Interview with Kate Braithwaite

Almost two years ago, I interviewed Kate Braithwaite on New Books in Historical Fiction  about her first book, Charlatan, a gritty and engrossing novel set during the Affair of the Poisons—an intrigue that touched, among others, the aging and soon-to-be replaced marquise de Montespan, mistress of Louis XIV. A month ago, I discovered that Kate was back with a new book, not too distant in time from the first but set across the English Channel, where the imminent death of Charles II has aroused fears that the ascension of his Catholic brother, the future James II, will reignite the religious wars in England.

But Kate can explain the rest of The Road to Newgate herself.

Kate, welcome! Although set in the same century as your previous novel, Charlatan, you’ve moved north for this one. It’s nice to see a book about the later Stuarts—rather than the Tudors, who get so much attention—but what drew you to this particular setting?

I stumbled across this story while researching Charlatan, and both novels are not only set in the same century but in the exact same few years, roughly between 1678 and 1682. While Paris was in turmoil with a poisoning scandal, London had a very different kind of upheaval, when one of the most infamous liars in history, a man called Titus Oates, created a major panic with revelations of Catholic plots to assassinate Charles II.

Titus Oates (Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

What’s the story, in a nutshell?

In The Road to Newgate, a married couple, Nathaniel and Anne Thompson, get caught up in the events of Titus Oates’s Popish Plot. A Protestant magistrate is found dead in a ditch, sparking mass panic, but Nat, a writer, doesn’t believe the plot stories and becomes determined to prove that Titus Oates is a liar. Oates, a dangerous enemy to make, is also connected to the Thompsons through their friend William Smith, a man with a secret he is afraid to share. The story is about Nat, Anne, and William: about what they must do to expose Oates … and what it will cost them. 

Your main character is Nathaniel Thompson. Tell us a bit about him: who he is and what he wants from life.

Nat is clever, hard-working, and stubborn. He’s a man who has achieved a good position as Licenser to His Majesty’s Press and has done so without the benefits of a rich family or connections pulling strings for him. He has recently fallen for and married Anne, ten years younger than he is, and when the story begins, he is still adjusting to this new life where he has someone else to care for, other than himself and his work. He is not always the most sensitive soul and has a lot to learn as a husband! Although Nat’s decisions are made in good faith, the cost of his choices—costs borne by his family and friends—may be hard to bear.

Nat’s wife, Anne, is also a major character. What’s her background and her role in the book?

Anne comes from a different, more affluent background. She is the younger of two daughters and has married Nat in the face of family opposition. But having married the man she loves, she finds life more challenging than expected. Once the novelty of running her own household wears off, she struggles to find her feet. Nat is busy, and she is often alone. She wants to understand his work, but she has her own views and the couple don’t always see eye to eye. With Nat caught up in public events and bringing danger to their door, Anne has to find a way to assert herself in her marriage and take an active role in the events that unfold if she is to have the life with Nat that she imagined when she married him.

Nat and Anne have only recently married, as you mentioned, and Anne, as we learn early on, has reason to believe that she will soon have a child. That’s a lot of transition to deal with, and the events of the novel only increase the pressure. What do their varying—and developing—points of view contribute to your novel?

The challenge in this story was making the public, historical events personal to the characters. The Popish Plot is complex and political, but I was interested in looking at how a public crisis could affect ordinary people. By telling the story through Nat and Anne’s points of view, I hoped to personalize the public drama as it unfolded. I enjoy stories where I can read different characters’ perspectives on the same events. Nat always doubts Titus Oates’ plot stories, but Anne’s reaction is more in line with the majority of Londoners. The pressure on the marriage—the threats to Nat’s income, the pregnancy, Anne’s doubts about Nat’s actions—is a very important theme. A key part of the story is a murder investigation, and it was vital that Anne take a role there. The ability to switch into her point of view was essential to telling her story—I hope—convincingly. William Smith’s point of view and his story are integral to the plot but also add to the reader’s understanding of Nat and Anne’s characters and marriage, when we see them through an outsider’s eyes. I was also keen to portray Titus Oates on the page, and each of my three storytellers have important confrontations with him at various points in the book.

There is a certain contemporaneity, as Russians say, to this whole web of plots and conspiracy theories and counter-plots. Do you see echoes of this past in our present, and if so, where? More generally, what would you like readers to take away from The Road to Newgate?

I definitely see parallels to the world in 2018 in the story of The Road to Newgate. The explosion of propaganda, the terrible rhetoric against Catholics, the way Oates’ lies are so fantastic that people find it easier to believe he is telling the truth than imagine that someone could have made it all up—all these things resonated with me as I wrote. That said, this is a novel. My main aim has always been to write an entertaining, page-turning book. There are themes to think about and connections to be made; it is also a lesser-known slice of Stuart history that I’m excited to shed some light on. But these are not the most important take-aways. Above anything else, I’m hoping readers will care for the characters and get sucked in to wanting to know what happens to them. Oh, and want to read my next book!

Are you already working on another novel?

I am, although slowly! With a book launch and children off school for the summer, I’m not getting along with my next project quite as quickly as I’d like. But it does have a title —The Girl Puzzle—and it’s about Nellie Bly, a groundbreaking female journalist. There are two storylines at the moment, one of her as a young woman starting her career in New York City in the 1880s and a second later in life, in her fifties when, in the first scene, it seems she has just kidnapped a child.

Sounds fascinating. I look forward to finding out more. Thanks so much, Kate, for taking the time to answer my questions!

Kate Braithwaite was born and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her first novel, Charlatan, was long-listed for the Mslexia New Novel Award and the Historical Novel Society Award. Kate lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and three children.



Follow her on Facebook and Twitter, or find out more about her at  http://www.kate-braithwaite.com. She also maintains a second, light-hearted blog about the differences between US and UK English.

And on another note, for those who’ve been waiting, The Shattered Drum is now available for both print and Kindle and as part of my second Legends box set, which also includes book 4 (The Vermilion Bird). Click on the titles to access the various editions, and check out the links at http://www.fivedirectionspress.com/the-shattered-drum and http://www.fivedirectionspress.com/boxsets, respectively, for more information.

Marriage Politics, American-Style

As I’ve written elsewhere, in the time period and area of the world I study, most people saw marriage as an economic and political contract between families writ small and villages (among the poor) or between entire clans and patronage networks (among the elite). The desire of individuals for love and companionship, understanding and compatibility, played little role in the choice of marriage partner. Instead, the dominant factors included things like whose lands ran together, which woman needed a husband to plow the fields or which man needed a woman to cook and clean, and who had close ties to those in power and in favor. Not to mention the possibility of children, without whom the family, village, or lineage could not continue.

Health and fertility, especially among potential brides, also weighed in the balance, since bearing children was a wife’s primary responsibility. Personality had some importance, for sure, but only to the extent that it made a successful partnership more or less likely in the eyes of those charged with selecting the potential spouse. Parents and guardians, not the couple themselves, made that decision. Aristocratic fathers, to ensure that they had a free hand, secluded their virgin daughters within the household, keeping them as close as the ladies of any Turkish harem.

But that was Europe in the premodern era. Nothing like that could have happened in the Land of the Free and the Brave in the twentieth century, right? In my latest interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, with the author Robert Goolrick—whose new novel The Dying of the Light I also featured in last week’s post—we see that the United States in the Gilded Age, at least among its old landed and nouveau-riche entrepreneurial classes, was not so different from medieval Europe after all. The tensions created by selling one’s daughter to the highest bidder pervade this novel, determining much of its action as well as the complex and often contradictory relationships among its characters.

As always, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction. Goolrick is an unusually thoughtful and fascinating speaker, so make sure to listen in. You’ll be glad you did!

“It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” So opens Robert Goolrick’s rich, lyrical new novel, The Dying of the Light (Harper, 2018).

The house is Saratoga, a colonial-era estate in Virginia that is at once a joy and a burden to the family that lives there, the Cookes. In particular, it determines the life trajectory of Diana Cooke, the eighteen-year-old heiress charged with saving her family and her home from poverty right after World War I. Diana reluctantly embraces her destiny, agreeing to marry Captain Copperton, a wealthy but uncouth man who doesn’t hesitate to remind the Cookes at every turn that he owns not only the house but them, in principle if not in fact.

But Copperton has one virtue in addition to his entrepreneurial abilities: he is a good father to the son he has with Diana. And it is, in the end, their son who unwittingly sets off the series of events that leaves Saratoga in ashes. Along the way, a cast of delightfully realized and often eccentric characters interact in sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising ways against the backdrop of Saratoga and its ever changing, ever inspiring river.

As for me, I am almost, almost through the massive list of projects surrounding the release of my last Legends novel, The Shattered Drum. Stay tuned for the formal announcement next week. If you’re signed up at Five Directions Press, you will receive the press release automatically. And if you’re not, why aren’t you? We send out no more than six mailings a year—mostly announcements of new titles—and since our resident designer, Courtney J. Hall, puts her creative talents to work on those mailings, they are always exciting to see.

Meanwhile, I hope to get back to writing—maybe as soon as this weekend. I can hardly wait!

A Sense of Place

Just yesterday, I was talking with the writer Robert Goolrick, whose latest novel, The Dying of the Light, is the subject of my next New Books in Historical Fiction interview (on which, more next week—or perhaps the Friday after that, depending on how many interviews are in the queue ahead of me). Although as writers and as readers, we tend to focus on characters and plot, The Dying of the Light reminds us that setting, if properly invoked, expresses and motivates the first and drives the second.

Place grounds us, influencing our experience of the world in ways so fundamental that we often don’t recognize their force. In my own novels, the crowded streets and tightly packed houses of sixteenth-century Moscow breed different expectations from the vast borderless grasslands of the steppe or the equally vast and borderless yet somehow confining forests of the Russian north. My characters feel these differences, sometimes with joy—as when Alexei has a chance to return to the steppe for a summer, even if it means leaving his family for a war that may prevent his return—and sometimes with dread, as when Nasan stands in the Kremlin Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, surrounded by the decaying corpses of Moscow’s royal princes.

The Dying of the Light opens with a wonderful line: “It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” And indeed it does: the Virginia estate of Saratoga, as important to those who live there as Pemberley or Tara. The Cookes of Saratoga can trace their ownership of the house back to the eighteenth century, but by the time the novel opens more than 150 years later, the house has become both a burden to those who live there and an essential part of their being.

The estate costs a lot to maintain, you see, and the Cookes are land-rich and cash-poor. They have one asset besides the house and their name: their beautiful daughter Diana. So they put her on the market—the marriage market—and force her to choose between their estate and her happiness.

What happens after that is the subject of a future post, but today’s point is simple. Saratoga—its river and its fields, its people and the race relations that bind and separate them, its disasters and moments of recovery—both challenges and rewards its residents. It pushes the plot in unexpected directions. It forces the introduction of new characters, who in turn develop new relationships even as they twist existing ones in different directions, sometimes to the point of destruction. And the history of the house, so closely tied to the person of the protagonist Diana Cooke, ultimately reveals the theme hidden in this wonderfully lyrical and fascinating book.

Take this one short example from p. 106. “They” are Diana and her cook, Priscilla.

They heard the crack and crash of a tree outside, in the garden, struck by lightning that lit the room like daylight, like noon in July. They felt the chill air that suddenly filled the room, blowing in from the library, and thought the same thought at the same moment. “The books!” Diana jumped up.

They ran into the library, forcing open the broad double doors, to find the giant half tree that had been split by the lightning and crashed through the diamond panes of the windows, destroying everything, letting in the slashing rain, pulling books from the shelves, the soggy pages flapping in the wind, the rug soaked, the ruination of all that Diana held most dear.

Now, that’s a sense of place.

On another note, my summer plans are proceeding apace. The Golden Lynx, 2nd ed. is available on Amazon and Kindle, and I’ve approved it for distribution via Ingraham. The rest of the Legends novels, despite yet another copyright challenge, have received their updates. The first of two box sets is out on Kindle, and Kindle Unlimited users can borrow all the Legends novels for free (others pay $2.99 per book or $6.99 for the set). And the e-book of The Shattered Drum releases on Monday, but you can preorder it now. The print version should appear in seven to ten days. That leaves only the second box set, which I hope to complete this weekend and release around the same time as the print version of The Shattered Drum.

After that, I will be back to writing—a whole new series waiting to be born!


Images: Apollinary Vasnetsov, A Street in the Kitagorod (1902), public domain via Wikimedia Commons; warriors in the steppe, screen shot from Nomad: The Warrior, dir. Sergei Bodrov (2005).

Works in Progress

So, as I wrote last week, I’ve spent the last six days focusing on my own novels, mostly the Legends books as I spiff them up in preparation for the release of The Shattered Drum, the last one in the series. I’d hoped to start work on Song of the Shaman, the second installment in my spinoff series, also set in Russia but in the 1540s, an even more troubled time in that country’s history than the 1530s, and involving some of the same characters. But now that Friday has dawned, it’s pretty clear that’s not going to happen during this break. So what have I been doing?

Well, the second edition of The Golden Lynx has appeared on Amazon for print and Kindle, although we’re still working out the kinks when it comes to linking the files—both print and Kindle and first and second editions. You can get the new e-book no problem, but running a search stubbornly turns up the older print edition, no longer available for sale (the print link above will take you to the right place). It looks as if Amazon is correcting the print/Kindle links as we speak, though. And the customer service rep did a stellar job of cleaning up the e-book formatting, which had become inexplicably distorted in the “Look Inside This Book” feature despite being perfect in the e-book itself. If you happened to see it in its multi-size, multi-font, all centered glory, try again. I swear, I do know how books should look!

The new Golden Lynx is also uploaded to Ingram Spark, although not yet available because I want to check the physical proof before I approve it for distribution. It has an official publication date of July 30 and an on-sale date of August 15. That was another learning experience, although the print proof passed on the second try and the site seems in general easy to use, if more expensive than CreateSpace. Both have great help files and extraordinary customer service, so in general it’s been a positive experience. Useful, too, as some of my fellow Five Directions Press authors want to list with Ingram Spark as well, and now I have a better sense of how to prepare their files and what to warn them about.

In addition to that, I’ve revised The Vermilion Bird (insignificant changes such as adding the book link for The Shattered Drum and stripping out one ad for another) and The Winged Horse (small but significant changes to make Tulpar more consistent with his later self). The box set of Legends 1–3 will be ready as soon as I finish reading through The Swan Princess, which I’m doing now. The second box set will soon follow. The Shattered Drum is available for preorder on Kindle. The print edition has already been proofed twice and has only the teeniest adjustments still to include in the final PDF. That will probably go up next weekend, to give the computers time to link the two editions before the release date.

With all these changes to account for, I’ve updated the Five Directions Press site, the books and bio pages on this blog, and my own site. I’ve even discovered the magic button that relinks this blog to my author site. Any day now, I’ll have a moment to record an excerpt from The Shattered Drum and add that to the two sites—maybe on Thursday, when my next New Books in Historical Fiction is supposed to take place. The print excerpts must wait until the official release of the Kindle book on July 16.

I’ve had a couple of weird experiences during all this. CreateSpace has twice freaked out about whether I have the right to update my own novels—this after six years!—forcing me to hunt down and scan the official copyright registration forms that I fortunately signed up for. Meanwhile, the Electronic Copyright Office registration site has been down since Tuesday, so I can’t clear up the mystery of why my application for The Swan Princess remains open even though I mailed the deposit copies in April 2016 or verify that my registration of Shattered Drum “took.” Which could get exciting if CreateSpace starts questioning my right to produce those novels....

But otherwise, it’s been a very productive week. And now I have to run off and work on The Swan Princess corrections, because I have only three more days before work barrels back down the pike at full speed!