Inspired by a true story, Jamie Ford’s poignant new novel is framed by two world’s fairs held in Seattle—what the author calls the  “metaphorical rocks” of his powerful tale. At the first fair in 1909, a real-life raffle was held to give away an orphaned baby, an event that both haunted Ford and piqued his curiosity.

He imagines what might have happened to that child in Love and Other Consolation Prizes, a riveting story that moves from heartbreak and poverty in turn-of-the-century Southern China to Seattle’s glittering 1962 world’s fair, the Century 21 Expo. The fair's opening day triggers painful memories for one attendee—a man named Ernest Young, who recalls a time when he fell in love with two girls and muses, “The present is merely the past reassembled.”

We asked Ford, author of the 2009 bestseller Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, about fate, family secrets and the rewards of writing redemptive fiction.

Your novel was inspired by an incident in which a baby was raffled off at the 1909 Seattle world’s fair. How and when did you become aware of this event?
I remember watching a DVD in 2009 that was commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s forgotten world’s fair. (I know, I have weird viewing pastimes). The program was narrated by the actor Tom Skerritt, who casually mentioned that a boy was raffled off and that his name was Ernest, and a newspaper clipping flashed onscreen that read “SOMEBODY WILL DRAW BABY AS PRIZE.” 

And just like that, I fell down the rabbit-hole. . . .

Even now, after reading the novel, it’s hard for me to believe that such a raffle happened in the U.S. just over a century ago. Were you similarly dumbstruck? What does this say about how much our culture has changed in the last century?
Ironically, at Seattle’s second world’s fair (in 1962), a vendor gave away poodles––which was criticized for being inhumane. So as the philosopher, Robert Zimmerman, sang, “The times they are a-changing.” 

And I wasn’t quite dumbstruck as much as consigned to the weirdness of history. Those early world’s fairs all had ethnographic exhibits, which were basically human zoos that featured “exotic” or indigenous people. The fact that a boy was raffled off seemed like an extension of that mindset.

Also, this didn’t just happen at world’s fairs. In the May 1920 issue of The Kiwanis Magazine there’s an article about the Asheville, North Carolina chapter: “One of their unique features was to auction off a real baby for adoption at a luncheon attended by the ladies.”

Strange days, indeed.

The description of 5-year-old Yung’s experiences aboard the ship to America are riveting and heartbreaking. Can you tell us a bit about how you researched this era and the activity of human smugglers?
While doing research at the Anacortes Maritime Museum near Seattle, I learned that smugglers Ben Ure and Lawrence “Pirate” Kelly made their fortunes transporting immigrants, tied in burlap bags so that if customs agents were to approach, their human cargo could easily be tossed overboard. The tidal currents would carry the bodies of these discarded immigrants to a place now known as Dead Man’s Bay. There are probably happy people having picnics on that beach as I write this, who have no idea how the place earned its name.

I also looked at oral histories of some of the first immigrants from Southern China (where my great-grandfather immigrated from). I was trying to figure out why someone would put themselves at such risk on the high seas. It turns out many of those men and women didn’t have a choice—they were sold.
 
You write of young Ernest and the raffle: “His fate had been decided by this simple piece of cardboard.” Where do you fall on the fate vs. random chance continuum? Do you think our individual destinies are fated or dependent on chance and luck?
The romantic in me desperately wants to believe in luck, or fate, or for lack of a better word—destiny. But the cynic in me worries that all of this is somewhat predetermined. You could argue that all human action is guided by external causality, which creates the narrow pathways in which we exist. When you’re bored and want to feel especially helpless, look up the philosophical idea of Determinism. Warning: It will break your brain.

“I’m not a bitter person in life. I don’t want to be a bitter author on the page. There’s no shame in happiness.”

Why did you choose to bookend your story with two world’s fairs, one in 1909 and the other in 1962? Do you see the fairs as turning points in Seattle’s history?
I love the symmetry of showcasing Seattle’s two world’s fairs. But also, the fairs were snapshots of how the city (and the U.S.) presented itself to the world at large. 

Both expositions focused on the latest technology, architecture, and what was happening in the arts. Both featured celebrities and politicians. But in looking at the fairgoers themselves, what amused them, what they celebrated, you get a marvelous anthropological glimpse at how we behaved. I guess you could say that both fairs were great for people-watching, even decades later.

You write of Ernest, “He suspected that everyone his age, of his vintage, had a backstory, a secret that they’d never shared.” Do you think such secrets are specific to his era and location? Or are they a broader part of the human experience?
Oh, no. We all have secrets. I certainly do. But we’re always followed by the next generation (often our own children) who are obsessed with the future, not the past. So these secrets stay hidden. 

I recently found out that my late mother had another child, who was given up for adoption. So I have a mystery sibling. I’ve heard that she’s a police officer in Vegas.

Go ask your parents their deepest, darkest secrets. Who knows what you’ll find.

How do you feel about Mrs. Irvine and how do you think readers will react to her character? Does she deserve any credit for trying to do what she thought was right?
I think she’s a product of her time. That is to say, she means well, but she’s lacking in empathy. Like many good, well-meaning people in life, their Achilles heel is an inability to embrace the complexity of others. People are qualitative, not quantitative. 

But, that’s just me. I’m a pretty emotive guy.

Your depiction of Gracie’s dementia is tender, even life-affirming. Do you have any family experience with this condition?
I saw this to some degree with my Yin Yin and Yeh Yeh—my Chinese grandparents. My grandfather took care of my grandmother for a decade as her health slowly declined. It takes special dedication, and tenderness, to be that kind of caregiver.

And then I experienced it first-hand as I cared for my mother in hospice. When you meet fear and dread with love, because that’s all you have left, it changes you.

Early Asian-American life is a poignant theme in your works, and you’ve been compared to other Asian-American authors such as Amy Tan. How do you see yourself fitting in (or not fitting in) to a growing canon of Asian-American authors?
I don’t know. Honestly, it’s not for me to decide, and I still have more books in me, so we’ll see what happens. I love historical fiction, but I’m open to all kinds of storytelling. Last year I published a few stories that were basically Asian-themed steampunk. And last week I had a crime noir tale published in an anthology. Oh, and I’m still working on a screenplay and a script for a graphic novel. Plus, there’s always a lot of really bad poetry leaking out of my brain.

Reviewers often remark that your books are hopeful or triumphant, an outlook that seems relatively rare in current fiction. Do you set out to write hopeful stories or do they develop organically as you write?
I love redemptive stories. Not necessarily ones with perfect happy endings, with rainbows and unicorns, but I like to at least have a jumping-off point where characters can continue their journeys—if only in the imagination of readers. 

It’s sad that stories of hope and redemption are sometimes seen as “less than literary,” as though every story needs to crush your soul to have creative merit.

I’ve never bought into that idea. I’m not a bitter person in life. I don’t want to be a bitter author on the page. There’s no shame in happiness.

Author photo by Alan Alabastro

Here’s something that may come as a surprise for fans of Paint It Black and the Oprah-approved White Oleander: Bestselling novelist Janet Fitch has a secret passion for Russia. It started back when the writer, 62, was attending junior high in Los Angeles and fell in love with Crime and Punishment, launching a deep dive into the waters of Russian literature.

“I’m a pretty intense person myself,” Fitch explains during a call to her home in Los Angeles, “and a lot of the literature we got as kids was pretty pallid—it didn’t suit me at all.” Opening Crime and Punishment, she says with a laugh, “was like, OK, here we are. This is my internal landscape.”

After decades of reading Russian literature and history and a few trips to the country, Fitch—who studied history at Reed College—has distilled that fascination into her first work of historical fiction, The Revolution of Marina M., an epic page-turner and part one of a two-volume tale set during the Russian Revolution. Ten years in the making, the novel snuck up on Fitch, who had originally planned to write about a Russian émigré living in 1920s Los Angeles. But it was impossible to tell the character’s story without flashing back to the past in Russia—interludes that, according to Fitch’s critique group, were the most interesting parts.

Soon, Fitch was making a full-on plunge into one of the most turbulent and confusing periods in Russian history, a place where few Western novelists have dared to tread, even after 100 years.

“The Revolution is a moving target,” Fitch says. “People can be good guys and bad guys, or they’re bad guys to start out with, then good guys. . . . It’s a far more sophisticated problem.”

Luckily for readers, Fitch has created a firecracker of a guide through the tangled years of revolution: the titular Marina. Born with the new century, Marina is just 16 when the first tremors of rebellion begin to penetrate her comfortable upper-class St. Petersburg home. As a passionate young poet, Marina finds her soul stirred by the calls for freedom and action.

“To be Marina, it was a joy,” Fitch says. “This is the first time I’ve written a character who wasn’t under the foot of events, but more equal to the events. She’s a far more fiery person than I’ve ever written before. A much braver person than I’ve ever written before. She’s much more of a real heroine than I’ve ever tried before.”

Like any real heroine, Marina must deal with some complicated relationships. She and her two best friends aren’t always on the same page when it comes to the idea of revolution: Mina, the daughter of Jewish academics, is more cautious, while Varvara, who lives in near poverty, is ready to burn it all down. Marina’s father is a government official, invested in keeping things as close to the status quo as possible; her mother is an aristocrat who refuses to even think about politics; and her sensitive younger brother is facing pressure to enlist. In the midst of all this, Marina is also dealing with a normal coming-of-age dilemma: her burgeoning sexuality. Should she wait for her childhood crush to come back from the front or throw in her lot with a passionate proletarian poet?

“She’s much more of a real heroine than I’ve ever tried before.”

Needless to say, this headstrong teenager doesn’t always handle these complexities well. “I’ve known fiery people,” Fitch says. “They’re glorious, they believe, they’re willing to stick their necks out, they’re willing to fall a long way, they make a mess—for themselves and others—but they live in a large way.” That spark makes Marina’s picaresque journey through this turbulent era a compelling one to follow, even if, at times, you might wish you could warn her about what’s to come.

“It’s the first book that I’ve written that has been very propulsive, as far as the events of the story,” Fitch says. “When you’re in the midst of a revolution, your life will be changed week by week by what happens in the external world. So it’s much more of an event-driven book.”

Fitch’s earlier novels, which she describes as “more interior,” were both bestsellers. Both have been adapted to film—White Oleander as a major feature and Paint It Black as an indie film, released in October via streaming services. But no matter how different The Revolution of Marina M. is to Fitch’s previous works, it has many of the hallmarks her readers have come to look for, including complex and dynamic female characters. Readers will come away with more understanding of the Revolution, but this is no history book.

“People living through history don’t know what’s going on at the top. We only see the effects on our lives. That’s what fiction does best. It’s showing us how it felt to be in those times, rather than what Lenin thought. The average person had no idea; they’re just trying to get some food, find work, decide between your two boyfriends,” she says with a laugh.

The events that sowed the seeds of the Russian Revolution—vast income inequality, a rise in populism, an unpopular leader, a lengthy and pointless war—might seem uncomfortably familiar to modern readers, and Fitch does see some parallels between world events in 1917 and 2017.

“We are living in a revolutionary period right now . . . not the cataclysm that the Russian Revolution was, but we’re living through a time of extreme change,” says Fitch. “Revolutions don’t stop, that’s the most important thing you can take away from The Revolution of Marina M. Once the wheel gets turning, it keeps turning. In Russia, it’s still turning.”

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Cat Gwynn.)

With his much-anticipated fourth novel, Charles Frazier returns to the Civil War setting of his National Book Award-winning novel, Cold Mountain.

Varina centers on an unexpected and controversial figure: Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

You’ve said that after Cold Mountain, you didn’t think you’d ever want to write about the Civil War again. Why have you returned to this setting?
I don’t really think of Varina as a Civil War book. The present time is 1906, and the book covers most of her long life. But she calls the war—especially the chaotic weeks following the fall of Richmond—“the axle of her life.” Everything turns around it. In a sense, American history and culture do the same. That war and its cause—the ownership of human beings—live so deep in our nation’s history and identity that we still haven’t found a way to put it behind us for good. I think of historical fiction as a conversation between the present and the past, and Varina Davis’ life offered me a complex entry point into that dialogue.

Why did you want to tell Varina’s story?
I like writing about strong, complex women, but I hadn’t known much about Varina Davis until I ran across a fragment of fact—that shortly after her much-older husband Jefferson’s death, Varina moved from Mississippi to New York City, intending to be a writer at age 60. During those years she became friends with Julia Grant, Ulysses S. Grant’s widow. Along with personal affection for each other, they apparently saw their friendship as an emblem of national reconciliation. Eventually I became interested in a fictional version of Varina in old age, looking back, stitching together history and memory and invention, hoping to make sense of her long life filled with privilege, loss and persistence. Her dramatic, problematic life was a narrative situation begging for interpretation and interrogation.

What was the most daunting part about telling this story?
Varina looks back at seven or eight decades of American history from the perspective of the early 20th century, so one immediate problem was how to structure the story, how to order all that time. The book is partly about memory—both true and false—and I realized very quickly that I wasn’t interested in calendar time. I wanted to move fluidly through my character’s life, following a memory pattern, not in a straight line. I wanted quick shifts from scene to scene, place to place, time to time. As a writer, I always want to meet the reader at least halfway, so I enjoyed finding ways to create a variety of fixed points in the swirl of time and memory, an internal logic to the narrative shifts.

When writing historical fiction, how do you navigate memory, history and invention?
When I write about historical figures, I’m always in search of a fictional character, not a biographical sketch. My research process tends to be inefficient and intuitive, and a majority of the research I do never finds a place in the book. I read a great deal of primary sources—letters, journals, newspaper articles—and biographies, but eventually I have to step away from the foundational facts of history in order to find my fictional character. So, discovering which plants would be edible during April in upstate South Carolina or getting in the car and driving the route Varina took as she fled south trying to reach Florida becomes more useful to my writing than reading 50 more Jefferson Davis letters.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about Varina during your research?
It was less about Varina than about someone else whose path crossed Varina’s during the Civil War. Strange but true, a 4- or 5-year-old multiracial orphaned boy, nicknamed Jimmie Limber, lived in the Confederate White House in Richmond alongside the children of Jefferson Davis. He was photographed along with Varina’s children and is mentioned in several memoirs by her friends and acquaintances, and he was the subject of wild rumors. The story of their meeting is somewhat hazy—Varina may have seen him being beaten on the street and taken him home, or her own sons may have known him from the little boys’ street gang they belonged to called the Hill Cats. Either way, Jimmie Limber stayed with Varina and her children as they fled from Richmond at the end of the war until they were captured by Federal troops in south Georgia. He then came under the care of a teacher from Boston working with freed slaves on the Sea Islands, and soon after, at about age 6 or 7, he may have been sent to an orphanage. At this point he drops out of the historical record.

I became interested in imagining a life for that little boy, and in having him, as a middle-aged man, seek out Varina. This fictional character, now called James Blake, wants to fill blanks in his memory to better understand his life, and over the course of seven Sundays in the late summer and fall of 1906, he and V visit to talk and try to reconstruct and understand history—the nation’s and their own—to re-examine their lives.

We’re in an era of recasting the legacy of the South and the Confederacy, particularly with the tearing down of Confederate statues. What do you think Varina can contribute to these conversations?
It’s important to remember how those monuments came to be where they are (or were, in a few cases). They didn’t spring up right after 1865, but are largely a product of the Jim Crow South. The Stone Mountain monument wasn’t even finished until the early 1970s. There’s a very strong argument that the monuments have much more to do with suppressing equal rights than commemorating ancestors. With that in mind, part of what drew me to Varina Davis was that she left the South—with no intention of returning—before the rise of the Lost Cause and Jim Crow, and even in her 70s tried to look forward rather than backward. So, the events of the past few years—among them the violence of white supremacists in Charlottesville, the church shootings in Charleston, the national debate over Confederate flags and memorials—certainly shaped the book, especially as they emphasize the extent to which the history of our country is built around the armature of slavery and the Civil War, and how far we still are from putting those issues behind us.

After fleeing Richmond at the end of the war, Varina writes, “Head full of sorrow, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?” What’s your answer to her questions?
The Buddhist suggestion that we should avoid despair or hope offers the beginning of an answer. If I come up with anything more useful, I’ll let you know.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Varina.

Photo credit Mark Humphrey

Linnea Hartsuyker is the author of The Half-Drowned King, the first of a historical fiction trilogy that continues with The Sea Queen. Hartsuyker’s epic books follow Ragnvald, a Viking warrior who served and fought alongside Norway’s first king, and his sister Svanhild, whose fight for her own autonomy begins to drive a wedge between herself and her brother. We sat down with Hartsuyker to talk about how hating your first drafts can be a rite of passage and why you should be obsessed with your work. And of course, we asked about her favorite book.

You have a degree in Material Science and Engineering from Cornell, then later went and earned your Master of Fine Arts from NYU in Creative Writing—what was your deciding factor to pursue the path of creative writing?
I always loved books and writing, but I also wanted to make money when I graduated from college, and I saw writing books and getting published as something “other people did.” So even though I loved the idea and kind of wanted to do it, I didn’t really think of it as a career when I was thinking about college. I was thinking about having enough money to buy books when I graduated. I was pretty good at math and science as well, so that’s why I pursued an engineering degree.

But once I got out in the real world and started doing the jobs that I was able to get with my first degree, I realized how important it was to really enjoy what you’re doing and feel like what you’re doing is meaningful. And so, while I had a pretty boring job in my early 20s that didn’t really engage me, I started writing on the side, and for a long time I would write for a while—and as I’m sure you know, writing is hard—so I’d get frustrated and stop. But I couldn’t keep myself away, and I kept on picking it up again. Thinking about getting published, trying to write things, getting frustrated, putting them down again—there was a long period of time as a young writer I think where [your] taste is much better than your ability. Which is extremely frustrating, to write things you know don’t measure up to where you’d like them to be.

This also sounds like a cliché, but I’m not sure it was even a decision to pursue a creative writing path, just that I couldn’t stay away from it. I had a really important moment in my late 20s or early 30s when I was considering getting an MBA to try and see if I could get more interesting jobs with that, because I was still doing all kinds of jobs and trying out startups and web development, and things like that, which were fine but didn’t really hold my attention. A friend of mine said, “You shouldn’t get an MBA, you should get an MFA.” And it was the right thing to hear at the right time. And I realized, yes, yes I should. So I started taking classes in New York, various creative writing classes, to make sure I wanted to do a Masters, and very quickly I realized I did. Once I made that decision, that I was going to make writing the most important thing in my life, it felt like everything suddenly felt right. But it took a while to get there.

I totally understand the “your taste is better than your ability” concept. Also, when you said writing is something that you’ve always really loved, it reminds me of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Have you read that one?
That’s a wonderful book. I love that book. Whenever I read it, I feel so known and understood.

Do you wish you started your career as a writer earlier?
You know, even once I decided to sort of center my life around writing and take it really seriously, I never thought that I’d be able to quit my day job and be a full-time writer. I’ve always viewed it more as a sort of a calling rather than as a career. So it’s exciting to me now that it is my career, and that’s just beyond my wildest dreams. But in terms of starting earlier, I don’t know, because I wouldn’t be in the place I’m in now if I hadn’t had the life I had leading up to it. I’ve had a ton of frustration. I was a total perfectionist in my 20s, and because it’s really hard to be a writer and a perfectionist at the same time, you spend a lot of time beating yourself up.

I wish I was a little easier on myself, because when I was 25, I wanted to have a published book when I was 30. I think when I was 30, I’d calmed down and said, “I’ll publish a book when I publish a book,” but setting those deadlines didn’t make me feel good at the end of the day.

Does this still feel surreal to you then? Because it’s happening for you now—you’re on a book tour and everything.
It’s funny how quickly it became my life, and I have to remind myself every so often that it is a dream come true, because every day, yes, this is my life, I’m a writer. And it has its ups and downs like everything else. But the flexibility of having writing be my full-time job is fantastic. My husband had a conference in Thailand, and I got to tag along because I didn’t have to worry about leaving behind a 9-to-5 job. Or more like an 8-to-10 job, because a lot of my jobs had been that way, which left little time for writing.

Have you always wanted to write historical fiction?
I’ve always loved history and historical fiction. I also grew up in love with fantasy novels, and I would like to write a fantasy novel someday. But something I like about history is that obviously a historical novel is fictionalized, but it has the benefit of being somewhat based on truth. [When you’re] writing a fantasy novel, you’re creating so much from scratch that needs to all have a reason to be created, whereas when I’m writing historical fiction, I’m trying to create the world in my reader’s mind that is how I imagined that particular history.

How much extra work did you have to do for you to accurately portray not only the setting but also the characters themselves, since they were based on actual historical figures?
I think it is extra work to some degree, but it’s work I love. Sometimes I feel like I write so I have a good reason to learn about this stuff, and sometimes I feel like I learn about it so I can write about it. I had a novel writing teacher who said, “If you’re going to write a novel about something, you should be obsessed with it. Because you’re going to have to spend years of your life thinking about it.”

So, Viking history, ancient history, Norse mythology, Scandinavia are all things that I’ve always been obsessed with, so it’s really easy for me to spend time learning more about them. And having an excuse to visit Norway, Denmark and the Faroe Island, it’s . . . it’s just a pleasure.

I couldn’t help but notice in reading your acknowledgements at the end of the novel that every one of your first readers was female. Was that a coincidence, or were you looking for a specific perspective?
I wouldn’t call it a coincidence; it is just most of my writing friends are women. I did have a few men in my writing classes who read chapters of it, but the first people who I felt like I trusted enough to read it from beginning to end, and give me advice, were close friends, and they were women.

And I think it’s interesting, the book business. There are men in the book business, but it’s very women-dominated—publishing is something like 70 percent women. Also, the book-buying public is heavily skewed toward women as well. I felt like if it turned out to be a book that only women would like (which I’m happy to say that it isn’t), then at least I knew that it would do well in the market.

After your trilogy is complete, will you continue writing historical fiction? Is there any desire to create a world or characters of your own?
I think so—I have some ideas for historical fiction that I still want to work on. I have kind of more fairy-tale influenced ideas, and then I have been thinking for many years about how I would design a fantasy world, and how it would work, and I hope to write that at some point as well.

What I’m not sure I’ll ever write is kind of modern literary fiction. There are a lot of people writing that really well, and I’m not sure I’d have as much to say in that area. When you asked earlier about the characters being based on history, I would say with that, in the research I found the characters were almost barely mentioned. So a lot of the research was more about trying to figure out how people would or could have lived, than figuring out how these specific people lived. Which I really liked. One nice thing about writing [in a period] that was so ancient is I could create a lot of it. So, knowing certain events in their lives, I could sort of work backwards to put together the things that they did or would have done to get to where they ended up.

If you were sitting in front of a roomful of undergrad students, all with a desire to be writers, what would be your best piece of advice that you could give to them?
I think it’s really hard advice to hear, but I would counsel all of the people to be patient—it takes a really long time to get to be a writer, where your writing starts to catch up with your taste. I still feel like I write so many things that are awful, and I have to do a ton of editing, too, to make them into something I like, and they never quite achieve what I want them to achieve. But even being able to do that, I can be pretty happy with a lot of things. It takes a really, really long time just to get the skill. And some things do get easier over time. . . . I’m kind of glad it took as long as it did. For a long time, I wanted to write things that I felt would be easier to write—I tried writing a romance novel, even though I don’t like romance novels, and found out it’s hard to write something you yourself don’t want to read. I found what I needed to do was to find a project that I was obsessed with and to put my energy into that, no matter how long it took.

So, patience, and read widely, and the advice I was given about if you want to write a novel—be obsessed with it.

So why did you choose Ragnvald and not Harald to be your protagonist?
Some of the reasons for that may cause spoilers, but when I read the history that this was mostly based on, the section on Harald and the history of the kings of Norway, Harald was the one my family traced our ancestry back to. So, my original plan was to have Harald be the protagonist, but when I read Harald’s history, he was just wildly successful and basically wins every battle. And that’s really boring.

Whereas Ragnvald was flawed.
Yes, and there wasn’t much mentioned on him, but the details that were [mentioned] were tantalizing, and something that he does and that happens later in his life indicated to me someone who had a lot of power, but chose to be put at the service of a younger king, rather than try to become king of Norway himself. There’s also some sacrifice that he makes for Harald later in his life which struck me and made me wonder what kind of person he must be to do these things and remain loyal to Harald, so I started to focus on him as the main character because of that.

The power behind the throne, the sidekicks, things like that have always interested me more in fiction than the hero at the front of the battle.

Did you ever feel constricted, like something couldn’t go how you wanted it to, since your characters were based on real people?
A little bit, but not too much—it was kind of fun to come up with how these people got to all of the places that we know happened, and also to come up with their reasons for being there. So it’s constricting in one way, but I think sometimes the constraints can actually give you some freedom to work with, because there are some things that are already decided, so you don’t need to worry if those decisions are right or not.

Also, I’ve taken some liberties. Svanhild is only mentioned once in all of the sources, so I got to invent most of her story, which was actually quite freeing as a writer. And since it was so long ago, even if things may not have happened exactly as I have them written, everything is at least plausible.

Finally, what book has most influenced or inspired you as a writer?
The first book I ever read that made me think that I wanted to be a writer was Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. At the time, it was really groundbreaking, the idea of retelling a historical myth from the point of view of different characters, especially from the point of view of women. I’ve read it since, and there are some ways in which it holds up, and some ways it doesn’t, and I certainly read it differently now than when I read it at age 12, but it’s definitely the book most responsible for me being a writer now. Part of me wants to say that my choice was something more highbrow, but that’s the truth.

Well that’s a better reason than mine—I had read a book once, and it was so . . . horrible. [Laughs.] And I told myself that I knew I could do better, and that’s why I started writing.
So I think your explanation is a little more uplifting than you may think. I think a lot of people have that idea as well. I remember complaining to a friend about something similar, and he was like, “But she finished a novel.” And that kind of made me keep quiet, because truthfully that person had indeed finished a novel, several actually. So that at the very least made me sit down and keep my mouth shut a little bit.

Ten years after the publication of her first novel, Frances de Pontes Peebles returns with The Air You Breathe. Set in 1920s Brazil, it’s a captivating tale of female friendship, music, love and ambition.

You were born in Brazil, grew up in Miami and now live in Chicago. Where are you most at home?
I’m most at home around the people I love, and who love me. I have this in all three places, so they are all my homes.

The Air You Breathe started as a fictional account of Carmen Miranda’s life, but then you decided to create your own Brazilian star, Sofia Salvador. Why?
Carmen Miranda’s story is compelling, but ultimately I felt hemmed in by having to faithfully follow the trajectory of her life. It felt like a story about a Hollywood star that has already been told many times, in many forms. I didn’t want to tell the same story over again. This was very early in my writing process, when the novel was more an idea than a fully formed manuscript. At the time, I was also reading a biography of Édith Piaf, written by Piaf’s former friend. I was fascinated by the tone of the book, how much love and jealousy was in her account of their friendship, how music bound them and also broke them apart. My instincts told me that my novel wasn’t about an actual Hollywood star but about music, friendship, loss and memory. I had to be true to my original impulse, so I re-envisioned the novel and started over.

Your research for this must have been extensive. Is that part of the reason it has been a decade since The Seamstress?
I did a lot of research, which I really enjoy. But research wasn’t the reason for the extended timeline between books. My husband and I moved back to Brazil and managed my family’s farm, building a business there. Farming is a 24/7 endeavor. While on the farm I gave birth to my daughter, which was wonderful, but I also went through postpartum depression, which wasn’t. After I had a child, my brain worked differently. I had less writing time and had to adjust to this new reality. I’d write while my daughter napped. When I had childcare, I’d write a few days a week. As she got older and went to preschool, I gained more time. Like many women who are mothers and do creative work, I felt like I had to fight for my time and my ideas. But the beautiful thing was that this book, this idea, also fought for me. It stayed with me all those years and through all those life changes. It was stubborn. It said, I’ll be here when you’re ready. It was my duty to learn how to be the writer that this particular book needed. I’m not sure I could have written Dores’ character—her wise, wry voice full of love and regrets—without having experienced my own decade of heartache and love and transformation. As Mary Oliver says, “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.”

There’s a lot of detail regarding Graça’s family’s sugar plantation and the rituals and customs of the servants. Was this history something you’ve always been aware of, or was it part of the research?
In Pernambuco, where I was born, sugar still drives a big part of the agricultural economy. Ever since the 1600s, sugar was king. There are many working sugar plantations today, but the old mills, Great Houses, chapels and slave quarters are abandoned. They are relics. Driving through the countryside, I used to see them and wonder what life was like on those plantations, especially as Brazil began to modernize. I wanted my two main characters—Maria das Dores and Maria das Graças—to be from Pernambuco, and to have them migrate south to Rio, as so many Brazilians did and still do. I always wanted the young Graça to have a position of power over Dores. When I started writing Dores’ character, I imagined a little girl wandering through a Great House on a sugar plantation, not as part of the family but as a servant, born into this role that she desperately wants to escape. So it started there.

The novel chops back and forth in time. Did you originally write it linearly, or was it always your intention to give the reader snippets of what was going to happen? 
I always wanted the reader to see Dores as an old woman in the present day, as the last living member of the Blue Moon Band. I always wanted the reader to experience her regrets and to see the outcome of her life. I was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin in terms of structure, and having a narrator who is alive in the present day but who focuses mostly on her past.

You based Dores on singer/songwriter Chavela Vargas, who was very open about the fact that she’s attracted to women, and is one of the few women in a male-dominated music scene. What were the challenges in writing the story from Dores’ perspective?
Whenever you have a first-person narrator with secrets and flaws, the challenge is how to be in their heads for the entire span of a book and not feel suffocated. Dores speaks to the reader as if addressing a long-lost friend. The challenge was how to build this relationship over the course of the book—how to have Dores slowly reveal her regrets and misdeeds, and how, in spite of these revelations, the reader (hopefully) grows to understand Dores and empathize with her.

Madam Lucifer is an interesting character: a killer and gangster who dresses in full drag during Carnival. He’s very empathetic toward Dores and never mocks her because of her sexuality. Where did he come from?
He’s inspired by a Brazilian man called Madame Satã. He died in the 1970s, but he’s a legend today. Satã basically ruled Rio’s bohemian Lapa neighborhood in the 1930s. By day he was a gangster, providing businesses protection from thieves and corrupt police. By night, in Lapa’s cabarets, he transformed into his famous drag persona, Madame Satã. He was openly gay and unashamed of his sexuality at a time in Brazilian history when gay men were sent to mental hospitals and administered electroshock conversion therapy. Satã was elegant, brutally violent and tenacious, surviving a 27-year stint in one of Brazil’s most notorious penitentiaries. In a country that still suffers from homophobia and racism, the fact that Satã became a legend—with several biographies and a popular 2002 feature film based on his life—is pretty amazing.

Did you have a sound or duo in mind when you created Dores and Vinicius’ band Sal e Pimenta?
I guess I was inspired by Ellis Regina’s and Tom Jobim’s Bossa Nova record from 1974. Although, in the book, Dor and Vinicius are antecedents to Bossa. They are Bossa’s fictionalized founders.

How did the Iowa Writers’ Workshop shape you as a writer?
My teachers and peers at Iowa were incredibly smart, intensely focused and very generous readers. They made me push myself to be a better writer and reader, and they still do. I read their work and feel this great mix of inspiration, jealousy (in the best sense) and awe. Iowa taught me to keep striving, keep working, keep reading. For me, the best thing about writing is being at my desk and feeling completely immersed and transported, even if it’s only for 10 minutes. Those 10 minutes are incredible! I live for those moments when I’m totally engrossed and in love with whatever I’m working on. Iowa taught me to fight for those moments, to never diminish them.

I read you’re already well into your next novel. How’s it going? Any clues?
I’m a slow writer. It takes me a long time to understand a book and to shape it. This new book feels very different from anything I’ve done before. It feels more like my short stories. I’m excited about this and terrified, too. I’m striving to be the writer this book deserves. I’m going to fight for it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Air You Breathe.

Author photo by Elaine Melko.

Two months before Esi Edugyan’s splendid new novel, Washington Black, was published in the United States, it was long-listed for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

“That was a great gift,” Edugyan says of the favorable attention during a call to her home in Victoria, Canada. “I’m a Canadian novelist. Not only that, I’m a novelist from western Canada. To be noticed was like a miracle.”

Washington Black is itself something of a miracle. Opening in Barbados in the 1830s, it tells the story of Washington Black, an 11-year-old slave on a sugar plantation whose life is forever changed when he is removed from hard labor and “loaned” by his owner to Christopher “Titch” Wilde. Titch is an eccentric naturalist, inventor and abolitionist who initially wants the young Washington to serve as ballast in his experiments with hot air balloons.

Washington turns out to be a gifted artist and naturalist himself. The two develop a fraught relationship that takes them from Barbados to the Arctic and the deserts of Morocco until Washington ultimately gains his freedom. Told from Washington’s point of view, the novel examines both what it means to be truly free and the complex power dynamics of its central relationship.

Edugyan, who was “born on the prairie” in Calgary, Alberta, is the daughter of parents who emigrated from Ghana. She is married to Steven Price, a poet and novelist, who is her first reader. “From the first draft, he’s the only one who knows what I am writing about,” she admits. The couple have two children, ages 6 and 3, who are voluble in the background as our conversation begins. “Yeah, they are pretty high energy,” she says, laughing.

Edugyan took a circuitous journey in conceiving Washington Black, beginning with reading a story by Jorge Luis Borges about an ill-fated 19th-century impostor named Tom Castro, who claimed to be the shipwrecked scion of a wealthy English family. Borges’ story is told through the voice of an ex-slave. “I found myself interested in the voice of this former slave and his journey from one world—a very brutal world—to this other world. That’s where the book grew out of.”

It is apparent from her previous novel, Half-Blood Blues, also a Man Booker Prize nominee, that Edugyan is fascinated by sounds and voices within her fiction. Half-Blood Blues unfolds from the point of view of a black jazz musician in Germany at the outbreak of World War II and captures the rhythms of jazz and the desperation of that era. In Washington Black, Washington’s voice seems to speak across the decades from the 19th century. “They had to sound true to their eras and backgrounds,” Edugyan says of her narrators. “I wanted this to have the sense of a written narrative, a bit formal, as though it’s a slave narrative that’s been transcribed for the record.”

Edugyan says she doesn’t write autobiographically and speculates that writing from male points of view “is maybe a way to put some distance from myself.” To achieve that authentic-sounding voice, Edugyan read a lot of nonfiction. She mentions Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains, Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder and Andrea Wulf’s book on the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature, as being influential. “I’m somebody who really enjoys reading widely,” Edugyan says. “I enjoy research and delving into things deeply. But of course, at some point the trick is to stop, because you could turn your whole life into researching. At about the halfway mark, you don’t want to do any more research. Then you’re reading for prose that is just really beautifully written.”

“I didn’t want these abolitionists to be viewed as the great white saviors. It’s not just black and white.”

The 1830s, in which Washington Black is set, were an especially significant decade in the history of slavery. Although the slave trade had been outlawed in the British Empire, slavery itself was still legal. “It seemed like this was a really potent time,” Edugyan says. It afforded her the opportunity to examine the complex relationship between Washington and Titch. “I wanted to show something more nuanced and more subtle about the relationship. I didn’t want these abolitionists to be viewed as the great white saviors. It’s not just black and white. I think there’s a lot of gray. Theirs is not a true friendship. The power imbalance is just so staggering.”

Both Titch and Washington are haunted by their pasts. Titch, burdened by the expectations of his colonial family, is a man “who was very enlightened for his era, very open-minded. You get the sense that if he met Washington today, they could have a good friendship. But he’s living in the shadow of this very strange relationship. There’s something unfinished there.”

And Washington? “He comes out of a life of brutality and savagery. He’s wondering how to begin to live a life that he owns.”

Furthermore, the early 19th century was a period when Europeans were exploring the Arctic. Her knowledge of sea life adds pleasurable depth to the novel. “We live right on the coast,” she explains. “Having young children always asking questions when you’re at the beach makes you see things anew. Growing up, I didn’t know tons about sea life, but I’m learning now. It’s an interest of mine.”

Her efforts have paid off in this story of high adventure with a unique and compelling character. “I’m lucky to be writing in an era when stories from people of color are things people want to hear. I know that 30 years ago that was not the case. It was a struggle. But I do feel now in the Canadian landscape there’s a real effort being made to be more inclusive.”

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Tamara Poppitt.

In the new novel from Lou Berney, two people fleeing from their previous lives—a man running from a hitman after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and a mom escaping a bad husband—meet on Route 66. We spoke with Berney about November Road, memories of Route 66 and JFK.

You mention in the foreword how your mother traveled Route 66 from Oklahoma to California and shared those memories with you. Have you been able to make that trek yourself? How did it compare to her stories?
I’ve driven from Oklahoma to California (and back again) many times. My mother’s stories about her travels are still so vivid in my mind, it’s always as if I’m seeing the landscape through her eyes: the lonely Texas/New Mexico border where her family’s car broke down (they had to spend the night in the car); the Painted Desert, which my mother always said was a great disappointment since the colors were far less bold than the billboard advertisements; the wreck by the side of the road they came upon once, two shattered cars in the desert, some little girl’s doll peeking out from the wreckage. Every time I drive that route, I feel especially close to my mother.

Why did you choose to set this story against the backdrop of Kennedy’s assassination? How much research did you undertake?
My family was Catholic, and both of my parents had been deeply shaken by the Kennedy assassination. Every summer my father, mother and I drove down from Oklahoma City to Arlington to see a Texas Rangers baseball game. Every summer my father would detour through Dallas and follow the route that the president’s motorcade had taken.

I did a lot—a lot—of research about the assassination. And then—wisely, I hope—I left most of it out of my novel. I wanted the focus of November Road to be on the characters, their journeys. The assassination plays an important role, both thematically and in plot terms, but that’s not what the novel is really about. It’s about two people who are on the run from the past, toward the future.

Author Ivy Pochoda describes November Road as a novel that defies categorization—as part love story, part gangster story, part cross-country adventure. How would you describe it?
I love Ivy’s description of November Road. I didn’t set out to write a novel with so many different elements, but I know I’m drawn—as reader and writer—to stories that have a lot going on, a lot of layers, a lot of characters colliding with each other. I used to worry that was a weakness of mine, as a writer, but now I just kind of embrace it. There’s a quote, I think it’s from Don Quixote, I love: It’s better to lose by a card too many than a card too few.

Your hero, Frank Guidry, isn’t exactly a good guy. How did you tackle making him a person that readers could ultimately root for?
Frank Guidry is definitely not a good guy. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be likable and engaging and complicated, so I worked hard to make him all that. Most importantly, though, I needed to make him capable of change. I didn’t know until I wrote his last chapter if Frank actually would change, but I really wanted him to—and so I hope that meant that readers would want that, too.

How did writing November Road compare to writing your previous novels? Was it easier or more difficult? In what way?
November Road was tough to write. I made so many false starts and wrong turns you wouldn’t believe it. Originally, for example, the entire novel was going to be set in Charlotte’s small Oklahoma hometown, which turned out to be a disaster. And originally Frank Guidry wasn’t even a character. Basically, from initial proposal to final draft, I ended up changing the main character, the setting, the plot and the theme. That’s all. But the good thing about writing a novel, and having a patient editor, is that you can go back and fix your mistakes.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
My big wish is that readers finish the book feeling both entertained and moved. I can’t say if I succeeded or not, but I wanted to write a book that was both hard to put down and hard to forget.

November Road is a book about discovery, about what’s important and about being the person you were meant to be. What did you discover about yourself in writing it?
I really like that description of what November Road is about. And I think a similar thing happened to me while I was writing it. I started trusting myself more, doubting less, and letting the characters take the story where they wanted to take it. Like I said earlier, the process was a lot bouncier than I’d anticipated. But it was also liberating in a way I’d never experienced before.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of November Road.

Born in Norfolk, England, Edward Carey is the author of the acclaimed Iremonger Trilogy, Observatory Mansions, Alva & Irva and now Little, a charmingly macabre novel of the girl who would become Madame Tussaud. In addition to being a novelist, Carey is a playwright and an illustrator. He teaches at University of Texas in Austin and is married to author Elizabeth McCracken. We spoke with Carey about the 15-year process of writing Little and what it might be like to be a person made of wax.

What was it like to work at Madame Tussaud’s in London all those years ago? How exactly did it spark your inspiration for this book?
It was certainly a different job. I was employed, alongside 20 or so others, to stop flesh people from disturbing wax people. We were there to protect the wax ones. And that was it as I recall. “Please do not touch.” But the flesh humans really wanted to touch those wax ones. We were generally alone with the waxworks at the beginning and ends of the days, and we inevitably thought about the waxworks and how it was to be waxwork. You expected them to move; you suspected that they could, only that they were incredibly stubborn, that you were playing a game with them. There was a certain melancholy to the wax figures; it seemed rather cruel that they’d come so far to look like humans and yet never achieved actual humanity. After being there a few weeks, it was inevitable that any guard would become so attached to his wax wards that he would pretend to be one. We stood very still, and the public would come up to us and say how lifelike we were; we’d tell them, “Do not touch,” and they’d scream.

The most impressive waxworks, the oldest and so the most experienced at being a waxwork, were the models made by Tussaud herself. It is an incredible list: Voltaire, Franklin, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette—both full length and severed heads—Napoleon, Marat murdered in his bath, the guillotined tops of Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, Herbert. These figures, it always seemed to me, had a greater dignity than the others. They also had a certain advantage: The other, newer figures would, in time, be melted down, but Tussaud’s own works, crop of the original founder, were part of the permanent collection. They represented a certain vital, bloody strand of history. They were also stations of the biography of Tussaud herself. She knew them, she cast them from life.

By far the most impressive was Tussaud’s self-portrait, a tiny, wizened old woman with a little smile—this figure is the boss, there’s no doubt about it. As I worked there, standing beside the waxwork of Tussaud and visiting all the other people of her life, I became deeply fascinated. Here was her life in three dimensions, and what a life. It seems she left a kind of trail of dead behind her, and what dead, she collected them up. She knew everyone. She was even imprisoned alongside Josephine, Napoleon’s future empress. (It’s not entirely clear what is 100 percent true about her life, and what is somewhat embellished—but I love her all the more for that.) It is an incredible survivor’s tale. What a journey this small Swiss woman made, and what an extraordinary body of work to have left behind. When I worked there I made sure to visit the self-portrait every day. I desperately wanted to write about her, but it took me a while to build up to it.

How does it feel to write a novel over 15 years? Is it maddening or rewarding to see the story and characters keep evolving with time?
I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. This novel has been almost every size a novel can be. It hit almost 700 pages at one point, and it also slimmed down to about 250. One of the most helpful ways of knowing what a novel is actually like is reaching a draft and leaving it alone for a very long time and coming back to it with fresh eyes. I’ve done this several times with this book. Once or twice I thought I’d abandoned it forever. But I always came back. Some books behave, and some don’t—this one didn’t especially. I’ve had a different relationship with it than any other book I’ve written. It took me a long time to relax around the fact that some of the characters in the book are very famous, but what took me the most time was getting Marie Tussaud’s character right in my mind. Her spirit, not the history around her, needed to steer the book, and I only truly understood that after many drafts. In a way I suppose I was searching for her all these years.

Marie welcomes her prominent chin and nose as gifts and remembrances from her parents. But it’s clear from others’ points of view that she is very ugly. Why is it that Marie never gives into this view of herself?
I think not only does she not give in, she’s would never think of herself in those terms. She has no self-pity inside her, and an incredible sense of fairness. She sees all bodies as equally fascinating. She is simply captivated by everything she witnesses. Every human life, every object has its own particular worth. Being very small and very vulnerable, she finds nothing to be worthless. This can be something of a problem, too, because she has such hunger for knowledge and such interest in everything that when she is casting severed heads from the guillotine—or even worse, mutilated heads brought in by a Parisian mob—she is as engaged and as enthusiastic as if she were casting healthy, living-and-breathing royalty.

Marie is also an orphan—her nose and her chin are all the inheritance she has, and she is very proud of them. They are proof that she has a past. If she gave in to doubts, even for a moment, she’d drown.

Doctor Curtius at once feels like Marie’s savior and destroyer. How do you see him in the novel?
Curtius teaches her everything: her craft; how the human body works; how to work; how to observe; and even, in a fashion, how to love. But he is a weak man, physically frail and also a coward. I see him as a child and Marie, initially the child, as the grown-up. He is a father to her, but a neglectful one. In the end, because she must, she fights back. But once Curtius has set her on the path of knowledge and learning, she never stops. Unlike Marie, Curtius can be toppled by the personalities of his waxworks; at one point in the novel he is so obsessed by murderers that he’s almost overtaken by their character.

I suppose he’s brilliantly flawed, a genius at wax modeling, but knows about as much as a waxwork on how to be an actual human being. From the outside he’s fairly convincing, but from the inside there’s a lot missing.

Marie lives in a cupboard for all the years she is a tutor to Princess Elizabeth at the palace of Versailles. This is so intriguing and puzzling. Is this a historic detail common at the time, or something created to resonate with the reader that Marie is truly a small and inconsequential person?
Servants were often little more than useful objects, and treated with as much as affection. I wanted to highlight this. Marie becomes a beloved object to Princess Elisabeth, but Elisabeth can never get over the fact that Marie is a commoner, a plaything rather than a true person. I’m not certain that servants were put in drawers and left to live on cupboard shelves—though surely there must have been some that were in the long history of servitude—but it seemed right to me.

You are known for drawing your characters as part of the writing process. Tell us a bit more about the beautiful illustrations in this novel. Was the intent always to include them?
Absolutely. For me, drawing the characters in a book is a way of getting to know them better. I’ve always illustrated my books, whether for children or adults. I try to do something different each time. For Little, very early on I made a wooden mannequin of Marie, four foot and a bit—her height. My wife very kindly had her hair cut so the wooden woman could have some hair. I found clothes for her in a Parisian flea market. This wooden mannequin, like the waxwork self-portrait, takes up the exact amount of space that Tussaud did. The wooden woman lives at home with us; she’s always there in the sitting room. I found it incredibly useful to have this doll around. I also made, quite early on, a death mask in wax of Doctor Curtius. I did this in part so I felt certain of what Curtius looked like (there’s a wax bust that’s perhaps of him in the Musee Carnavalet in Paris, but they’re not sure), but also so that I had a true understanding of how it was working with wax. Also fairly early on, I painted a portrait of Marie in oil paint. I signed it DAVID and state in the book that Jaques Louis David painted Marie whilst he was imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre. (He didn’t, of course. I lied.)

I wanted to have Marie’s own drawings (or what I say are her own drawings) in the book, so that she’s revealing her personality with them. This is the first time I’ve put the illustrations in the book that are (purportedly) by the person writing the book. I hoped it would be another way for the reader to feel closer to Marie, to know her a little better. This had always been my intention and I drew as I wrote.

If Marie were given the choice to pick between Edmond and Princess Elizabeth, who would she pick, and why?
I think, above everything else, she has a great capacity for love. She pours herself into other people; she finds connections. I don’t know that she could make a choice between them—could she ever have such a luxury? I think the act of choosing might make her physically rip in half like Rumplestiltskin.

Does Marie have any regrets?
None! (I wonder if regret is perhaps the luxury of the privileged. Her life is so much about surviving. I’m not sure if she’d understand the concept of regret. Things are to her, and there’s nothing to be done about it.)

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Little.

Author photo by Tom Langdon

Diane Setterfield has captivated readers around the world with her intricately woven tales, but the bestselling British novelist admits that creating them has affected her in unexpected ways.

Most recently, with the publication of her third book, Once Upon a River, she’s been seeing rivers everywhere, even when looking at things like leaf patterns or cracks on a wall. “When you’ve been focusing on something so intently for a time,” she says, laughing, “the whole world seems made of rivers. You get slightly bonkers after novel writing.”

The river in question is the Thames, and Setterfield’s focus became so complete that a few years ago she moved to a home near its banks in Oxford. “I can leave my front door and be down there in a couple of minutes,” she says by phone from her home. “I think it’s one of those mysterious ways in which a life where you spend several years intensively imagining something seems to create change in the real world for you.”

Once Upon a River begins on the dark night of the winter solstice in 1887, when a photographer pulls a 4-year-old girl out of the Thames’ icy waters and delivers her apparently dead body to an inn, the Swan at Radcot.

When the child miraculously revives, the mystery deepens as various families begin to argue about her identity. One couple rejoices that their daughter, kidnapped two years ago, has finally been found, while a local farmer believes the girl to be the offspring of his estranged son. And defying any sort of logic, a hardscrabble woman named Lily announces that the girl is her sister, who drowned decades ago. In the meantime, others whisper that she is the child of a phantom ferryman named Quietly. The girl herself remains mute, offering no clues to her identity. As Setterfield writes: “A body always tells a story—but this child’s corpse was a blank page.”

And oh, what a story it turns out to be, as Setterfield enlivens her pages with a broad cast of colorful characters, all with their own stories to tell. “What I longed for,” she says, “was a room with great big walls where I could just put everything on the wall, and I could physically re-create the themes and the character lines and the chapters of the novel all around me.”

The story’s vast roots stretched back to Setterfield’s own childhood in the 1960s, when her 2-year-old sister, Mandy, was diagnosed with a heart defect. Doctors told their parents that Mandy couldn’t be operated on until she was older and bigger. From that point on, Setterfield recalls, “Family life became very, very different. I can remember having terrible nightmares as a child, and when I look back, the nightmares I had were always about my sister: losing my sister, my sister falling down into a hole in the ground and I couldn’t get her out. I was much more aware than most children are of what sickness is and what dying means.”

About that time, young Setterfield heard about an American boy who “drowned” in a lake but subsequently came back to life. Thrilled, she told her grandmother, “We must tell Mandy that if she died, she just might come back. And then it will be all right.” That’s not how it works, her grandmother informed her.

“While I was writing the book, I found myself thinking a lot about the pleasure of being a child when your mum or your dad reads a story to you.”

Years later, when Setterfield was in her 20s, she read about a similar incident in Scotland, in an article that explained the science behind the mammalian dive reflex—the body’s response to submersion in chilled water that accounts for such survival.

Happily, Mandy outgrew her heart problem without needing surgery and is “absolutely fine now.” (Setterfield dedicates Once Upon a River to Mandy and their other sister, Paula.) Yet despite the real-life storybook ending, the remnants of Setterfield’s childhood nightmares linger, which made writing the sections about Lily and her guilt about her sister’s death paralyzingly difficult. “There came a time,” she admits, “that I had to look myself straight in the face and say, ‘Diane, what are you avoiding?’”

One of the novel’s central premises is “the different ways human beings create stories to explain something miraculous or impossible or unlikely.” As a result, setting the book in the latter part of the 19th century made immediate sense, Setterfield says, because “science had just gotten started explaining human beings to themselves,” and she could contrast these scientific theories with prevailing notions of superstition, folklore and gossip.

Not surprisingly, as its title suggests, Once Upon a River is a book about storytelling, in which the narrator occasionally addresses readers directly. “While I was writing the book, I found myself thinking a lot about the pleasure of being a child when your mum or your dad reads a story to you. This is a story for adults, and it’s not specifically to be read aloud, but I thought if I can just have a few little moments that will be reminiscent of what it’s like to be in a comfortable, safe place and someone you trust is telling you a story, then that would just be a lovely thing to do,” Setterfield says.

Setterfield hasn’t always been a storyteller, having first been an academic in England and France. She left teaching and burst onto the publishing world in 2006 with her hit debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, a modern gothic novel about a dying writer. That’s about the time when she began to have what she calls “a distant sense of a book” about a drowned girl who comes back to life.

Exhausted and exhilarated by the publicity tours for The Thirteenth Tale, Setterfield spent a two-week holiday along the banks of the Thames, taking what she calls “a discovery walk” of about 180 or so miles, from the river’s underground source all the way to London.

Without having any plot or location specifics in mind, she says, “I just wanted to drink in the general feeling of being by the river.” As she fondly describes the journey, reminiscing about how at first she found it quite easy to wander off from the initial narrow, bramble- and mud-covered path, she has a sudden realization: “Here’s a metaphor very much like the early stages of writing a novel!” Continuing with that thread, she adds, “And then, the longer you follow it, the stronger the current is and the more certainty you have. Wow!”

Setterfield took notes while making her river journey, but she tucked them away in her office for a long while and wrote another novel, Bellman & Black. After that, she finally tackled the river story.

At times, she despaired of ever being able to wrestle it into shape. Now that she’s done, she’s monumentally relieved, and still in the “honeymoon phase” of writing her next book. “You should really talk to writers when they’re right in the thick of it,” she suggests with a cheerful chuckle, “and then it would probably be a very different interview.”

One reward for her perseverance has already materialized: A TV series of Once Upon a River is forthcoming from the team that created “Broadchurch” and “Grantchester.”

Meanwhile, Setterfield continues to contemplate the river. Although she can’t see the Thames from her house, she says, “I’m pretty sure that if I could put a window in the roof space of the attic, I’d be high enough to see over the streets to the river. I think about it so many times, you’d be amazed. Every time I go up there, I stand there, almost as if I’m trying to see through the roof, but I’m just imagining that window so hard. I may just have to ring up a few architects.”

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Susie Barker.