Tag: historical fiction

Klekkende Høj

by Joshua Mostafa Regardless of what form the story will take, the question remains: where to begin? Not with an encyclopaedic mastery of the facts, but with some detail that will catalyse the creative process: an irritant, grit in the shell, an indecipherable image or an indigestible notion. The epitaph to Jim Crace’s The Gift of Stones is an excerpt from an archaeologist’s memoir: the discovery of ‘the skeletal lower arm of a child’ prompts its excavators to speculate ‘in the darkness of our tents, inventing reasons why the arm was there, and what the fate had been of that…

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Mode, Genre and Time

by Joshua Mostafa On the first floor of Foyles, the bookshop in Charing Cross Road, London, I found the bookshelf devoted to historical fiction. It’s free-standing, and the reverse side is populated by romance novels: a not unsuitable pairing, though the appearance of the books themselves suggest an affinity with the fantasy genre: the authors’ names are displayed in large, chunky lettering with aspirations to Gothic or Celtic style. So close is the marketing style or ‘branding’ of the book covers of the two genres that a stray swords-and-sorcery title had been misshelved between a novel about the Wars of…

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(Pre)historical fiction

by Joshua Mostafa I am writing this longhand on board a barge, for the second and longer leg of a trip down the Danube via Linz to Vienna, from where I’m catching the hydrofoil to Budapest (where I’m now typing it up, and trying to make sense of the Hungarian kezboard–keyboard!–layout), then a twelve-hour train ride to Bucharest, from where I’ll be able to get out to the Carpathian mountains. These cities are simply waystations for me, stopping points to sleep as cheaply as possible between the stretches of countryside I’ve been photographing and describing in obsessively detailed notes. The…

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Historical Fiction

by Joshua Mostafa This endeavour: there are three shelves on my bookcase dedicated to it. In my citation management app, there are several hundred articles on its various aspects. And so many notes, scattered among ring-bound notebooks, online backups, and annotations: digital, or pencilled in margins. I could not begin to count my trips to the library, beginning on the campus of an obscure town in the American Midwest, and continuing in Australia, increasing both in frequency and the weight of each bag of borrowed books; I think I must have unwittingly saved enough rarely-read volumes from the Fisher Library’s…

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Embracing the chaos

by Claire Scobie Trust the process. If I learned anything writing The Pagoda Tree, it is that. Except, like with any lessons, it’s easy to forget. Over the past three weeks I’ve written about the fun stuff: planning, dreaming and researching a novel. The actual writing is much thornier. From the start I knew I needed to get the scenes down, however rough. Louis de Bernieres confirmed that approach after telling me how bogged down he became researching his epic Birds without Wings. If you research first and write later there’s a danger of getting lost in the morass of…

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Archive Fever

by Claire Scobie I’ve often found libraries sexy places to work; none more so than the British Library in London. As you walk up the marble steps, you feel the tension. Everyone is focused, everyone is busy. You can’t dawdle or daydream here. Inside the reading rooms the atmosphere is hushed. It’s this intensity, a combination of intellectual stimulation, furious study and a reverence – for books, for the written word – that fuels the headiness of the creative process. During the four years working on The Pagoda Tree I spent many weeks there. My favourite place to write and read…

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Week Two: History with my feet

by Claire Scobie On my second visit to Thanjuvar, I interviewed the current Prince, Babaji Rajah Bhonsle, in his palace with its air of fading grandeur. I was hoping for pomp and ceremony, but he arrived in beige slacks and a pressed white shirt. He’s a modern Prince – he’s on Linked-In. As we sat drinking chai in a dark room hung with chandeliers and portraits of his royal predecessors, he mentioned we were sitting in the original harem. I felt a frisson of excitement. My character, Palani, is based on the real Muddupalani, a royal courtesan and poet who…

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In search of The Pagoda Tree: a four-part series

by Claire Scobie Over the next four weeks I’m writing about the process I went through thinking, dreaming, researching and writing my novel, The Pagoda Tree (Penguin). Set in eighteenth-century India, this is largely told through the eyes of a temple dancer, or devadasi, named Maya whose life is transformed by the arrival of the British. After my first book, Last Seen in Lhasa, was published I suffered from second book syndrome. As with many first-time authors, my first book, a travel memoir, was a labour of love, a story I felt compelled to write because of my years going…

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