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.

Buried away in the small house she shares with her husband and their children, ages 11 and 13, are the abandoned pages of a novel Yangsze Choo worked on for eight years.

“It was really, really terrible and is hidden away forever. Forever!” Choo exclaims, laughing, during a call to her home in Palo Alto, California. But as she discusses her new novel, The Night Tiger, it is apparent just how deep and abiding those early themes have been in her writing life.

Choo, who speaks with a British accent, is from Malaysia and spent her early childhood in that former British colony before her father, a diplomat, was posted for extended periods to Japan and Germany and also Thailand and the Philippines. She went to Harvard, where she met her husband, and worked as a management consultant before the couple moved to California about 13 years ago. “I now describe myself as an unemployed housewife,” she says wryly.

Given her accent, you could imagine Choo to be kind of proper or a bit reserved. And you would be wrong. During our call, she is enthusiastic and funny. She laughs heartily. She jolts the conversation with exclamations like “I was super excited!” She describes “a really fab Victoria sponge cake” recipe that has recently forced her to “scamper on a treadmill like a hamster.” She marvels that there is now an app that replicates the clink and murmur of a coffee shop so you don’t feel lonely when you write. She sometimes interviews the interviewer.

Her well-received debut novel, The Ghost Bride (2013), is set in Malaya in the 1890s and concerns a young girl who, in accordance with a legendary Chinese tradition, receives a proposal from a family to become a ghost bride to their only son, who died under questionable circumstances. The Night Tiger is set in colonial Malaya in the 1930s, and the “night tiger” of its title lurks in the underbrush of a thicket of interconnected mysteries and unsolved killings.

Reserved? Proper? Hardly. “My mom said to me, ‘Can’t you write something cheerful? Dead people, ghosts, and now this book is about tigers eating people! Why don’t you write something uplifting?’”

Of course, Choo’s parents, and especially her mother, are sources of some of the stories and fables that wend their way into the narrative fabric of the book. Choo interviewed her parents frequently to develop a tactile sense of an earlier era in what is now Malaysia. Fascinated by the black and white bungalows built to house British civil servants, she learned that as a girl her mother had a young friend who worked as a maidservant in one of those houses.

“Growing up I realized that there was very little literature on Malaysia,” Choo says. “And what there was was primarily written by British writers like Somerset Maugham. But hearing my mom’s stories about her friend the maid, I thought, there is a whole other story about the local people. I realized that I’ve always been hearing the local side, and yet what is documented is really the colonial side.”

The Night Tiger follows the intersecting lives of two young Malayans. Ren is an 11-year-old houseboy in the service of a kindly, ailing British doctor who believes he has become a “weretiger,” a murderous, mythical beast that can assume human form during daylight. To put an end to the beast, the doctor makes Ren promise to locate and restore his missing finger to his corpse after he dies. Ren, who is also haunted by the death of his twin brother (and feels his presence still as a kind of electrical charge), has 49 days to accomplish this mission. At the same time, hoping to provide for the boy’s future, the doctor sends Ren to serve a British surgeon named William Acton. The surgeon is a guilt-ridden reprobate, and in his vicinity, deadly tiger attacks begin, to Ren’s alarm.

“I think at 11 you are at the zenith of childhood,” Choo says, explaining the combination of confidence and naivete in Ren. “My kids were growing up through these ages while I was writing this book. An 11-year-old knows how to do childhood well. You are big enough, strong enough, and you can walk quite far. You can do all the housework. But you haven’t hit puberty, so your world hasn’t started to change. You are at the very top form of being a child.”

The novel’s other central character is Ji Lin, a brilliant student whose stepfather believes she should work instead of going on to university. Her stepbrother, Shin, with whom she shares the same birthday and a love-hate relationship, is sent to study to become a doctor while she is apprenticed to a dressmaker. To help pay her mother’s gambling debts, Ji Lin also secretly works in a dance hall. She enters the story when an unlucky man, who carries the doctor’s missing finger for luck, spills a vial with the finger into her hand.

To create Ji Lin, Choo burrowed back into her abandoned novel, where she had tried to develop a character who worked in a dance hall. While researching that failed novel, Choo had read a book by an author who wrote about visiting “a strange dance hall [where] all these girls were for hire but afterward were strictly segregated. It was weirdly prudish.” Choo deftly captures that menacing strangeness in her fictionalized version.

In slowly bringing these two characters together—and resolving the mysteries of a series of perplexing deaths—Choo fashions a rich and intricate tale. One of the novel’s greatest pleasures is the depth of its understory. There is, first of all, a thread of upstairs-downstairs intrigue as Choo portrays the unbalanced relationships among the British and their local servants. More than that, there are what seem to be Choo’s obsessions, or as she prefers to call them, themes.

For example, she is interested in the Chinese fascination with lucky numbers. “The belief that certain rituals would guarantee you happiness was in the back of my mind.” So were the traditional Confucian virtues, for whom her characters are named. “I didn’t plan this, I’m not that clever, but it’s curious how my characters have become the opposite of those virtues.” And Choo’s abiding interest in the nature of twins also deepens the story. “The idea is interesting because this whole novel is about different worlds—natives and colonials, the world of night and the world of day, the world of the living and the world of the dead. It’s about a lot of our unresolved fears, I think.”

Surprisingly, Choo says she did not plan out this novel. With a laugh, she explains that she had her themes, but she “never knew what was happening.” The storylines proliferated to such a degree that she had to cut about half of them out of the final novel. She has considered a sequel.

“I am happy that a lot of the thoughts I had did come out here,” she says. “I feel proud of this book. It talks about a lot of things I’ve been mulling over for a long time.”

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by James Cham.

Kate Quinn takes to the skies in her new novel of Nazi hunters, Night Witches and a truly evil stepmother. 

“Gentle or thrilling—you decide,” reads the ad for private charter company Fun Flights in Carlsbad, California. Although novelist Kate Quinn admits she is “not terribly fond of flying,” she opted for adrenaline when she booked a 1929 open cockpit biplane in the name of historical research for her latest novel, The Huntress, a spellbinding Nazi-hunting saga that spans continents and decades.

After her British pilot took off, Quinn found herself soaring through the air, experiencing the same kind of rush that her novel’s character, Nina Markova, might have felt during a World War II bombing run. After growing up in the wilds of Siberia, Nina becomes a fearless member of the Night Witches, the Soviet Union’s legendary all-female night bomber regiment. Quinn was mesmerized by the hair-raising escapades related to the Night Witches and the tales of navigators who climbed out on the wing in the middle of a flight to dislodge a stuck bomb. “I read that and said, ‘You people are crazy, and that’s totally going in the book!’” she says. “A lot of things they experienced I would not have dared to make up.”

So as Quinn’s aerial courage grew, she asked the pilot, nicknamed “Biggles,” if he would consider momentarily cutting the engine, imitating the method the Night Witches often used to silently descend over German troops before releasing their bombs. “Absolutely not,” Biggles quickly responded. “That is not going to happen!”

Spine-tingling bombing runs are just one of the many highlights of Quinn’s intricately plotted novel about a trio of characters that converge after World War II to locate “the Huntress,” the mistress of an SS officer who slaughtered six innocent souls on the shore of a Polish lake. Pilot Nina, who narrowly missed becoming one of the victims, later marries Ian Graham, a British journalist and brother to one of those killed. An unlikely pair and a study in opposites, Nina and Ian are determined to deliver this war criminal to justice.

In the novel, Quinn describes one of Ian’s articles as “Dynamite in ink,” writing: “He knew every pulse point to push in those paragraphs, every emotional trigger to pull.” Those words serve as an apt description of Quinn’s latest tale, which will no doubt appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Similarly, Quinn’s previous novel, The Alice Network, was a historical thriller involving real-life female spies in France. After that book’s tremendous success, Quinn knew she wanted to write something war-based and set in the 20th century. She experienced a “lightbulb moment” when she stumbled across the story of Hermine Braunsteiner, a Nazi war criminal discovered in the 1960s living as a housewife in Queens, New York. “That was the story I realized I wanted to tell,” Quinn says. “What does it mean for someone to discover someone in their family literally has this kind of past?”

To make such a complex story play out, Quinn had to interweave multiple characters, plot points and timelines. In addition to Nina and Ian, she introduces readers to Jordan McBride, a young girl growing up in Boston who begins to suspect that her new German stepmother, Anneliese Weber, may be hiding unspeakable secrets.

“I am really fascinated by aftermaths,” Quinn confesses. “Not just what happens, but what happens after. After VE-Day, a lot of people had to pick up and go on with lives that had been catastrophically, irrevocably altered. How did they do it? I find that an extremely interesting problem and an extremely interesting sort of character dilemma to examine through my fictional people.”

Quinn owes her fascination with history to her mother, a librarian and history scholar who entertained her with bedtime stories about Alexander and the Gordian Knot and Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. “I was really head-down in history from a very young age,” she says, “so when I started telling stories of my own, it was very natural to gravitate toward the past.” As a young writer, she relied on her mother’s deft editorial skills for critique, a practice she continues today. “She’s very incisive and doesn’t give me a pass just because she’s my mother.”

Today Quinn lives with two rescue dogs (Caesar and Calpurnia) and her husband, an active-duty member of the Navy whom she’s nicknamed “the Overseas Gladiator.” She’s already hard at work on her next book, tentatively called The Rose Code, about a group of female code breakers at Bletchley Park. 

Fortunately for readers, Quinn knows she’ll never tire of the power of historical fiction: “Often when we are examining issues that are delicate or sensitive or just dynamite, they feel too close in the modern age. But if you can examine some of the same issues through the lens of the past, it puts them in a slightly safer remove. That way it doesn’t hurt as much to look as closely at something that is perhaps a little too sensitive to examine in our own lives.”

Author photo by Laura Jucha Photography

Wild girls. Wanting to write about them—their realistic sexual experiences, their journeys of discovering their own pleasure—formed the initial spark for Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest novel, a sprawling saga that helped her navigate a sea of grief.

This subject especially enticed Gilbert because her previous novel, The Signature of All Things, chronicles the exact opposite: a 19th-century botanist who yearns to have sex but never does. “There was just this agony in writing that character,” Gilbert admits, speaking by phone from her home in New York City. So for City of Girls, she was determined to try something different. “Let’s take the corset off and let some people have some pleasure,” she says. 

Enjoyment, bliss, satisfaction—these emotions and more form the core of her big-hearted, rollicking new novel about a gaggle of lively New York showgirls. It’s narrated by Vivian Morris, who arrives in New York City in 1940 to live with her Aunt Peg, owner of the dilapidated Lily Playhouse, after being “excused” from Vassar College. (Vivian was ranked 361 in a class of 362, causing her father to remark, “Dear God, what was the other girl doing?”) In press materials for City of Girls, Gilbert compares Vivian’s story to a champagne cocktail, calling it “light and bright, crisp and fun.” She’s proud to write books that “go down easy,” she says. “I feel like it’s a real achievement to write a book that anybody can read. . . . One of the things I’ve said is I make bran muffins, but I frost them to look like cupcakes.”

The characters in City of Girls are “neither destroyed nor saved by sex,” Gilbert says, in contrast to the litany of literary heroines who face ruin or death in the face of sensuality, such as Anna Karenina, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Emma Bovary, to name a few. “Most novels about women would have you think it’s one or the other,” Gilbert says. “And that’s just not been my experience, and it’s not the experience of anybody that I know.” She says that Vivian’s comical first sexual encounter is one of her favorite scenes she’s ever written. “I was literally alone in my house laughing my ass off,” Gilbert says. “It felt like such a vindication for all of the sort of horrible virginity-losing scenes in literature. And also all the ridiculously romantic ones.”

Of course, it’s no secret that Gilbert has had more than her own share of adventures, having written her blockbuster post-divorce memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, about eating in Italy, discovering the power of prayer in India and finding love again in Indonesia. However, despite having penned a 2015 article for the New York Times Magazine called “Confessions of a Seduction Addict,” Gilbert wasn’t initially sure she could pull off this wild-girl narrative—that is, until she met a former showgirl named Norma, an “unrepentant hedonist” who was once John Wayne’s girlfriend. 

“Part of my research anxiety was, how am I going to get this 95-year-old woman to talk to me about sex? But with Norma it was like, how am I going to get her to talk about anything but sex?” Gilbert says, laughing. “Every generation thinks that they invented sex, but there’s always people who are living on the edge, and Norma was one of them. She had absolutely no shame, remorse or regret about anything she’d ever done in her life. And she was fabulous.”

In addition to interviewing Norma, Gilbert and research partner Margaret Cordi (to whom the book is dedicated) poured several years into exploring a variety of topics. “My system of writing is heavily weighted in terms of hours of research,” Gilbert explains, “so 90 to 95% of the effort is gathering everything I need to feel competent enough to create a convincing world. It’s truly like learning a new language, and it takes a lot of years to get fluent.”

And then suddenly—still during the research phase, before the writing even began—everything came to a heart-stopping halt during an 18-month period of deep, dark sorrow. In 2016 Gilbert left Jose Nunes, the husband she had met in Bali, to partner with her best friend, Rayya Elias, who had just been diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer. Gilbert tossed everything aside to care for her and couldn’t even imagine writing. “It just wasn’t the time,” she says.

After Elias died in January 2018, Gilbert retreated to her country house to begin working on her manuscript, even though at first she could barely remember her characters’ names. “I didn’t leave for a couple months,” she says. “It was just me and the dog and the book, and it was really healing. Every once in a while I would think, is this good for grieving? Like, should I be around people? But in fact I was around people. I was around all the people in the book.”

Gilbert describes this isolation as exactly what she needed, “something so consuming that I would look up, and hours had passed, and I hadn’t remembered that Rayya had died,” she says. “I think that creativity is kind of the opposite of depression, the opposite of despair. And I really want to offer the book as a gift to everybody in these dark times. I hope it does for everyone what it did for me, which was cheer me up.”

But Gilbert soon faced another significant challenge: She didn’t know how the book would end. A short introduction is set in 2010, when 89-year-old Vivian receives a letter from the daughter of a man she once knew, asking Vivian to explain their relationship. The rest of the book, beginning in 1940, is Vivian’s “How I Met Your Father” response. “I love to be in control and feel like I know everything,” Gilbert acknowledges, “but you have to leave a little bit of a window open for that which will surprise you.” Luckily, the author soon lost herself in her narrator’s voice. “I would get up every morning and say to Vivian, ‘Let’s just tell everybody what happened.’ And I was able to kind of just become her.”

Gilbert took great pains to make sure Vivian’s voice rings true. “She cannot speak as though she’s got a degree in women’s studies from Bryn Mawr,” Gilbert says. “I needed to make sure that I didn’t put too much of my modern feminism into the book, that it had to be realistic to its time and to those girls.” Young Vivian adores the unbridled freedom she finds in New York with Aunt Peg, “the first freethinker [she’d] ever met,” whose theater company is “a living animation of glamour and grit and mayhem and fun.”

Gilbert herself grew up with freethinking parents, living on a small Christmas tree farm in Connecticut that her mom and dad still run. “My parents are really unconventional,” she says, “and my dad’s a real iconoclast. I feel very lucky to have been raised by a genuine eccentric. Everybody thinks their dad is weird, but my dad is really fucking weird. His disdain for anybody telling him what to do was so huge that I think I just inherited that.”

Tossing conventions to the wind, Gilbert’s own life often seems to swirl about her with plot twists like those found in her novels. In March she announced on Instagram that she’s in a new relationship with photographer Simon MacArthur, an old friend of both hers and Elias’. 

“My way of living involves flinging my heart into the world and seeing what it sticks to,” she says. “So there’s always a lot of love in my life.”

Portrait of Elizabeth Gilbert by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders