All posts filed under: historical fiction

Historical novelist Maria McCann on Ace, King, Knave

[An] exuberant revivification of grave robbers and gamblers, hucksters and whores in 18th-century London: like Hogarth sprung to life. – Hilary Mantel, Books of the Year 2013, Observer This is my second interview with Maria McCann – I first interviewed her back in 2010 about her previous novel, The Wilding, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize. That novel was set during the Restoration in 1672. For her new book, Ace, King, Knave, Maria has moved forward almost a century to the Georgian England of the mid-1760s. The novel is the tale of two young women: Sophia, born into the Somerset aristocracy, and Betsy-Ann, the daughter of travelling fair people, and their relationship with the same man, though they each know him under a different name. To Sophia, he is Mr Zedland, heir to an estate in Essex with an elegant townhouse in London. The man Betsy-Ann knows as Ned, however, comes from a much more disreputable background. The Georgian capital is a world where everyone, whether highborn or low, is looking for the Great …

German novelist Eugen Ruge on ‘In Times of Fading Light’

In Times of Fading Light is Eugen Ruge‘s debut novel, a bestseller in Germany, and the winner of the 2011 German Book prize, awarded to the best German-language novel of the year. A multi-generational story spanning well over half a century (and drawing to a certain extent on Ruge’s own family history), it charts the impact of wider historical events on the lives of the Umlitzer family, who once belonged to the Communist elite but whose socialist utopia has long-since vanished by the time the book opens in 2001. Through four generations, Ruge presents different perspectives of life under changing political regimes and the restrictions they imposed – we move from Fascism, to Communism and post-Communism, finishing with hyper-Capitalism. We witness characters’ lives that still have their fair share of mundane chores, problems and domestic disputes, but which appear extraordinary set against backdrops that are hard now to imagine. Eugen Ruge was born in 1954 in the Urals in the former Soviet Union, where his German communist father Wolfgang had fled from the Nazis in …

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

I recently interviewed Serbian-born, London-based writer, poet, and academic Vesna Goldsworthy, whose books include a  collection of poetry, The Angel of Salonika, and a memoir entitled Chernobyl Strawberries, which one reviewer described as “suffused with a longing complicated and deepened by the eradication of the Yugoslav state”. I met Vesna to discuss Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination, another book which contemplates the identity of South Eastern Europe, in this case the construction of the Balkans in the British literary imaginary – “a gently ridiculous proxy” as Vesna calls it  (typified by the fictional kingdom of Ruritania) for the real Balkans; a repository for the qualities of a region which by turn attracted, fascinated and repelled the British; a place that could be turned into farce and pastiche, or depicted as a place of potential menace, where European identify dissolved into something irredeemably alien and eastern. To listen to the podcast [22:45], click here. To find out more about the book, visit Vesna’s publisher’s site here.

6. Books of the Year – Catherine Arnold

Our final guest who shares the highlights of her past twelve months of reading is historian Catherine Arnold. I first interviewed Catherine about the second book in her London trilogy, which explores the darker aspects of the city’s past, Bedlam: London and its Mad. You can hear the interview here. (The first volume of the series, as yet unpodcasted, is Necropolis: London and its Dead.) More recently, we met to talk about her latest book, City of Sin: London and its Vices. You can listen to that here.  Here are Catherine’s choices from her 2010 reading: Looking back at the books which I’ve enjoyed over the past year reveals that history, personal, national and social, has been much on my mind. I’m currently researching a book about London and crime, and to this end I’ve particularly enjoyed Newgate, London’s Prototype of Hell by Stephen Halliday, and Tyburn, London’s Fatal Tree (Alan Brooke and David Brandon), both from the History Press (Sutton). Gripping accounts of two of the darkest aspects of London life. As I have also …

1. Books of the Year – Elizabeth Speller

Today we begin a new series of guest posts in which writers and publishers choose their favourite books of 2010. Our first guest is Elizabeth Speller, whose first novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, was published to great acclaim earlier this year. You can hear my interview with her about the book here. Her second novel, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton, will appear in May 2011. Here are her choices (you’ll find an interview with one of her selected authors, Madeleine Bunting, here): My greatest pleasure this year came from reading Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper. Read selectively, randomly or straight through (I did all three, in order) it is a wonderfully intelligent and lively journey through the landscape of the imagination between the wars. Harris informs but also has huge fun with the creativity, fantasy and sometimes spectacular self-indulgence of the period. I’m delighted to see publishers producing such visually beautiful but serious books to compete with e-publishing. It was announced …

Hilary Mantel interview revisited

“Revisited” because this is something of a first for Podularity: a transcript of an interview which I conducted earlier this year with Booker prize-winner Hilary Mantel. If this feature proves popular, we’ll be doing more of these in the course of the autumn. And if you would prefer to listen to the interview rather than read it, you can still find it by clicking here. This transcript was created by Typing Angels, and we’re very pleased to have found them. George Miller: Hello, and welcome to this first edition of Podularity for 2010. My name is George Miller, and I’m delighted to say that my guest in this first programme of the New Year is Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, the novel in which she charts the rise of Thomas Cromwell from abject beginnings to Henry VIII’s right-hand man. Shortly after her Booker win in October, I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon interviewing Hilary about the book. An edited version of the interview appeared shortly afterwards on …

42. The Return of Captain John Emmett

To record this week’s podcast, I travelled to the Cotswolds to visit my guest (and friend), Elizabeth Speller. Elizabeth has recently bought a splendid shepherd’s hut on wheels which she is using as a retreat to write in. Although this book wasn’t written there, its sequel, currently a work in progress, will be. You can see the hut – which is enough to arouse the envy of anyone with writerly ambitions – in the video we recorded, which will be on this site shortly. In the mean time, click on the link above to listen to our audio podcast in which we talk about making the transition from non-fiction to fiction, the challenges of setting a novel in the past, and the ways in which the reverberations of the First World War continued to be felt in the years that followed armistice. The novel has been getting terrific reviews: The Times, for example, said: “Speller’s writing is gorgeous, her research immaculate and very lightly worn. Sheer bliss.” And the Independent said: “Covering death, poetry, a …