Hailed as "the Daphne du Maurier of her generation", Susanna Kearsley is the author of several novels of suspense, including the internationally bestselling MARIANA, winner of Britain's Catherine Cookson Fiction Prize. A former museum curator, she brings her own passion for research and travel to bear in her books, weaving history with modern-day intrigue in a way that, in the words of one reviewer, "tells the story of the past and illuminates the present."
Do you use myspace, facebook, twitter, or other social networking sites? If so,
how do we find you on those sites?
On Twitter, I'm at http://twitter.com/SusannaKearsley On Facebook, I'm at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/profile.php?id=1712098844&ref=profile
What is your book about? Please provide a description.
In the tradition of The French Lieutenant's Woman and Daphne du Maurier’s The House on the Strand, The Winter Sea interweaves history, mystery, romance and the workings of ancestral memory in the story of a novelist who slowly comes to realize that her book about a little-known Jacobite rebellion and the people taking part in it might be more fact than fiction.
How long have you been at work on this book?
THE WINTER SEA, although my longest book to date, was also one of the quickest for me to write, taking me almost exactly a year from start to finish. But the idea for the story first occurred to me some 20 years ago, so I suppose in a sense this has also been the book that took me the longest time :-)
How did the idea originate?
'The first idea for it started forming twenty years ago, when by pure chance I found a little book called Playing the Scottish Card, by historian John S. Gibson, detailing “The Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708”. I’m always intrigued by episodes of history that I’ve never heard of, and this one began with an irresistible quote from Lord Dacre: “History is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have happened.” How could I resist? And having read Gibson’s history of the invasion attempt, I was driven to search out the original sources he’d used, like the memoirs of Nathaniel Hooke – to read the letters for myself and find out more about the people who engineered this nearly-successful attempt to restore James Stewart to his throne, and once I did that I was hooked. Reading the actual words of the people and “hearing” their voices, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to rest till I’d written their story.' (The above is excerpted from an interview I did on with bestselling romance author Nicola Cornick on The Word Wenches web site, http://wordwenches.typepad.com/word_wenches/2009/09/an-interview-with-susanna-kearsley.html)
Did the book entail any unusual writing habits or places?
Nothing unusual for me :-) Details in the next answer, below.
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