The Novice Blog Tour: Guest Post and Giveaway

Please join me in welcoming Mirella Sichirollo Patzer, author of The Novice, to Historical Tapestry! Below you will find not only her wonderful guest post on her Books of a Lifetime but more information about The Novice, the tour schedule and a chance for you to win a copy of your very own! So without further ado....

 

Books of a Lifetime by Mirella Patzer

 

Thank you for inviting me to your website to speak about books! It is a real pleasure to be able to share some of the books that inspired me throughout my life.

I was born the child of immigrant parents who came to Canada to begin a new life in the aftermath of World War II. At first, they were not yet able to speak English, and because they couldn’t speak the language, they couldn’t read it either. Therefore, I had no one to read me a bedtime story. In fact, I did not know books existed until I entered 1st grade. It was my first grade teacher who read me my first story and encouraged me to plough through those early first grade readers. To this very day, I carry my gratitude for her in my heart.

By the 2nd grade, I was truly obsessed with books. On my way home from school, I had to walk past a library. It wasn’t long before I coaxed my mother to acquire a library card for me. The very first books I read were fairy tales. I devoured every fairy tale book the library had, often reading the same books, the same stories over and over again. That’s when my love for kings and queens, princes and princesses, was born; a love I carry to this day. Not only are historical biographical novels my favorite genre, I’m in the process of publishing one soon. After fairy tales. I progressed to Nancy Drew books, and was completely entranced with those wonderful mysteries. After that, with my library card in hand, I read as many books in as many different genres as I could, always above my grade level, and always preferring historical stories rather than contemporary ones.

By the time I was twelve years old, I had read Gone with the Wind twice. To this day, it is my favorite novel. The romance between Scarlett and Rhett, the drama of the Civil War, plantation life, Scarlett’s courage under challenging circumstances held me enthralled, and still captivate me.  

In the years following, I discovered Diana Gabaldon’s novel, Outlander, the year it was first published. I recommended and lent the book out so many times, that I kept buying and buying copies of it. It is Diana Gabaldon’s portrayal of Jamie and Claire’s romance that keeps drawing me in, inspiring me to write about true love in my own stories.     

There are so many good books to be discovered that I rarely will read a book more than once. The exceptions to this rule are Outlander and Gone with the Wind. I have read and re-read these novels more than five or six times. They are timeless and provide me with much inspiration in my own journey as an author of historical fiction.

Today, I read at least a book a week and am a professional book reviewer. I am proud to have reached the status as an Amazon Top 500 Reviewer. I am choosy about the books I read, preferring historical novels about strong heroines in lesser known periods of history. Rarely do I find a book I dislike. Reading is a great gift. It brings me great joy and has inspired me to keep honing my skills so that one day I might write a book as memorable as Outlander and Gone with the Wind. One can only dream….

 

Thank you so much, Mirella, for taking the time to share your thoughts on the power of books and how they can transfer your life!

Now to the giveaway! For a chance to win an eBook copy (open internationally!) of The Novice please leave a comment below answering this question: what book (or books) first captivated you so much that it pushed you to become the avid reader you are today? Be sure to leave your email address so I can contact you if you win (no email, no entry!). For an extra entry, share this guest post/giveaway online and leave a separate email with a link to where you shared. That's it! I will pick a winner on October 15th and the winner will have 48 hours to respond to my email before I have to pick another winner. Good luck all!

 

About The Novice

 

Publication Date: September 15, 2014
H&W Press
Formats: eBook, Paperback; 380p

Genre: Historical Fiction/Historical Romance

 

A young woman on the verge of taking her vows to become a nun.

A desperate flight from a murderous massacre.

One honorable man comes to her rescue.

Another becomes her nemesis and captor.

And a life and death search to reunite with her one true love.

 

 



In 10th century Naples, Saracens run rampant, annihilating villages, murdering women and children. Death and despair is everywhere. Alone in the world, Sara is a young novice plagued with doubts about taking her final vows to become a nun. When her convent is attacked, she flees for her life straight into the arms of a group of Saracens who leave her to die alone in the woods. An honorable cavaliere named Nicolo comes to her rescue and offers to take her to the safety of Naples. As they journey together, they are irresistibly drawn to each other. Believing Sara to be a nun, the honorable Nicolo is torn between love and duty to respect her vows. Heartbroken, he does what honor demands and sets her free before she can tell him the truth that she is not a nun. In her search to reunite with Nicolo, she encounters Umberto, a dark and dangerous man who will stop at nothing in his obsession to possess her. With her sharp intellect, and her heart, Sara must rely on her own courage and strength to escape her abuser and find the only man she will ever love. A story that burns with intensity, intrigue, and passion from the author of the highly successful novel, Orphan of the Olive Tree.

 

About The Author

A true blue Taurean in every way, Mirella Sichirollo Patzer grew up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, a city famous for the Calgary Stampede, oil companies, and the wild west. Historical fiction books are one of her obsessions, especially those that pertain to medieval eras and with Italy as a backdrop. Her fascination for women of history and Italy is often reflected in her work, her various blogs, and website. She lives in Cochrane, Alberta, Canada with her husband and family. Her house is brimming with books and toys. For her, life couldn’t get any better.

For more information please visit Mirella’s website. Mirella also blogs at History and Women & Historical Novel Review. Connect with Mirella on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and Pinterest.

 

 

 

The Novice Blog Tour Schedule

 

Monday, September 29

Review at Flashlight Commentary

Tuesday, September 30

Review & Giveaway at Peeking Between the Pages
Interview at Triclinium – Elisabeth Storrs

Wednesday, October 1

Guest Post at Book Babe
Spotlight at Historical Fiction Obsession

Thursday, October 2

Review & Giveaway at The Book Binder’s Daughter
Interview & Giveaway at Historical Romance Lover

Friday, October 3

Spotlight & Giveaway at Historical Fiction Connection

Monday, October 6

Review at History From a Woman’s Perspective

Tuesday, October 7

Review at Unshelfish
Spotlight at Princess of Eboli

Wednesday, October 8

Guest Post & Giveaway at Historical Tapestry

Thursday, October 9

Spotlight at CelticLady’s Reviews

Friday, October 10

Review at With Her Nose Stuck in a Book
Guest Post at Keely Brooke Keith

 

 

 

 



Julie's Books of a Lifetime

I joined the Historical Tapestry team exactly 2 years ago today, so I thought it was about time that I shared my books of a lifetime with you all.

I have always loved reading; to loose myself within the confines of a book, so that when I finish reading it feels like I have lost a good friend. As I sat to write this post I pondered on the many thousands of books I have read over the years. The list is enormous and I wonder if I had to choose a few really special books what would I choose?

So I am going to share the books that have left a lasting impression with me. The books that I can recall the plot months and in some cases years after I read it. Or perhaps the books that I re-read with complete regularity. There maybe a few surprises and if you are regular reader of the Anglers Rest blog you may be familiar with several of the books mentioned.

I don't know how old I was when I was introduced to books. I do recall sitting on my Grandmother's knee whilst she read to me the many Enid Blyton books that I loved. Starting with Noddy and Big Ears in the years before political correctness when completely mad! I still have my childhood set of Noddy books.

I then moved on to the Mr Twiddle series before racing on through the Famous Five, Malory Towers, St Clare's series. For those who would like a trip down memory lane there is an Enid Blyton Society. I also enjoyed the Nancy Drew series and they were frequently borrowed (and re-borrowed) from the library and the library of yesteryear when the tickets were a heavy card and the books exchanged for a round disc or your library ticket.

Those books and wonderful times with my Grandmother undoubtedly shaped my reading habit and enthusiasm. I recall many an evening with my Mum and Grandmother, all with our heads buried in our respective books.

Into senior school and reading was typically history texts or literature books that had been set. Hamlet, Mice and Men are just a few. A real favourite during this period was Animal Farm by George Orwell, that was strategically read whilst undertaking Russian history and Revolution.

Once into adulthood I have read a real variety of books. I love to read books that form part of a series and I like to read them in order. Two favourites are those set in Elm Creek by Jennifer Chiaverini. Another series, but completely different to the Elm Creek series is the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. I am slightly obsessive about reading in order and often will gather a complete set before reading commences. Then once I have finished reading the series it takes a few weeks before I can move on to another book.

I also like several of the cozy mystery series, especially those that feature coffeeshops, teashops, knitting and various crafts.

I also like anything with a genealogical theme; that way I can get my two obsessions nicely bound together, two fixes for the prices of one if you will!

The final book I am going to mention is A Town like Alice by Neville Shute. I bought a tatty looking second hand copy about 30 years ago. That copy is still going strong and the book is read at least once every year. I have thought about replacing the tatty copy but somehow, that those new editions are just not the same. Here is a picture of my very well read copy.

Thank you for accompanying me as I shared my books of a lifetime. Why not share your books too?

Books of a Lifetime by Hazel Gaynor

Thank you for inviting me to Historical Tapestry to talk about my favourite subject: books!

All writers are readers, first and foremost. I firmly believe it is a love of words, instilled in us during our formative years, which creates that urge to write our own books as adults, to tell our own stories. Perhaps all writers are channelling their inner child – making stuff up, using their imaginations. I like to think so!

My own childhood was peppered with a rich diet of classic children’s books. Bedtime stories were Winnie the Pooh, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Wind in the Willows. My dreams were inhabited by Tigger and Piglet, Mrs Tiggywinkle, Ratty and Mole and naughty Mr Toad. Of course, Enid Blyton was also on the shelf: Noddy and Big Ears, The Famous Five, Malory Towers … and when I was old enough to read myself, I took great joy in hiding under the bed covers with a torch to read on when I was supposed to be asleep. Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man was also a particularly memorable childhood book. Part mesmerised, part terrified, I just couldn’t put it down. I recently read a beautiful illustrated version to my two boys and they are equally captivated.

I also have very clear memories of visiting the local library as a child. It was a cold and draughty building, but there was something quite magical about those shelves and shelves of books just waiting to be read. I can almost remember the smell of the place; can still remember how I would reach up onto my tiptoes to watch the librarian as she took the little card out of the sleeve in the front of each book, stamped it and slid it back in. Such a simple thing, but the basis of such profound memories.

It was in my teenage years that I discovered the two books which have had the most lasting impact on me. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Both are still my most loved books of all time (no doubt helped by the fact that the Bronte home at Haworth Parsonage on the Yorkshire Moors wasn’t too far from where I grew up). I adored these sisters, their lives and their novels so much that I chose to compare and contrast Emily and Charlotte, and their female protagonists (Cathy and Jane), for my English Literature A’Level extended essay of 10,000 words. I could easily have written 20,000 words. I would love to read that essay now – I wonder what conclusions I drew?!

From the Brontes, I moved on to Jane Austen and fell in love with Lizzie Bennett and Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. I equally loved Sense and Sensibility and Emma. I also have great affection for Dickens’ Great Expectations. Pip, Estella and Miss Havisham are such fantastic characters. At around the same time, I discovered Daphne du Maurier’s brilliantly haunting Rebecca, another book which has really stayed with me. Mrs Danvers still sends a chill up my spine!

And there are so many other books I have loved since, many of them read on my daily commute in London in the mid to late ‘90s: Birdsong. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Perfume. Wild Swans and Memoirs of a Geisha to name but a few. I also read the early Harry Potter books on those train journeys, long before they were republished with much less embarrassing ‘adult’ covers.

I was a late bloomer when it came to Tolkien, reading The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy just before the first movie was released in 2001. I consider it a rite of passage to read these classics, and made my way, slowly, through Moby Dick for the same reason.

In more recent years, the books I have read and loved have been many and varied. I wept for hours after finishing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I fell hopelessly in love with Rose Tremain’s wonderful character, Merivel, in Restoration and again in Merivel. I adored Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. And of course, Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl which was, for me, a game changer for historical fiction. She wrote history differently. She opened my eyes to an entirely different perspective of the Tudor dynasty that I had laboured over in the vast tomes written by historians such as David Starkey. Philippa Gregory made this fascinating period really come alive for me. I have read many of her books since and was totally in awe when I met her in person in 2012.

Most recently, I have gushed with praise for Eowyn Ivey’s magical The Snow Child and Hannah Kent’s astounding debut Burial Rites. I have many, many books on my TBR pile and while this may take over a hefty corner of the bedroom floor, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

As a writer, I now read with a slightly different eye. Of course, I still get hopelessly lost in a great story, but I can now also step back a little to admire the craft of writing, the narrative devices and the sheer brilliance of a story well told. These great authors simply make me want to write better. It is by reading that I have ultimately discovered what it is I want to write (and what I don’t) and I continue to read with more and more hunger as my own stories bubble and brew in my mind.

As for what I am currently reading? Hilary Mantel’s epic, Wolf Hall. I may be some time …

Hazel Gaynor is an author and freelance writer in Ireland and the U.K. and was the

recipient of the Cecil Day Lewis Award for Emerging Writers in 2012. Originally from North Yorkshire, England, she now lives in Ireland with her husband, two young children, and an accident-prone cat.

A voyage across the ocean becomes the odyssey of a lifetime for a young Irish woman. . . .

Ireland, 1912 . . .

Fourteen members of a small village set sail on RMS Titanic, hoping to find a better life in America. For seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy, the journey is bittersweet. Though her future lies in an unknown new place, her heart remains in Ireland with Séamus, the sweetheart she left behind. When disaster strikes, Maggie is one of the few passengers in steerage to survive. Waking up alone in a New York hospital, she vows never to speak of the terror and panic of that fateful night again.

Chicago, 1982 . . .

Adrift after the death of her father, Grace Butler struggles to decide what comes next. When her great-grandmother Maggie shares the painful secret about Titanicthat she’s harbored for almost a lifetime, the revelation gives Grace new direction—and leads both her and Maggie to unexpected reunions with those they thought lost long ago.

Inspired by true events, The Girl Who Came Home poignantly blends fact and fiction to explore the Titanic tragedy’s impact and its lasting repercussions on survivors and their descendants.

Books Of A Lifetime by Alison McQueen

My mother introduced me to Pearl Buck some twenty-five years ago. I was visiting my parents, who lived in a village in the middle of nowhere, and found myself at a loose end from a reading point of view. “Have you read any Pearl Buck?” she asked. I reckoned I’d gone through everything vaguely interesting on my parents’ bookshelves years ago. Apparently not.

I started with the 1945 novel, Portrait Of A Marriage, and although I just couldn’t get my head around the annoying dynamic of the marriage, (as a banner-waving feminist, I think it felt too passive and old-fashioned in comparison to the books I was reading at the time), there was something almost haunting about the way it was written. The style was a little too verbose for my liking, but still, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all, so I started another, Pavilion of Women, and it all began to drop into place.

Written in 1946, Pavilion of Women is one of Pearl Buck’s superb Oriental novels, and tells the story of Madam Wu, who, upon reaching her fortieth birthday, decides to retire from married life and brings a concubine into the household for her husband. It is a delicate and beautiful story, written of a certain time, and I have never forgotten it.

Pearl Buck was born in 1892 in West Virginia, and grew up in China, where her parents were missionaries. It was there, in the grave-littered grasslands behind their house, that she would stumble across the tiny bones of baby girls who had been suffocated at birth. She started writing in her twenties, and became so prolific that her works are almost unlistable, yet, by the time that I started reading her, she had been largely forgotten.

Many of Pearl Buck’s novels deal with the confrontation of East and West, with the fragile business of customs and traditions, and, most brilliantly, with the intricacies of all-too-human relationships and the lot of women in her far-flung settings. Her 1931 novel, The Good Earth, earned her a string of awards, among them the Pulitzer. In 1938, she was recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her writing spilled over into political journalism, and she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind and to press for Chinese women’s liberation.

I knew none of this when I started reading her, and in my years as a writer, I came to realize how little known she had become. I mentioned her to one of my editors many moons ago, and she had never even heard of her. Then, a couple years back, her name popped up on the radio as the subject of a newly-released biography about her life in China.

The Good Earth re-entered the American bestseller charts in 2004 after being selected for Oprah’s Book Club, over seventy years after it was first published, and thirty years after the author’s death. These days, whenever somebody asks me for a book recommendation, I often hear myself saying, “Have you read any Pearl Buck?”

Born to an Indian mother and an English jazz musician father, Alison McQueen grew up in London. After a convent education, Alison worked in advertising for twenty years before retiring to write full time. In 2006 she was selected from an impressive longlist to join The Writer’s Circle, a group of 8 top writers to be groomed by the UK film industry as the new generation of British screenwriters. She has written two novels, UNDER THE JEWELED SKY and THE SECRET CHILDREN, which was inspired by her life.  Alison lives in a small English village with her husband and two daughters.

Books of a Lifetime by Jennifer Kloester

Today we are pleased to have Jennifer Kloester here at Historical Tapestry to talk about her "Books of a Lifetime".

Welcome Jennifer!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks for having me on your wonderful website and for the chance to talk about books. I love books and their power to transport me to another place and time, to move me and teach me and make me laugh or cry. I am in awe of the lasting power of words and the way in which books read in childhood and adolescence have not only stayed with me for years but also enriched my experience and even shaped my life. For example, much of my love of England can be directly traced to my childhood reading. Books such as Swallows and Amazons, Winter Holiday, Pigeon Post, The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, Schoolgirl Honour, The Secret Garden, Ballet Shoes, The Little White Horse, Sherlock Holmes, Enid Blyton's Famous Five and Malory Towers series and John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps each informed my youthful view of the world. As a child I loved adventure and mystery and romance and reveled in the possibility that the things done by the characters in these books were actually possible. I yearned for adventure and I found a vicarious satisfaction in the triumphs of Richard Hannay or the Fossil sisters or the Blackett children or Mole and Ratty and terrible Toad.

As I grew older I moved on to mystery and murder novels, though still with a civilized Englishness that I found reassuring. Dorothy L. Sayers' wonderful Peter Wimsey books with their literary allusions and intellectual interpolations in Latin and French captivated and intrigued me, while Agatha Christie proved to be perfect holiday reading whenever our family went camping. P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That and John Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga expanded my horizons in new directions as did the wonderful writing of Oscar Wilde, Nancy Mitford and Georgette Heyer. I love to laugh but it is a rare author who can make me laugh out loud and these three each do so in their own inimitable way. I especially love Georgette Heyer's Regency novels with their clever plots, witty dialogue and marvellous comic characters such as Jonathan Chawleigh in A Civil Contract, Augustus Fawnhope in The Grand Sophy, Ferdy in Friday's Child and Sir Nugent Fotherby in Sylvester (to name but a few).

My love of English literature and poetry enriched my childhood and sent me out into the world to seek my own adventures. I've found plenty of them and also plenty of marvellous new authors – and not just English ones either. Books like Mr Pip, The Help, The Hare with Amber Eyes, Perfume, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Elegance of the Hedgehog and The Tall Man have given me hours of reading pleasure and enriched my life in ways that are quite different to those experienced via my childhood reading – though they are no less potent. Each new book is a new adventure and, even now, I still love an adventure!


Jennifer Kloester is the author of two books about one of our favourites here at Historical Tapestry - Georgette Heyer. You can find out more about Jennifer and her books at her website.

Books of a Lifetime by Andrei Baltakmens

So far I’ve lived in three different countries—New Zealand, the United States and Australia—and each move has necessitated shedding some books while keeping the ones that matter. I always retain at least two large bookshelves: a collection of classics and contemporary literature, anchored by the Odyssey, Iliad and Shakespeare, and topped by Dickens, and a bookshelf for fantasy, speculative fiction and mystery.

But why stick with these books?

For me, the books of a lifetime are those that create an entire immersive world: vivid and concrete as you imagine it. These books, in reading, generate the sensation of presence, of the outside world receding and the fiction living around you. I remember reading the mesmerizing opening chapters of Our Mutual Friend on a rainy winter’s morning in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the feeling of being on that dark London riverside, amongst the mud and coal-smoke, was acute.

Dickens, from the legal and spiritual labyrinths of Bleak House to the prisons of Little Dorrit and beyond, has that power of conjuring an entirely realized world. This lies in the scope of his imagination, the heightening effect of his descriptions, his abundant language and vibrant characterization.

Joseph Conrad wrote that the aim of the writer’s art, above all else, is to make you see. I think this does not mean simply to visualize but to comprehend the whole in the parts the writer can present, to see it clearly, illuminated by its own light. Conrad, who bridges the Victorians and modernism and joined the adventure story to something morally complex, is an often overlooked master. Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and Lord Jim maintain their hold on me.

Many works with the same compelling quality come crowding in, as I think on it. Tolkien is rightly understood as a master of world-building, but the impression of vast depth he creates is the key to his magic. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy sings through the clean, evocative beauty of its language, whereas Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast sequence is concrete due to the architectural detail of its stunning, elaborate, Dickensian prose.

I would add these novels, which draw on and embed history to create unique worlds: Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera (which brings to mind Borges and his labyrinths of thought and memory).

From my other shelves, the clarity with which P.D. James writes, and the way she uses mystery to pick apart the subtle contradictions of British society, makes her detective novels particularly intriguing. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose intricately combines so many literary traditions (mystery, history, Borges and the intellectual thriller) within a precisely realized, intellectually complex setting that it continues to resonate.

But every author I believe has one more bookshelf, a shelf for impossible books they dream of reading and books they want to write. Reading brought me back to Dickens and Dickensian mysteries for my Ph.D. thesis. So Dickens was still with me, years later, when I began my historical mystery, The Raven’s Seal. I was conscious of not trying to imitate the inimitable Dickens but of drawing on the strengths of his style. Creative writing classes instruct us to show and not tell, and aspire to a spare, minimalist style, but Dickens demonstrates that writing can show and tell, and joke and instruct and misdirect and even rage, and above all else entertain.

Similarly, contemporary literary fiction is suspicious of plot because life is not so constructed, but Dickens used plots, and particularly the mystery plot, as hinges for meaning, and I wanted to pick up on the same impulse in a mystery story. And, like Dickens in his last mystery, Edwin Drood, I created a world of my own, a fictional city and a prison, to frame my mystery so that I could focus on the story rather than the details of a real place which would be familiar to many readers and historians. I doubt if I can ever match Dickens’s genius, only acknowledge his influence.

Reading is an experience, and the books that mark you for life magnify experience. That quality of vividness and presence always brings me back to certain authors. For better or worse this makes itself felt in my own work, a lifetime’s effort among books. 

---

Andrei Baltakmens is the author of The Raven's Seal. You can read an excerpt here. 

Books of a Lifetime by James Becker

Today we welcome James Becker, author of ECHO OF THE REICH to Historical Tapestry to share his Books of a Lifetime.

***

I write thrillers for a living, with the occasional venture into the somewhat uncharted and certainly unfamiliar waters of non-fiction and ghostwriting, and almost inevitably most of the books I read are also thrillers. If nothing else, I do need to be professionally aware of what other authors in my chosen genre are producing: I need to be able to spot new trends as they emerge to avoid ending up—to continue the aquatic theme with which I started this paragraph—in some unvisited backwater.

            But thrillers are essentially ephemeral. Once you know the ending of a particular book, at least some of the excitement and attraction in reading it has gone, and so most of the books I read today are discarded—or, more accurately, deleted from my Kindle—once I’ve finished them. I retain very, very few to read again. If you look at my library, there are almost no novels in it, and the vast majority of books are reference works which are related in some way to the subjects that I write about, and I don’t read these, just dip into them when I need to in the search for some elusive fact.

            But having said that, I do have one shelf which contains a small number of books that I read once and enjoyed so much that I decided to keep them, and every so often I go back and I read them again, with undiminished enjoyment. But I will freely admit to anyone that they are a somewhat eclectic selection. And they even include two non-fiction works which I’ll get out of the way first.

            Somewhat alarmingly, both of these books discuss monsters, one type undeniably extinct, the fate of the other creature rather less certain. The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker takes a critical look at these giant animals which roamed the surface of our planet for millions of years and makes a number of suggestions about them which have yet to be accepted by mainstream palaeontologists, hence the title. Principally, he believes that dinosaurs were quite probably warm-blooded and suggest that some of them were a lot more intelligent than most people believe. Robert Bakker is a palaeontologist himself – a somewhat eccentric palaeontologist, as I think even he would agree—but he writes with a fervour and a passion which is enormously engaging, and his arguments seem to me to be both logical and sensible. Like almost every child, I was fascinated by dinosaurs when I was growing up, and in this book they really seem to come alive.

            The second monster is well known around the world, even though its existence is disputed by almost everybody. In The Great Orm of Loch Ness: A Practical Inquiry into the Nature and Habits of Water-monsters, F. W. Holiday describes his own personal search for the Loch Ness Monster. Belief or non-belief in this creature is obviously very individual. Most scientists flatly deny that any large unknown animal could exist in this vast body of water, but almost none of those scientists have bothered to bestir themselves from their cosy academic niches to visit the loch and actually investigate it. F. W. Holiday did investigate it, and claims that he saw the creature himself, a testimony that one obviously either accepts or rejects. What I love about this book is not so much the subject as the way the author writes about it. He clearly has a passion for the subject, but also a very obvious mastery of the English language, and some of the phrases and expressions he uses are almost poetic in their concepts and creativity. It is a delightful book to read, irrespective of the subject matter.

            And turning to creative writing, one of my personal favourites has to be the entire universe-encompassing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of books by Douglas Adams—a trilogy in four parts, as he puts it. The author has a deft touch in his use of words and the way he puts them together, and the story itself is simply wonderful. It pokes fun at everything from the human race—‘ape-descended life-forms who still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea’—to the bureaucracy that requires the demolition of the planet Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass and which places the planning authority in Alpha Centauri where any complaints should have been lodged. The book is laced with humour throughout, as the hapless Arthur Dent travels the galaxy in pyjamas and dressing gown, encountering sexy archaeologists investigating the demise of civilisations caused by the Shoe Event Horizon, and hitching rides on spaceships powered by exotic and unlikely devices, including the Infinite Improbability Drive, the Someone Else’s Problem Field, and even a space-warping engine which relies on the new science of bistromatics, mathematics based upon the financial calculations involved in paying for a meal in an Italian bistro.

            Two other slim volumes on the shelf which still make me laugh are two of the funniest books ever written, in my opinion. The first is Puckoon by Spike Milligan, an unlikely tale describing the division of Ireland into two separate countries, a tale peopled by entirely believable and heavily flawed characters who find themselves in the strangest of situations. Spike Milligan handles the complex story beautifully, and the book is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

The second novel is The Great Dinosaur Robbery by David Forrest, one of the very few books written by two authors (David Forrest was the joint pseudonym of two writers) that I have read and enjoyed. I know we’re back to dinosaurs again, but that’s almost incidental. The story is as simple as it is unlikely, and involves a group of nannies in New York contriving to steal an entire brontosaurus, bone by bone, from a museum to mail it to Her Majesty the Queen in London because they believe it contains a hidden message from a British secret agent. The humour and the characterisation are simply delightful.

            One other of my ‘must read again’ books is non-fiction. My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell is one of those books that instantly transports you to another place and time, in this case the island of Corfu where he spent his adolescent years just before the Second World War. All of his books—and he wrote 37 in all—are enjoyable reads, most especially if you’re interested in the animals with which we share this planet, but this book is a delight no matter what your view of nature. His descriptions of the island and the many eccentric characters he met there are a joy to read, and you really feel that you know the place and the people. I have a particularly soft spot for this book because it was one of the set books when I was studying English literature at school, and it enlivened my studies enormously.

            Finally, there’s my ‘desert island book’: if I were to be stranded somewhere, deprived of my Kindle and any other form of entertainment, but could take one book with me, what would it be? That’s actually an easy question to answer. Without the slightest hesitation I would seize The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. Again, as with the Durrell book, I was lucky enough to read The Hobbit as part of my school studies, and progression to the longer, darker and much more absorbing The Lord of the Rings was an obvious step. I believe this book to be one of the crowning literary achievements of the twentieth century. Not only is it an absorbing and fascinating tale, but it is beautifully and creatively written, exciting and disturbing. Such was JRR Tolkien’s linguistic ability that he not only invented several new languages to be used in the book, such as Elvish, but he even wrote poetry and inscriptions in those languages. Quite remarkable. This is a book I’ve already read two or three times, and which I hope I will be able to read many times again.

I’m a bestselling author on both sides of the Atlantic with my historical mystery thrillers penned under the name ‘James Becker’, which have enjoyed substantial international sales and are now available in some fourteen languages. The latest book published by Penguin in the United States of America and by Transworld in the United Kingdom is Echo of the Reich.

Books of a Lifetime by Kim Fay, The Map of Lost Memories

I love novelists, and I devour information about them the way many others follow celebrities. I want to know their methods, their madnesses, their inspirations. I am awed when I discover that one of my favorites read Great Expectations at the age of twelve, or that another credits teenage years spent reading Willa Cather with shaping her literary career. I am also fascinated because my experience was very different. So different that I bemoaned my devoid-of-literary-notables adolescence to a friend, when asking her who I should mention if ever questioned about it.

“Lie,” my friend told me.

I have considered it. It’s not that I didn’t read as a child. In fact, I read voraciously from the moment I could hold a book, and I loved all the usual suspects: Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Carolyn Keene. Like every budding writer, I was mad about Jo March. And my passion for Betty Cavanna ran so deep that I actually absorbed her writing into my own without realizing it until my sister gave me a vintage copy of Cavanna’s Mystery of the Emerald Buddha last year, to celebrate my novel being accepted for publication. In this book there is a dinner party conversation about the ethics of taking artifacts from the Angkor Wat temples out of Cambodia. As I reread this section, I was astonished, since that exact issue plays a crucial role in my historical adventure novel, The Map of Lost Memories.

As I left grade school, I was on the path to becoming one of those teenagers who discovers Virginia Woolf and George Eliot and Ayn Rand and so on. Instead, I took a turn and found myself in the land of teen romances, which led me into the land of Harlequin romances, where I was drawn not to the love stories but to the exotic locales: Hong Kong, Greece and Paris first came alive for me on the pages of romance novels, which were the only books I read for years, with one exception.

In the seventh grade I somehow got my hands on a copy of Gone with the Wind. I don’t remember if I bought it myself or if someone gave it to me; what I do remember is that I was captivated from the first line: Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. I bolted it down, all 1,024 pages of it, in less than a week, absorbed by the history, Scarlett’s determination, and a romance on an epic scale. When I was done, I immediately flipped it over and started reading it again, and I read it half a dozen more times (at least) before I graduated from high school. It sat by my side as I typed away on my own novels, a faithful companion urging me on. I loved that book so much that when I attended my twenty-year reunion, a former classmate commented on how “Kim used to carry a ratty old copy of Gone with the Wind around with her all the time.”

That ratty old copy happens to still be sitting on my bookshelf, held together (just barely) with layers of tape.

As I entered college and took advanced English courses, studying writers ranging from Henry James to Joan Didion, the romances drifted out of my life. And once I started working at The Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, I entered a whole new realm of reading: Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, Muriel Spark, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Katherine Anne Porter, Laurie Colwin … the list truly is endless, for there were times when I was reading a book a day. In the five years I worked at that indie bookstore, Michael Ondaatje taught me the poetry to be found in prose, Penelope Lively taught me how to layer a plot, and Graham Greene taught me the art of literary suspense. But as for my beloved Margaret Mitchell, she taught me the greatest thing of all: how to tell a story and keep a reader turning the page.

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Born in Seattle and raised throughout Washington State, I lived in Vietnam for four years and still travel to Southeast Asia frequently. A former independent bookseller, I am the author of the historical novel The Map of Lost Memories and Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam, winner of the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards’ Best Asian Cuisine Book in the United States. I am also the creator/editor of the To Asia With Love guidebook series. I now live in Los Angeles. I am represented by Alexandra Machinist of Janklow & Nesbit.

Synopsis:

Suspense and secrets are woven together in this engrossing fiction debut by Kim Fay.The Map of Lost Memories takes readers on a daring expedition to a remote land, where the search for an elusive treasure becomes a journey into the darkest recesses of the mind and heart.

In 1925, the international treasure-hunting scene is a man’s world, and no woman knows this better than Irene Blum, who is passed over for the coveted curator position at Seattle’s renowned Brooke Museum. But she is not ready to accept defeat. Skilled at acquiring priceless, often illicitly trafficked artifacts, Irene is given a rare map believed to lead to a set of copper scrolls that chronicle the lost history of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer civilization. Such a find would not only restore her reputation, it would be the greatest archaeological discovery of the century.

As Irene travels from Seattle to Shanghai to the Cambodian jungles, she will encounter several equally determined companions, including a communist temple robber and a dashing nightclub owner with a complicated past. As she and her fellow adventurers sweep across borders and make startling discoveries, their quest becomes increasingly dangerous. Everyone who comes to this part of the world “has something to hide,” Irene is told—and she learns just how true this is. What she and her accomplices bring to light will do more than change history. It will ultimately solve the mysteries of their own lives.

Books of a Lifetime by Yves Fey + international giveaway

I have many favorite novels not on the list, but for my books of a lifetime I’ve chosen the ones that I return to most often. First is Tolkien’s peerless epic, The Lord of the Rings. I discovered The Fellowship of the Ring in the early 60s, before the brouhaha, and spent about three years trying to get the rest of the series from the library. It was always checked out. Then, magically, it appeared in paperback in my local store. Tolkien is a master stylist, his prose gorgeous without ever being flashy (I love flashy, but I’m awed by his purity and clarity). His language is devoted to the realization of his world, one of the most brilliant ever conceived. It is one of the great everyman stories. I never fail to weep when Frodo leaves for the Grey Havens. The ending leaves me bereft, but the book fills me with joy and renewed hope. I reread the entire series at least once a decade. It is a gift that will endure.

After TLOTR, the books I reread most are probably Dorothy L. Sayers Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey romantic mysteries. I’ve read the quartet a half dozen times, and my two favorites, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, more often. I adore that she pulled off the ultimate Mary Sue novels, where her beloved hero falls for her own alter ego, and we don’t scorn her for it. I worship her elegance and wit - the opening of Have His Carcase is as brilliant as Austen. And the quartet forms a wonderful love story with the tantalizing tension she creates between Harriet and Peter, and the exquisite detail with which she renders it. She excels in her deft characterizations of the minor characters. While I generally prefer dark and broody reads, I can go to the dark-edged brightness of her classic mysteries for a delicious escape.

Mysteries are the genre I read the most, though with few exceptions I do not reread them. One exception is John le Carré, specifically the trilogy of George Smiley’s shadow world of espionage. Le Carré is a master of dialogue. I don’t think any character is ever tongue-tied in his books, yet their voices are always unique and individual. Connie Sachs is one of my favorite female characters. I wish Le Carre had given Connie a book to herself, a grey and gritty Miss Marple at Oxford mystery to solve on her own. The other enduring exception is Raymond Chandler because of his extravagant yet ironic style (he was as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a piece of angel food cake). I have a battered but treasured set of Chandler paperbacks with the 70s covers by Tom Adams, and a copy of his book of Agatha Christie covers.

Like many others, I also return to Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles and her devious, vitriolic, brilliant hero Francis Crawford of Lymond and his fascinating adventures across a broad map of the 16th century. Her style is baroque (I did say I love flashy), and its saturated brilliance and detail suits the flamboyance of the period. Dunnett and Tolkien are among the few who can write long action scenes that hold my attention. Dunnett does it by leavening bursts of beautifully choreographed movement with thought and dialogue without ever disrupting the pace. I also admire her utter ruthlessness, killing off her darlings (the readers’ favorites) without mercy to further the story.

Equally often I return to Mary Renault, her Greek novels and her Alexander books. Of these my favorites are The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, and The Persian Boy. Her romantic sensibility captivates me. I love her characters, and her world building is breathtaking. I appreciate her early affirmation of homosexual relationships, writing unapologetically when homosexuality was still scorned by society in general, and offering a world in which those open to change could begin to do so.

I have also returned to J.R.R. Salamanca’s haunting Southern Gothic novel Lilith. La Belle Dame Sans Merci is one of my favorite poems and Lilith is a beautiful and tragic modern embodiment of Keats’ vision. Also I return to it because I knew a Lilith, who if not mad was quite willing to abandon mundane truth in the quest for the ever-tempting lure of the mythic.

The Brothers Karamazov is a book which is always with me and forever influences how I see the world. Dostoyevsky is another ruthless writer, but unlike Dunnett, I believe he simply could not help his merciless honesty, but feared and dreaded it, even shredding his own most dearly held beliefs by putting them in the mouths of fools. Dostoyevsky could go down the rabbit hole of any character’s mind, down to the darkest pit, and sometimes fling himself free once again. Sometimes not. I think his only equal in character conception is Shakespeare.

I will close with two other books I have reread several times, one which has another of my favorite openings, and the other my favorite closing. The first is Robert Penn Warren’s All The Kings Men, with its drive down the blinding, sweltering highway into another era and the eternal swamp of moral dilemma. The last is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a great book whose final paragraphs forever fill me with the heartbreaking poignance of lost dreams.


THE GIVEAWAY:

- open worldwide
- one entry per household
- leave a comment until the 30 Septembre at midnight GMT.

 

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FLOATS THE DARK SHADOW is Yves Fey's first historical mystery, set in the dynamic and decadent world of Belle Époque Paris. Yves Fey has an MFA in Creative Writing from Eugene Oregon, and a BA in Pictorial Arts from UCLA. She has read, written, and created art from childhood. A chocolate connoisseur, she's won prizes for her desserts. Her current fascination is creating perfumes. She's traveled to many countries in Europe and lived for two years in Indonesia. She currently lives in the San Francisco area with her husband and three cats. Writing as Gayle Feyrer and Taylor Chase, she previously published unusually dark and mysterious historical romances.

 

Books of a Lifetime by Anthony Goodman (With Give-away)

Goodman’s choice for Book of a Lifetime:
The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III by Sharon Kay Penman.

As authors of historical fiction, we are faced with a delightful dilemma. That dilemma stems from the very subtle difference in the unwritten contract we make with our readers. In writing fiction that bargain is easy: we promise only to attempt to entertain and engage our audience with the subject, the plot and the characters in our story.

When writing ‘creative non-fiction,’ such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, part of that contract says we will “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,” while again entertaining and engaging our reader.

But when we write historical fiction, we walk a fine line between telling our readers what actually happened, while taking license to simply make things up. So we are faced with the choices of exactly how much we can make up and how much we should not.

To my mind, one of the finest writers of historic fiction is Sharon Kay Penman, and her finest work for me is The Sunne In Splendour: A Novel of Richard III. Penman took a true-life character who was represented by Shakespeare as one of the greatest villains in history, and turned him into a brave, loyal and admirable human being who sacrifices all for the finest of motives and principles.

She manages to take relatively newfound research about Richard, and weave a story which totally contradicts what the rest of us have learned in our history classes, and most of all, from one of the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard the III. When I first read The Sunne in Splendour, I wondered exactly how much of this was, indeed, fact and how much Penman had made up. I later came upon a book in my mother’s library by a well-loved British mystery writer named Josephine Tey, titled The Daughter of Time. In this book, Tey tells the story of Richard III as investigated through the eyes of a modern Scotland Yard detective, who in turn finds Richard not guilty of his alleged crimes, and also a heroic and admirable man. The main character in Tey’s novel, Inspector Grant, uses the best forensic tools of his day – logic and inductive reasoning, (much like Sherlock Holmes) - to make his case. Penman wrote her book in 1982, while Tey’s novel was published in 1951. So forgive me when I say, “there is nothing new under the sunne.”
In these books, as well as the whole genre of Historical Fiction, the author will put words into characters mouths which may never have been spoken; will write scenes that may never have taken place; and will put thoughts into the minds of characters which no one could ever have known. This is the ‘creative’ part of historic fiction, and crosses the line which would otherwise break the contract that the writer has agreed to when writing “Creative Non-Fiction.”

I was given the diaries and letters of my own personal hero and surgical mentor, Dr. Alfred Hurwitz, shortly after his death. Dr. Hurwitz volunteered for active duty in WW II, and then landed on Omaha Beach during the D Day invasion; he followed the front line fighting through France, to the Malmédy Massacre in Belgium, to the Battle of the Bulge, to the liberation of the concentration camps deep in the heart of Germany. I used his diaries and letters, as well documents from his surgical auxiliary group to recreate the story of ordinary men and women who risked their lives every day to bring back the wounded alive from the primitive and dangerous environs of the battlefield. The most touching piece of history was sent to me by Dr. Hurwitz’s wife in a letter he sent just a week after landing on Omaha Beach:

“The soldiers have been wonderful, never a whimper. Always “Yes, Sir,” even with their last breath. It is the amazing courage of these boys that spurs us on. We can’t sell them short. They must always be our prime consideration.
"This has made me a wiser man. It has imbued me with the realization that petty things won’t disturb me in the future, that there is an indescribable beauty in just living.
“Thank you for your prayers. Somebody did take care of me, but I am afraid many more deserving men have been sacrificed in the holocaust.”

From these structural supports I wrote a novel, filled with words that were never spoken, and action that occurred at some time and some place, but not exactly as told in the book. Virtually all the events did take place. But not to one person or one group. This is, in the end, fiction – historic or not.

As an author, it is a wonderful gift to be able to put the story into a readable and gripping (though not necessarily happy) work of writing: The joys of writing historical fiction.


Anthony Goodman is the author of None But the Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II (2012), and The Shadow of God: A Novel of War and Faith (2002)

The publisher has graciously offered up two copies of None But the Brave for give-away to two lucky Historical Tapestry readers. To enter just leave a comment with your email address. The give-away will end September 21, 2012. This give-away is United States only.