seeing these paintings in the flesh, I was so overwhelmed by them. They’re so wonderful in real life, and Impressionism is so textured that you really have a sense of people working with the brush when you look at the originals that you don’t with reproductions.”

Kostova’s research took her to Paris and Normandy and into museums and libraries. In addition, she says, “I studied a lot of art history in college and that helped me, and I talked with art historians, and until I was about 15, I really loved to paint.”

She gleaned details from artist friends, who helped with the technicalities of painting, and her own sensory recollections. “I had memories of the way oil paint smells and the way you rework a canvas. More importantly, I have several close friends and family members who are very gifted visual artists, and they let me pick their brains and watch them paint and go to their studio classes.”

To help craft her characters, Kostova pored over biographies of artists and painters. “Sometimes . . . I think of this book as basically a biography,” she says. And her characters are so believable, so fully fleshed out, that it feels that way for readers as well.

Kostova also makes astute observations about the allowances made for genius, a theme, she notes, that has “plagued art and art literature since it began.” She says, “With The Historian, I liked the idea of writing about a supernatural topic and trying to make it human, and with this book I think I was really intrigued with the idea of writing on these rather time-worn subjects, the partly mad artist and the subject of genius and what genius is allowed to do and not allowed to do.”

Asked if she identifies with Robert’s obsessive nature, Kostova says she sometimes envies that kind of single-mindedness, but adds, “I also love to live in the world. A lot of other things are very important to me, like family and friends and social service and just the ordinary parts of life.” She says of Robert, “He can’t live properly in the world . . . in a way that sustains other people.”

Marlow, she explains, is challenged by Robert because he doesn’t seem to care about being cured or healed. Kostova muses, “I think in the person of Robert he’s faced with his life choices.”

As in The Historian, Kostova’s affinity for letters as a literary device lends a sense of immediacy and intimacy to the narrative (in a way reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s Possession). “We all would love to read other people’s mail if that were permitted, right?” she laughs. “There’s this sense of a letter that takes you right to the heart of somebody’s life, and that’s not really true in our era, but it’s a very direct way to convey character.”

The intriguing title of Kostova’s new novel alludes to the myth of Leda and the swan, but its deeper meaning lies at the heart of the novel’s mystery—one that keeps readers turning the pages (all 576 of them). “I’ve always loved Greek myths . . . and swans are such emblems of beauty and grace; they’ve been so important in painting and sculpture, and we still have this reverence for them even in contemporary life that I think is very interesting. . . . Swans are a funny thing, they’re kind of like dragons: once you start thinking about them you see them everywhere culturally.”

In the novel, Kostova describes Marlow’s experience upon seeing one of Robert’s paintings: “At any moment something might happen; that was the remarkable thing. He had caught the instant of shock, of total change, of disbelief. . . . She was inches away from me, breathing and real, in the second of unreal calm before complete distress, and I knew myself powerless. I realized, then, for the first time, what Robert had accomplished.” Much like the paintings she brings to life in The Swan Thieves, Kostova’s eloquent prose possesses the power to both transport and inspire.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of The Historian
5 Questions with Elizabeth Kostova on The Book Case

Just when you think you’ve read every possible take on World War II, along comes a story like The Postmistress. Though the effects of that worldwide conflict permeate every page of Sarah Blake’s second novel, she takes on the war from a different angle: the home front. Set in 1940, just before the U.S. entered the war, The Postmistress is a subtle, nuanced portrayal of the impact war has on three women: Frankie, a British journalist covering the Blitz; Emma, a newlywed whose doctor husband brings her back to his New England hometown; and Iris, aka the postmistress. These three very different women are ultimately connected by a letter that brings an unwelcome truth back to their small town—and by the shared hardships of a world forever changed by conflict.

Blake, a poet and essayist as well as a novelist, took some time to answer a few questions about the book, her favorite historical novels and the one secret she couldn’t wait to share.

The Postmistress is set during World War II, but there are no battlefield scenes. What inspired you to keep a WWII novel entirely on the home front?
Towards the middle of the book, Frankie Bard writes, “We think we know the story, because there’s a man and a woman sitting together in a funk hole in the dark. There are bombs. It’s a war. There was a war before, and we’ve read the stories; but every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.” I wanted to try and write a story about women in war, and one that wasn’t about waiting for the men to come home, or about picking up a weapon and fighting, but about making it through the gauntlet of chance that war, it seems to me, thrusts upon human beings. When war is part of daily life, as it was in the Blitz, and as it was in Europe, what does the daily look like?

That daily life is often as harrowing as a battlefield scene would be, with Frankie dodging bombs and Harry looking for German U-boats off the coast of New England. It's a sharp contrast to today, where we are fighting wars but see little to no impact on our day-to-day lives. What do you think about this shift in attitudes?
Ironically, though we have access to almost instantaneous news, I do feel that so much information buffers us from what is happening. To a certain degree I think that hearing news over the radio—through the medium of someone’s voice—or reading the news in a newspaper—by its nature a slower means of apprehending information than merely seeing a visual image—may have been a more potent, more immediate means of getting the news. It’s hard to buffer yourself from the sound of fear, or of sorrow in a radio announcer’s voice as they describe what they saw, or as they record the sound of someone telling you what happened. As always, single human witnesses have a profound impact. I think, for instance, of all the cellphone dispatches that were sent out last spring during the Iranian protests, and how electrifying their impact. To a certain degree, those were a return to the kind of radio broadcasts you might have heard during WWII. I think of Edward R. Murrow’s nightly greeting, “This is London.”

Your novel follows a linear narrative, but the story is carried forward by different characters at different points. How did you approach writing a novel with multiple narrators? Was it a challenge to make sure each woman had her own distinct voice? When did you decide that this was a story about not just one woman, but many?
The novel began many years ago when I had a sudden picture in my head of a woman in a small post office looking down at a letter in her hand and thrusting it into her pocket rather than in one of the mailboxes she was clearly in charge of. Who was that? And what was she doing? And whose letter did she not deliver? That’s how Iris came to be. And then the town of Franklin, and Will and Emma grew out of answering those questions. The novel kept growing, sideways and backwards really, as I tried to get myself to the point at the boxes when Iris holds onto a letter for Emma. Then, about 100 pages into that early draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus. I had no idea what she was doing there, just that she was a reporter and had come from Europe. What happened to her in Europe? So, then I went back and wrote that. My challenge at this point was not in keeping the women distinct, but in keeping them together. In some senses I wrote three different novels all of them aiming at that moment of Iris’ at the mailboxes, but it wasn’t until I began to weave the stories together by moving back and forth on the radio broadcasts that I started to see how the three women’s stories could intertwine. And then at that point, I have to say that I had the benefit of a truly gifted editor. Amy Einhorn was able to see how the stories could combine and move in and out of each other, all the while moving forward.

What kind of research did you do for the book?
I spoke to a lot of people; and often their memories or information guided the novel in a new direction. Though I had been researching the presence of German U-boats along the coast at this time, it wasn’t until I spoke to a 90 year-old resident of Provincetown, Mass., that I understood the palpable danger people felt at the time. It was she who told me that there were some inhabitants who felt certain the Germans could land on the Back Shore and march up the Cape to Boston. And when a German bread-wrapper washed up on shore, clearly having fallen off a U-boat, the town grew a bit more unified. I tried as hard as I could, in many drafts, to use that bread-wrapper, but couldn’t in the end find a place for it!

For a couple of years I read as much as I could about the history of World War II, trying to understand the timeline of events as much as the cultural and social attitudes at the time. And I visited the Holocaust Museum, the National Postal Museum, and the Museum of Radio. At the same time, I watched movies made between 1939 and 1941—Bette Davis in The Letter, being a little-remembered but wonderful discovery—paying attention to clothing, hairstyles, and slang; and I read novels written during that period, trawling for diction and rhythms of speech. Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Robert Penn Warren’s All the President’s Men were favorites.

At the beginning of the novel, it’s acknowledged that a postmaster not delivering the mail was far more serious in the 1940s than it would be today. What are your views on social media in the 21st century (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.,)? Do you think letters will ever be replaced?
I have to confess to being a bit of a Luddite in terms of social media. I eddied out at email, not following in the rush forward into Facebook, or Twitter, though I do have a Facebook page now, which I approach gingerly. I do think it’s fantastic to be able to be in touch with people right in the very moment, it allows for a kind of global dailiness. But there is nothing like the physical presence of a handwritten letter. I think that being able to hold something in your hand that traveled to get to you, that holds the person writing it in his or her handwriting is very powerful, and for the time that it takes to read the letter, you are with that person who wrote you in a way that email or Facebook cannot replicate. I think, sadly, that this kind of connection will vanish, if it hasn’t already. With it goes too, the art of letter writing, a wonderful mix of personal essay and meditation, gossip and humor.

The Postmistress has already received some rave reviews from readers. As a reader yourself, what are some of your favorite historical novels?
Oh, there are so many! I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and remain slightly in a Tudor daze—it’s a wide, fantastically made tapestry, an incredible feat that wears its scholarship invisibly. I return repeatedly to Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, which, like the Mantel, utterly absorbs you in another place and time, though this time, improbably, through the sense of smell. And perhaps one of my favorite historical novels—though I’m not sure if it qualifies as such—is Colm Toibin’s The Master, about the inner life of Henry James. But then, I came to love reading through the novels of the 19th century. And I return there. I repeatedly read and reread the Brontes, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

There are a lot of secrets and information that is withheld in The Postmistress, but in the end, there is no stopping the truth. Do you have a secret you’d finally like to get off your chest?
Yes! That I’m so thankful to have this book out in the world. It has been the secret passion, obsession, joy and trial that I have been living with for the last 10 years. I have been tied to these three women, listening to them—as if I’ve had my ear against a safe waiting to hear the click that would pop the door to set them freely walking and talking, the sign that I had cracked the code on their story at last. It’s been a tremendous process writing this book, and I am so grateful that Iris and Frankie and Emma are out into the world, and no longer talking to me in my head!

What are you working on next?
I am in the very early stages of a novel about an old money WASP family that finds itself at the end of its old money. It takes place over the course of two summers, 1959 and 2009, and moves back and forth in the same old house in Maine, between those time periods and across three generations of women.

RELATED CONTENT

Review of The Postmistress

Review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

Review of Colm Toibin's The Master

Under the Poppy takes place in the 1870s—was there anything in particular about that decade that specifically ignited your fire to tell this story?
I came to historical fiction the way I pretty much come to all my novels: led by strong images and intrigued by the varied places these images may eventually take the story.  Though I can never really pinpoint the absolute genesis of any of my novels, each has a sparking-point, and I remember very well writing a sticky note that said "les mecs," as I saw in my mind's eye the four puppets who come to the Poppy: lovely Miss Lucinda, the solemn Bishop, the ultra-bawdy Chevalier, and the ur-provocateur Pan Loudermilk. And with the mecs I saw Istvan, and . . . away we go.

This novel is filled with so much drama! There are brothels, love triangles and puppet shows, just to mention some of the elements. Was it hard writing a novel with so many lively elements?
It was a BLAST.  It was like a fantastic, long-running, multimedia show, and I got to see it all from backstage, so to speak.

Brussels is well known for its history of puppet shows—have you ever had the opportunity to visit the city and perhaps take in a show?
Not yet—I would love to go there, and to Prague as well. The history of European puppetry is a magnificent one and it would be fantastic to see some of it  firsthand.

And speaking of puppets: It's interesting that to call a human being a "puppet" means to imply that that person is weak, controlled by someone else's power. But what I found in my research was that a real puppet is unpredictable, funny, mysterious and always slightly dangerous—or more than slightly. I find puppets' inherent lawlessness to be very appealing. And they make fearless actors, of course, if you let them. 

Alongside all of the interpersonal excitement that occurs in the novel, there’s also a good deal of historical drama that acts as a backdrop (and sometimes a catalyst) to the personal struggles of the characters. Do you think there are certain common pitfalls that are part and parcel of historical fiction?
Being new to the genre, I can only hope there are common mistakes I didn't make!  What was exciting for me as a writer was having that panorama of the past, the politics, the fashion, the language, the little daily details that make up so much of the bedrock of life, available for my wonderment, learning, and use. And the social attitudes that are so different from our own: For one quick example, there's a moment when the character Lucy catches a little boy smoking in the theatre.  Instead of being horrified that he's smoking at all, she boxes his ears for putting the props at risk! 

Seeing the world in this novel through that scrim of history, an imaginative recreation of what that time, the feel and smell and texture of those days, might have been like to those who lived there, was fascinating. What I tried not to do was put in every single buttonhook and chamber pot—it's a real temptation, because hey, I wouldn't be writing about this world if I wasn't interested in it, and I'm interested in all of it.  But I tried to keep only what the story demanded.

One striking element of this novel is the fact that along with an omniscient narrator, there are also several first-person accounts scattered throughout. What was it like inhabiting so many characters and giving them all distinct voices?
In a word, fun. I had a tremendous amount of fun writing this book—being able to tell the story from so many different angles, through so many sensibilities, was a great treat. We see the world we inhabit through others' eyes as well as—and sometimes better, more clearly than!—our own, and I hope this multiple-viewpoint narrative enhances not only the story itself but the reader's experience of the story, too. 

When you strip back the many layers in this novel, what do you feel was the core story that you were trying to get at with Under the Poppy?
Love and faithfulness, what it means to really be true: to a person, a vocation, through tremendous struggle and unavoidable pain. Under the Poppy is at its deepest heart the love story of Rupert and Istvan.

You’ve long been an enthusiastic proponent of writer workshops, citing the Clarion Workshop as the real turning point in your career as an author. Some people have been rather pessimistic about sessions and programs aimed at those who dream of writing and being published. To you, what makes these programs so valuable?
For me Clarion was an experience of recognition: other writers, both my peers and the workshop's professional writers-in-residence, accepted me as a writer, took me seriously as a writer, treated me like a writer, and that dispelled any chance for self-doubt.  And once I saw myself as a real writer, recognized that I belonged there, reading, writing, critiquing—I started to act like one.  Being known for what you really are is a very powerful thing. Now, when I teach workshops, especially for young writers, I bring this mindset and this memory, and establish at once that we are all colleagues, and we must treat each other accordingly.

That said, certainly not every workshop is equally valuable to every writer, or to any writer.  The ones that seem to work best are ones that are seriously respectful and seriously honest in equal measures: being told that your work is good, if it is good, is one thing, but being assured that your mediocre work is peachy-keen helps nobody and sets you up for severe disappointment later on. 

Prior to this novel, readers may be most familiar with you in terms of Young Adult (YA) fiction. However, lately it seems like many YA titles are showing a lot of cross-generational appeal. Do you think that this is a function of certain elements within the genre changing, or would you say that readers are simply becoming more open-minded? In your mind, is there a clear division between YA fiction and that meant for an older audience?
I'd hope that every reader would come to every book with an open mind, but it's true that the genre label is sometimes used as a way to pigeonhole a book and so pass it completely by.  Though we each have our individual tastes in fiction, it's beneficial to keep adding delicious new stuff new to the menu.  And who doesn't love finding a new writer, a new voice, to enjoy? 

Life of Pi is a great example of a book that works well cross-generationally, and I would hope some of my own YA fiction—books like Going Under and Headlong and Talk—could make that leap to older readers, too. 

Your previous books have been published by a variety of publishers, such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux as well as Bantam Dell. What was it like working with Small Beer Press this time around?
As everyone who reads knows, publishing is a fairly fraught arena these days, so having the chance to work with an editor and publisher who are as passionate about making books as Kelly Link and Gavin Grant was both a comfort and a thrill.  I knew from day one that my vision for Under the Poppy was shared and respected, and I've had the satisfaction of watching the novel go from file to real live book in the best company possible.  Gavin and Kelly are true writers' publishers and there is no higher compliment than that. 

Under the Poppy has one of the best book trailers I’ve seen in a long while. The trailer really seems to capture the seductive energy of the novel as well as its aesthetic vibe. Did you play any part in the creation of the trailer? What do you think about book trailers as an element of book promotion?
They've become quite necessary, I think, a direct and immediate way for a reader to get a taste of a book, especially online, and so I'm justifiably proud of the creative team I assembled to make the trailer for Under the Poppy: director Diane Cheklich, puppeteer/compositor Al Bogdan, motion graphics artist Aaron Mustamaa, and musician/composer Joe Stacey—superlative artists and superlative work. (A shout-out to our human actors Madison, Julanne, and Jon, and Fred and Randy, our auxiliary puppeteers!) I was involved in the making-of in a few ways—from getting the team together to storyboard assistance to helping out with the puppets (I'm no good at all with an X-Acto knife, but I do OK with a rod-puppet).

And this seems like the right place to note that Under the Poppy is also making the leap to the stage: I've adapted the novel for an immersive presentation involving live actors, live music, film, and, yes, puppetry, that will be mounted at the Chrysler Black Box Theatre at the Detroit Opera House in 2011.  Diane Cheklich, Aaron Mustamaa and Joe Stacey are already involved in that project, as is designer Monika Essen, and we're having a marvelous time reimagining the story in 3D. 

If a reader loves Under the Poppy and can’t wait for your next novel, do you have any suggestions for other authors or titles they might want to seek out?
Two books I'd suggest at once are Sarah Waters' Affinity and Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford: engrossing historical novels (Victorian and Elizabethan eras respectively), passionate narratives, and both tremendously, gorgeously well-written.  Do yourself a huge favor and get them both. 

To complete his hugely ambitious trilogy of historical novels about the 20th century, Ken Follett has set himself a punishing writing schedule. Lucky for us. Because readers who compulsively turn all 985 pages of Fall of Giants, the gripping first book in the Century Trilogy, will not want to wait long for its sequel.

“If at all possible, I want to publish these books at two-year intervals,” Follett says. “So I work six days a week, and for the first draft I try to write six pages a day, which is 1,500 words a day.”

That means Follett hardly has time to enjoy his beach house in Antigua, where he is taking the call from BookPage, he says, in his library, “a white room with white bookshelves and very large open windows that look out onto the beach.”

“You get a different kind of understanding through your imagination, with the help of the author's imagination, of why people did the things they did."

Follett is there with his wife Barbara, who was for 13 years a member of Parliament and was also the minister for culture in the recently defeated Labour government of Gordon Brown. Back in England, the couple has a townhouse in London and a larger house, a converted rectory, 30 miles north of London, where they can host a tribe of children, stepchildren and grandchildren. Each of those houses also has a library where Follett writes.

“I do find it pleasant to be surrounded by books,” Follett says. “It’s very nice just to be able to reach out for the dictionary or the encyclopedia or something I use quite a lot—a reference book about costume at different periods of history so that I can describe people’s clothing. Books also remind me of the enormous culture to which I owe most of what I know and understand.”

The library in the country house, Follett says, pays special tribute to that cultural debt. In addition to books, its walls are lined with drawings and illustrations of well-known writers, among them a Picasso print of Balzac, which has pride of place over the fireplace. “I like the robustness of Balzac’s writing,” Follett says. “He’s not afraid to confront the dark sides of human nature. Obviously my work is not perceptibly affected by the Modernism of Joyce or Proust. However, I’m not unusual in this. Almost all the books you see on the bestseller list are basically novels in the Victorian tradition, stories with plot, character, and conflict and resolution.”

Perhaps. But not many of those bestsellers match the epic scale of conflict and resolution Follett deployed in his bestsellers about seminal events in England during the Middle Ages, The Pillars of the Earth (1989) and World Without End (2007). If anything, the Century Trilogy is even grander in conception than these fictional predecessors. The trilogy will follow the intertwined fates of five families—American, English, German, Russian and Welsh—through the tumult of the 20th century. Fall of Giants opens in June 1911 with the crowning of King George V of Britain. On that same day, 13-year-old Billy Williams, who along with his sister Ethel will become one of the most stirring characters in the book, begins his first day of work in a coal mine in Wales. The novel closes in 1924 after the reader has experienced World War I, the Russian Revolution, the beginnings of the women’s suffrage movement and the collapse of an antiquated class system, not to mention the emotional, spiritual and political ups and downs of the book’s central characters. In fact, by page 985, Follett has brought the reader into contact—sometimes glancingly, but more often at some depth—with roughly 125 characters, more than 20 of whom are actual historical figures.

“The research and effort at authenticity is more difficult when you’re writing about history that is within living memory,” Follett says. “One of the features of writing about the Middle Ages is that from time to time you ask yourself or you ask your advisors a question and nobody knows the answer. So then of course, as an author, you’re entitled to make it up. But with the 20th century, if you want to put, say, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary at the outbreak of World War I, at a social event on a particular day in July 1914, you really have to find out where he was on that day. You can’t make it up. Because somebody somewhere knows where he was every day.”

For a book with the international reach of Fall of Giants, Follett, who takes pride in the accuracy of his historical fiction, hired eight historians to read the first draft. These included experts on America, Russia and Germany.

Initially, Follett says, history drove the conception of the book. But as the work progressed, he drew on other sources. A story he heard years ago from a friend whose mother had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1913 underlies Follett’s conception of the Vyalovs, a Russian émigré family in Buffalo whose rise to political power will be important in the trilogy’s second book. And Follett’s own boyhood in Wales informs his portrait of the fictional mining town of Aberowen and the boyhood of Billy Williams.

“My mother’s family lived in a town called Mountain Ash, which is very like Aberowen. We were there probably every other weekend when I was a little boy to visit my grandparents. . . . My descriptions of the steep streets and gray houses that snake along the hillsides and also the way people talk and the comic nicknames people have, that’s all Mountain Ash.”

Follett also credits his mother with his interest in stories and storytelling. “I think my mother was a very imaginative woman. She told me stories and nursery rhymes and sang me songs when I was a baby. I was the first child. First children always get a bit more attention, don’t they? I think my interest in the imaginative life comes from her.”

And it’s that interest in the imaginative life that makes Follett a historical novelist rather than a historian. “If you want to understand the Russian Revolution, one way to do it is to read the writings of Lenin and Trotsky and of analysts and so on,” he says. “But in a novel you try to imagine what it was like to be a factory worker in St. Petersburg, why he would want a revolution, why he would pick up a rifle and start shooting. That doesn’t happen in a history book. You get a different kind of understanding through your imagination, with the help of the author’s imagination, of why people did the things they did.”

Fall of Giants, Follett says, is about a period of history that “people find baffling. Most people don’t know why we had the First World War. They know that it started with an assassination in Sarajevo but they don’t know what caused the war. I want readers to understand it, but I didn’t want to give a history lesson. My mantra while writing Fall of Giants was ‘they don’t want a history lesson.’ So I had to find ways in which all of these developments were part of the lives of characters in the story. That was probably the major challenge of the book.”

It is a challenge Follett has met—and surpassed.

Ron Rash believes that “almost all of the great books are regional books.” What, he asks, “could be more regional than James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which unfolds during a 24-hour ramble through Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904?

So Rash bristles—in a modest, gentlemanly sort of way—when people use the word regional to pigeonhole, diminish or dismiss fiction like his, which roots itself in a particular place—Appalachia, and especially western North Carolina, where his family has lived since the 1700s.

“It’s an important issue to me because I think there’s a difference between regional and local color,” Rash says during a call to his office at Western Carolina University (WCU) in Cullowhee, North Carolina. “Local color is writing that is only about difference—what makes this particular place exotic. Regional writing is writing that shows what is distinct about a place—its language, culture and all of that—yet at the same time says something universal. Eudora Welty says it better than I can. She says that one place understood helps us understand all other places better. That’s been a credo for me. I think that if you go deep enough into one place, you hit the universal.”

A point in his argument’s favor? Ron Rash’s novels, especially his recent bestseller Serena, are popular in France. He’s been invited to read his fiction in places as far away as Australia and New Zealand. His books sell well in China. And his short stories and novels have been nominated for national, not just regional, awards.

Still, there is his sense of loyalty to his place of origin. On a 10-city book tour in France, for example, Rash, a charming storyteller with a strong regional accent, remembers that “they had me go to a local high school, I think partly [so students] could hear an American speaker. The first thing I told them was not to imitate me; they certainly would not be understood in New York City if they sounded like me!”

"Landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world."

A regional setting and universal themes are definitely hallmarks of Rash’s atmospheric new novel, The Cove. Set in the small western North Carolina town of Mars Hill at the end of the First World War, The Cove uses a little-known historical incident as a stepping-off point for a haunting narrative about intolerance and redemptive but illicit love.

“Obviously I love to read about the region’s history,” says Rash, who is the first person to hold the endowed Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies Chair at WCU. “But a few years ago I was doing some research and I was amazed to find that [there had been] a German internment camp near where I live in western North Carolina during [World War I]. And this camp was not for POWs. It was for German civilians who happened to be marooned in the United States when the United States entered the war. That was fascinating to me. And it became even more fascinating to me when I started reading about the Vaterland, which was the biggest ship in the world at that time and was much more elegant than the Titanic, and these guys who ended up in Hot Springs [North Carolina] had been on the Vaterland.”

Then Rash read an account of the internment camp that mentioned in passing the fact that one and only one German prisoner had ever escaped. “Wow! I thought, boy, what I can do with that. To me there was just this incredible story here that even a lot of people in the region did not know about. At the same time, because of some things that were happening in the United States, contemporary issues, I thought there were interesting connections.”

But Rash, who customarily writes between 12 and 14 drafts before completing a novel—usually while sitting in front of his fireplace with his two dogs at his feet—could not get his story of a German escapee to fly. Not, that is, until he realized that the real emotional center of his book was Laurel Shelton, a young woman who has lived all her life in a sheltered cove near Mars Hill and who longs to escape from a life blighted by the superstitious beliefs and confining scorn of most of her neighbors. Her dilemma threatens to split her apart from her brother Hank, who has returned to the family’s hardscrabble farm in the deep shadows of the Appalachian mountains after being wounded in the war.

“To me,” Rash says, explaining his intense interest in describing the ghostly place in which his characters rise and fall, “landscape is always a character. And I would say the cove itself, the landscape, is in some ways as dominant a character as any other character. . . . It’s hard for me to completely articulate but to me it’s like landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world. I would argue that The Great Gatsby could only have been written by a Midwesterner because the kind of expansiveness Gatsby could imagine fits a Midwestern sensibility; looking out on this endless expanse gives you a sense of endless possibility. The same might be true of someone who was born at the ocean. But if you live in mountains—I’ve seen this in my own family—two things can happen. One is that you feel protected by the mountains, almost like it’s a womb that protects you from the outside world. But the other thing that can happen is that the lack of light does something physically to people who live in a cove. There’s always a sense of your smallness, your puniness and insignificance compared to these mountains that have been here millions of years and loom over you. The result can be the kind of fatalism I saw even in my own family. I think The Cove is my strongest attempt to show that.”

Though based on historical research and set almost 100 years ago, The Cove is artfully layered with Rash’s concerns about the present. One of his most persistent concerns is how easily we turn other people into enemies and go to war against them. In a remarkable way, The Cove dramatizes a hope that loving, reasonable sensibilities will prevail—and a fear of the tragic consequences if they do not.

“I don’t want to be a propagandist, but I hope the reader senses that this is in the story. Certainly there are questions of what it really means to be patriotic, what it means to go to war. You kind of lay it out there and let the reader make the connections or not.”

Then Rash returns the conversation to his interest in discovering the continuities of past, present and future. While researching his previous novel, he reports with delight, he discovered that the house he owns about three miles from the WCU campus had been in his family roughly 230 years ago. And the future? Well, he says with some pride, like his wife and himself, his 24-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son have chosen to become teachers. “At least we didn’t run them off from the profession.”

CORRECTION: Updated to reflect the fact that the setting of Mars Hills is an actual town in North Carolina, not a fictional one.

A decaying English country house holds menace and mystery in The Uninvited Guests, the remarkable third novel from Sadie Jones.

This is a departure from your previous work, especially the supernatural element. What made you want to explore that?
It wasn’t a conscious “departure,” but the original idea can’t be controlled. I should have loved to write an important modern state of the nation book, but I was given this to do instead! I dreamed the house, Sterne—this beautiful eccentric red-brick manor—and then, in imagining who lived in it and what the voice of the story would be, I discovered that there was a supernatural element, and also comedy.

Your last two novels were so specific about time and place. The Uninvited Guests is set more generally, in the pre-World War I English countryside. But the ambiguity felt deliberate.
Yes, it was. The action never leaves Sterne, and I used theatre to heighten the sense of unreality so that the reader might know they were heading off somewhere unpredictable. I was trying to create a magical realm akin to the transforming woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a time and place where anything might happen. It was a tricky piece of acrobatics, and it requires the reader’s trust and willingness to jump in with the book and revel a little.

What research did you do?
There was very little research compared to Small Wars, which was necessarily rigorous. I wandered the Internet, went to the National Gallery and looked at John Singer Sargent’s paintings of Edwardian socialites and read a 1920s edition of Mrs Beeton’s household management. There were wonderful descriptions of how to apply poultices to boils and what to do with a twice-boiled calf’s head that informed the more grotesque elements of the novel. The Edwardian era is a very entertaining mix of the recognizably modern and absolutely not, their delight in gelatin being a good example.

Right now stories set in England around WWI are very hot (all my friends have “Downton Abbey” fever!). Why do you think people are so interested in that time period?
I suppose it’s the zeitgeist, isn’t it? I had no notion, beginning work in 2009, that there would be a wave of fin de siècle drama or literature—or a vogue for literary ghost stories for that matter. I simply needed a time we perceive as beautiful and romantic and yet trembles on the brink of the unknown. Western civilization was at a peak, both culturally and scientifically; to me that generation sits like white icing on the dark slag heap of the century before it, looking blindly toward the new century, the mass suicide of the Great War. My little book doesn’t even begin to cover it.

You earned a lot of acclaim for your previous novels. How do you think that kind of success prepares a writer for whatever comes next? 
The benefits of having a tremendously successful first novel far outstrip any perceived drawbacks. The success of The Outcast gave me a career. I feel now that if I do good work it will be read and have a fighting chance to stand out. It sounds a simple thing, but it is as much as any writer can hope for.

What other eras would you like to explore?
I would very much like to write a modern novel—I just haven’t found one yet.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Uninvited Guests.

One of the most anticipated novels of the summer, Laura Moriarty's The Chaperone is a delight. Steeped in the atmosphere of the 1920s, it stars two fascinating, complex heroines—future movie star Louise Brooks and the Kansas matron sent to chaperone her on a trip to New York City—who carve very different paths out of the choices alloted to women of the time. We talked to Moriarty about the origins of her third novel, the real Louise Brooks and the challenges of historical fiction.

Your earlier novels are set in the present or recent past. What made you choose the 1920s as a time period and a real person—Louise Brooks—as your subject?
I was reading a nonfiction book about Louise Brooks, and she was so interesting, so intelligent and confident and difficult, even at a young age. But I was particularly intrigued when I read that when she was 15—and already a handful—she left Wichita for New York City accompanied by a 36-year-old chaperone she didn’t know very well. Right away, I thought, “That poor woman.” Then I thought, “Anyone who tried to chaperone Louise Brooks would have a story to tell.”

How closely does your story cleave to Brooks’ actual story? What kind of research did you do about her early life and that life-changing summer she spent with the Denishawn dance company in New York?
I stuck to Louise Brooks’ life story closely. There is an excellent biography on her by Barry Paris, and my copy of that is pretty well used: every other page is dog-eared and marked up. Obviously, I had to invent scenes and conversations, but when I wrote about Louise, I considered what people who knew her had said about her, and I watched her old films to try to get her mannerisms right. I also read Louise Brooks’ autobiography, Lulu in Hollywood. My goal was to give a true account of her tumultuous life and personality while imagining everything else, including the details of that first summer.

Right away, I thought, “That poor woman.” Then I thought, “Anyone who tried to chaperone Louise Brooks would have a story to tell.”

You’ve mentioned that Cora is based on a real person as well. What do you know about this nonfictional woman, and what were the freedoms of creating most of her biography from scratch?
I know very little about the real chaperone. She’s sort of lost to history, but that was a gift to me as a storyteller. I liked the combination of sticking to facts of Louise’s life and having the freedom to imagine anything for Cora. I made up her name and everything else about her, though I did quite a bit of research to give her a plausible background and to make her a woman of her time.

Life at the Home for Friendless Girls is particularly shocking for modern readers. Did places like that really exist?
Yes. And there were a lot of them. I read many accounts from children who lived in similar institutions. But really, it seemed like the people who were running them were doing the best they could, trying to feed and house and clothe as many children as possible. New York City was full of children who had to fend for themselves, either because their parents were dead or too sick or too poor to care for them. The children who found a spot in an orphanage were actually lucky. The orphan trains that brought these children out of the city and to the Midwest seem cruel and strange now, but taken in the context of a time when there were so many homeless children starving and sick in the streets of New York, you can see why it was a viable solution.

Clearly Cora has been sheltered by her Midwestern upbringing. But Louise is also not as sophisticated as she would like to pretend. Which character do you think is more naïve and which is more changed by her five weeks away from Kansas?
Each character is naïve in a different way, but I think Cora changes more that summer. When she goes to New York, she’s bringing years of disappointments and bottled-up emotions, and she’s thoughtful enough to be open to a new experience. Louise’s road is longer and much harder. I think her real maturity comes later.

The Chaperone addresses many subjects that were extremely taboo in the 1920s—sex, contraception, integration, homosexuality, abuse. Was it difficult writing about such things from the perspective of a woman who has no vocabulary for them?
I love how you phrased this question—while I was writing this novel, I was thinking about how so much of the way we see the world relies on our language, our names for things and ideas. It’s hard to conceive of an idea for which you don’t have a name. I really wanted Cora to be a woman of her time, not a woman with modern-day sensibilities and ideas plopped down in 1922. She sees the world the way it was taught to her, and the concepts that are familiar to a modern reader wouldn’t be familiar to her. I wanted to narrate the experience of someone struggling to come up with her own code of ethics in a way that would be true for her time. So yes, that was difficult sometimes, but that was what was so interesting about writing historical fiction—it’s the same pleasure as reading historical fiction, truly immersing myself in another world. But I’d say with writing, the experience is more intense. 

Louise and Cora both break from convention, but while the former does this audibly and intentionally, the latter is more quietly irreverent. Which method do you think is more effective?
Louise’s openly defiant behavior gets a lot of attention, and she was (and is) a role model for many women. But then there are women like Cora. She lives with compassion and she thinks for herself. She also works to instigate real change—though without any of Louise’s fame or glamour. Really, she’s just as defiant. It seems to me that the Coras of the world, once they’re roused, are the more formidable force. 

Throughout the novel, Cora is reading (and not always enjoying) The Age of Innocence. Were you influenced by Wharton’s work?
I chose it because it won the Pulitzer in 1921, so it seemed likely that it would be something Cora—wanting to impress her smart young charge—might bring along for the trip. Also, it was set decades before the ’20s, so Cora is reading historical fiction, which, for me, is a good way to consider the present anew. The Age of Innocence is very much about someone who simply can’t break through the constraints of his culture and time, and I liked the idea of Cora reading this story and thinking about it as she’s grappling with the confines of her own world.

Do any other time periods or historical figures particularly interest you? What’s up next?

Oh yes! So many time periods and historical figures interest me. I love a good biography. It’s looking like my next novel will also be historical, but I don’t want to say too much yet!

Related content: read a review of The Chaperone.

A clip of Louise Brooks in the 1929 film Pandora's Box:

In the wake of World War I, on a remote island off the coast of Australia, lighthouse keeper Tom Sherbourne and his wife Isabel make a life-altering choice: to keep and raise a foundling child who is not theirs. The repercussions of this decision shape M.L. Stedman’s stunning debut novel, The Light Between Oceans.

We caught up with Stedman (herself born and raised in Western Australia) for a discussion of right and wrong, moral ambiguity and an author’s responsibility to her characters.

What a mesmerizing story. Did anything specific inspire you to write The Light Between Oceans?
I write fairly instinctively, just seeing what comes up when I sit down at the page. For this story, it was a lighthouse, then a woman and a man. Before long, a boat washed up on the beach, and in it I could see a dead man, and then a crying baby. Everything that happens in the book stems from this initiating image—a bit like the idea of ‘Big Bang’—an initial point that seems tiny turns out to be incredibly dense, and just expanded outward further and further. I got to know Tom and Isabel as I wrote them, and was drawn into their seemingly insoluble dilemma, and their struggle to stay true to their love for each other as well as to their own deepest drives.

The major moral question of keeping a child that isn’t yours is posed early in the book. Do you think there was a “right” decision for Tom and Isabel?
Aha! It’s up to each reader to come up with their own answer to this one.

Fair enough. Well, you do a wonderful job of refusing to pass judgment on your characters. Was this a conscious choice and if so, was it difficult to do?
It was a conscious choice, yes. I think today more than ever we can fall into “sound-bite judgment,” reaching conclusions on the basis of quite a cursory consideration of an issue. It’s a kind of moral multitasking, that stems perhaps from being required to have an opinion on everything. If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

As to the second part of your question, the more my own views differed from that of a character, the more satisfying I found it to explore them and to put their point of view as convincingly as possible.

To this end, do you think there is a “bad guy” here? Do all books need heroes and antagonists?
I don’t think there are any “bad guys” in the book, just some poor choices made on the basis of imperfect information or perspective (i.e. the lot of the standard-issue human). Stories need tension, which can be supplied by antagonists, but here it’s supplied by fate or circumstance—the overwhelming force that pretty much all the characters are up against. One good character’s gain will be another good character’s loss, which makes the questions a lot harder. I didn’t want there to be any “safe place” in the book where the reader could relax and say, “I’m completely sure of what the right thing to do is here.”

If we really stop to consider things, they’re rarely black and white.

Speaking of antagonists, the landscape of Janus Rock and the great sea beyond is awfully unforgiving. Is it based on a real location?
No and yes. The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.

Lighthouses are always weighty images in literature. What do they represent to you?
A lighthouse automatically implies potential drama: You only find them where there’s a risk of going astray or running aground. They’re a reminder, too, of human frailty, and the heroic endeavor of mankind to take on the forces of nature in a ludicrously unfair fight to make safe our journey through this world. And they betoken binary opposites such as safety and danger, light and dark, movement and stasis, communication and isolation—they are intrinsically dynamic because they make our imaginations pivot between them.

What kind of research did you do to prepare to write?
To prepare, none at all! My research very much followed the story rather than leading it. I climbed up lighthouses, and went through the lightkeepers’ logbooks in the Australian National Archives—wonderful. And I spent time in the British Library, reading battalion journals and other materials from Australian soldiers in WWI: heartbreaking accounts that often left me in tears.

Do you have any useful tips for aspiring novelists?
Write because you love it. Write because that’s how you want to spend those irreplaceable heartbeats. Don’t write to please anyone else, or to achieve something that will retrospectively validate your choice.

Two of the 19th century’s most notable minds meet in poet Enid Shomer’s debut novel, The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.

With a novel like this, you know there was a historical fact that provided the initial spark to your imagination. What was it?
The initial spark was learning that Flaubert and Nightingale traveled the Nile at the same time. I’m not talking about approximately the same time. They were towed from Cairo to the navigable part of the river through the Mahmoudieh Canal on the same boat. That day, Flaubert wrote a description in his journal of a woman in a “hideous green eyeshade,” and we know that Nightingale had such a contraption that she wore attached to her bonnet. Their itineraries throughout their Nile journeys were almost identical. It’s kind of a miracle that they didn’t meet!

Did you know a lot about Florence Nightingale and Flaubert before you started the novel? Do you think readers need to know about them before they read the novel?
I did not know a lot. My sense of Nightingale at the outset was based on Lytton Strachey’s book Eminent Victorians, which depicts Nightingale as a shrewish and eccentric control freak. (He claims she actually worked one of her friends to death.) The more I read about and by her, the more I came to reject this depiction. She was, for one thing, blessed with a fabulous wit, a virtue Strachey ignored completely. Other early biographers painted her in saintly sepia tones. I set out to find out who the real Nightingale was.

I knew that Flaubert was an important writer and I’d read many of his books, but I was unfamiliar with his life. His journals and letters were a revelation to me. And he, too, had a magnificent sense of humor.

Readers don’t need to know anything about either character before encountering them in my novel. For one thing, in 1850 they both were unknown, confused and upset about their futures, so any notion the reader may have of who they are doesn’t apply. They hadn’t yet done the deeds that would inscribe them into canonical history. She was 29; he was 28. They considered themselves failures. Part of the pleasure of the novel for the reader is taking the journey to self-discovery with them.

It’s hard to imagine Flaubert and Nightingale together, yet there are so many similarities regarding what stage they were in their lives. Did that surprise you?
Despite the obvious differences between Nightingale and Flaubert, I always intuited that they had something essential in common, and my faith in that connection was one of the driving forces behind the book.

Certainly on the surface the dissimilarities were huge, and not just to me. One scholar of the period I consulted told me that these two lived in different lobes of her brain despite being contemporaries, and that she had never thought of them in the same breath. Of course, it turned out that they had a tremendous number of things in common, for they shared the same general culture and came from similar social classes. They both rebelled against upper-middle-class European values, and perhaps most importantly, they were both geniuses.

You based the character of Trout, Nightingale’s maid, on the real life writings of a different 19th-century servant. Why did you do that and what do you think she adds to the novel?
As part of my research, I delved into the lives of Victorian servants. Also, the real-life Trout had disappeared into the vast bone-pile of history, so I had to make her up from scratch. The only clue I had was that she and Flo didn’t always get along, that there was friction in their relationship. Reading the historical servant’s journals helped me to shape a vocabulary and a love life for the fictional Trout.

To me, Trout is an especially endearing and important character. First of all, she is amusing as well as wise in her own way. We get to read parts of her journal and thus get another view of things, one that is often at odds with Nightingale’s. The class differences between them provide insights into Nightingale’s limitations as a would-be humanitarian and social thinker. Trout forces Nightingale to grow—by example and also by challenging her assumptions. 

This is not your first foray into the life of historical person—I am thinking of your poem cycle about the first woman pilot to break the sound barrier, Jacqueline Cochran. Can you talk about the challenges of exploring a famous person’s life in prose versus poetry?
I began my writing career as a poet, but soon turned to writing short stories, and eventually, the novel. Though I wrote the Cochran poem-biography (Stars at Noon) in an attempt to deal with character through poetry, I believe that except for epic or book-length poems, poetry is not well-suited to exploring character, especially as it evolves over time. For me, poetry is primarily about language and metaphor, while fiction, though it, too, requires powerful language and metaphor, is essentially about time.

What did you discover about this time period or any of the characters that you couldn’t or chose not to add to the novel?
I learned a lot of surprising things about the period and my characters. For example, in the late Victorian Age, nearly one in four persons in England was a servant. There were juicy bits, too. Richard Monckton Milnes, the first biographer of Keats and the man Nightingale refused to marry, amassed the largest collection of pornography in England. (It is now housed in the British Library). He was also part of a group of prominent Victorian men who wrote pornography together as a hobby. They composed it round-robin style, and published under pseudonyms, always attributing their books to publishers in exotic locales—Constantinople, Cairo or Aleppo in Syria. Nightingale would not, I venture, have approved. I think she was right to refuse to marry Milnes. She would have been much better off with someone like Flaubert.

Have you been to Egypt and if not, did writing this make you want to visit?
I have never visited Egypt, though I have lived in two countries in the Middle East. Egypt is currently at the top of my travel list. I especially want to travel down the Nile.

What’s next for you?
I am currently working on a project that involves two stories: a contemporary one set in the early 1990s, and an historical one set in 1599. I love doing research, which, after all, is just focused reading and travel.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of The Twelve Rooms of the Nile.