Will > Books: fiction‎ (429)

“Tell me, Mr. Winge, does the expression homo homini lupus est mean anything to you?
“Plautus wrote it during the Punic Wars: ‘Like a wolf is man t

“Tell me, Mr. Winge, does the expression homo homini lupus est mean anything to you?
“Plautus wrote it during the Punic Wars: ‘Like a wolf is man to other men.’…What kind of wolf are you, Mr. Winge? A good wolf? A skilled hunter?”
“No wolf at all, I’m afraid. What I do, I do not undertake in order to satisfy my bloodlust.”
“…Now I have helped you pick up the scent, all you have to do is follow it out into the forest and find your mark. I see how your expression is changed. You can’t fool me! You are indeed a wolf after all. I’ve seen enough to know, and even if I am wrong, you will soon become one. No one can run with the wolf pack without accepting its terms. You have both the fangs and the glint of the predator in your eye. You deny the blood thirst, but it rises around you like a stench. One day your teeth will be stained red and then you’ll know with certainty how right I was. Your bite will be deep.”

this is how the world should function; rational and comprehensible, where every part has its given place and the effect of its trajectory can be precisely determined.

When she jolts awake in the darkness of the night, her heart beats with raging euphoria. The purpose of the workhouse is to teach her to spin wool and to imprint on her the city’s striving efficiency and productivity. But more than anything else, she is taught the art of hatred.

“I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll

“I’m a go-between. On the one side is Elmo Shepherd, who believes that brains can be simulated—and that once the simulation is switched on, you’ll reboot in exactly the same state as when you last lost consciousness. Like waking up from a nap. On the other side is Jake, who believes in the existence of an ineffable spirit that cannot be re-created in computer code.”
“What do you believe, Enoch?”
“Jake’s opinion is based on a theology I do not agree with. But like a lot of theologies it can do duty as a cracked mirror or a smudged lens through which we might be able to glimpse things that are informative. I don’t know about an ineffable spirit, but I do have a suspicion that there are aspects of who we are that will not come back when our brains are scanned and simulated by the likes of Elmo. It’s not clear to me that memory will work, for example, when its physical referents are gone. It’s not clear that the brain will know what to do with itself in the absence of a body. Particularly, a body with sensory organs feeding it a coherent picture of the world.”

PC Mag: What's the larger message you were trying to get across through the Moab hoax?
NS: Well I try not to be too message-y, because I think that people tend to turn on their deflector shields when they see that coming. But actually when I originally wrote an earlier version of the Moab section, it was prior to the events of the 2016 election and at the time I sort of was patting myself on the back for really being on top of things and predicting the future. And then I discovered that the future was way ahead of me. - from PC Mag interview

Can you ever make a new world that properly addresses the wounds of the past? - from Lightspeed interview

Can you ever make a new world that properly addresses the wounds of the past? - from Lightspeed interview

[In medieval history] so many of these cities and civilizations were the products of waves of conquest. How does that shape the societies that survive them generations later? How do conqueror and conquered influence each other and how do their stories and legends of what happened get transmitted? Can you ever make a new world that properly addresses the wounds of the past? - from the Lightspeed interview

I wrote a lot of this while managing a large obstetrics & gynecology practice (while my husband went to medical school), and I really wanted to capture the messy reality of medicine. It’s not always glamourous and noble; it can be exhausting, the work is bloody and tiresome and challenging, and sometimes your patients are terrible. It requires a confidence bordering on arrogance to cut into a person for their own good, and I wanted to show how a character might grow into that. - from the QuilltoLive interview

Shannon Chakraborty didn’t want to be a writer when she grew up. “I wanted to be a historian, but I’ve been a bookworm since I was a kid,” she said. She originally wanted to be a historian, with a specialization in the Middle East. “That plan got a bit derailed for a variety of reasons, one of which was graduating in 2008 when the economy collapsed, so I figured I’d work while my husband went to medical school and keep my mind occupied with a little world-building/historical fan fiction,” she explains.

It’s that experience that led Chakraborty, who was born raised in New Jersey by blue-collar Catholic parents, to the seed that became The City of Brass. “It sprouted the day I set foot in the rare books library of the American University of Cairo,” she explains. There she lost herself in the stories and lore around her. “As a homesick, homework-laden, and rather wide-eyed new Muslim myself, I found in these stories a refuge; they spoke of a history that dazzled, a faith of breathtaking diversity in which my weird background was nothing new nor particularly noteworthy.”

I come from a pretty big family and always enjoy seeing well-done portrayals of complicated, messy, exasperating and yet also still loving relatives; I think it’s a thing many of us can relate to. And I’ve always had a particular fascination with rival princes. They’re fairly common in history, and yet I can’t imagine the emotions that go behind making a decision to war against your own brother.
There was certainly some inspiration from my own family. My twin brother and I are very close, and I was very protective of him, especially when we were younger, even when we were fighting. This was definitely an emotion and dynamic that I was trying to capture with Muntadhir and Ali. Though my brother isn’t a wealthy, libertine playboy destined to rule a shaky kingdom so the similarities end there!

No one wants to hear that their child has a dark side. Especially when she’s dead.

No one wants to hear that their child has a dark side. Especially when she’s dead.

What Kate Waters gives me is the freedom to go in any direction – a freedom I loved when I was a reporter. One week I’d be interviewing a rescued sailor in Australia, the next, talking to the Mother of Martyrs in Gaza or in a Glasgow flat with a man accused of online child abuse. While police officers are drowning in a sea of forms in triplicate, she can pick up her notebook and go. - from WHSmith blog interview

the interview is her primary narrative tool, the scalpel that gets words, both spoken and thought, emerging from her characters. - from Hazlit interview

…as I grew and started reading books from my parents’ bookshelves, I discovered the thrill of finding out other people’s private thoughts and actions. It began with detective stories—Sherlock Holmes and his powers of deduction, and the shoals of red herrings in Agatha Christie’s novels. The “ta da!” of a heavily concealed denouement.
But it was Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca that stopped me in my tracks. From the hypnotic first line—“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”—I was drawn deep into this tragic love story and its gothic horror. I was no longer the observer of amateur detectives’ cleverness; I lived every moment of the tense, unsettling, and compelling narrative and was caught in the fabric of lies and silence that surrounded the real story. I was hooked. It was the first time I had been faced with the revelation that we can never really know anyone completely—even, or perhaps especially, those we love. - from the PW article

I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years

I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years later, when I’d opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realized no one could hear me.

Isra cleared her throat. “But Mama, what about love?”
Mama glared at her through the steam “What about it?”
“I’ve always wanted to fall in love.”
“Fall in love? What are you saying? Did I raise a sharmouta?” [slut]
“No…no…” Isra hesitated. “But what if the suitor and I don’t love each other?”
“Love each other? What does love have to do with marriage? You think your father and I love each other?”
Isra’s eyes shifted to the ground. “I thought you must, a little.”
Mama sighed. “Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life. There’s only one thing you’ll need, and that’s patience.”

“A Thousand and One Nights?” Sarah paused to think. “Isn’t that the story of a king who vows to marry and kill a different woman every night because his wife cheats on him.”
“Yes!” Isra said, excited that Sarah had read it. “Then he’s tricked by Scheherazade, who tells him a new story for a thousand and one nights until he eventually spares her life. I must have read it a million times.”
“Really?” Sara said. “It isn’t that good.”
“But it is. I love the storytelling, the way so many tales unfold at once, the idea of a woman telling stories for her life. It’s beautiful.”
Sarah shrugged. “I’m not a big fan of make-believe stories.”
Isra’s eyes sprung wide. “It’s not make-believe!”
“It’s about genies and viziers, which don’t exist. I prefer stories about real life.”
“But it is about real life,” Isra said. ”It’s about the strength and resilience of women. No one asks Scheherazade to marry the king. She volunteers on behalf of all women to save the daughters of Muslims everywhere. For a thousand and one nights, Scherehazade’s stories were resistance. Her voice was a weapon—a reminder of the extraordinary power of stories, and even more, the strength of a single woman.”

“Silence is the only option for Palestinian women suffering domestic violence, even here in America, and I hope to give voice to these women in my…novel.” - Etaf Rum

The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her. That the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba [The 1948 Palestinian diaspora] bulging in his veins... She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?

Fear comes to me three times a day, always without knocking. It sits beside me and if I stand up it follows me, by now it’s practically a cons

Fear comes to me three times a day, always without knocking. It sits beside me and if I stand up it follows me, by now it’s practically a constant companion.

Why, for some time now, had I found myself in places I didn’t want to be in and acquiesced and didn’t rebel and continued to survive whenever someone was taken from me? The ability to adapt is human beings’ greatest resource, but the more I adapted, the less human I felt.

I could have known about the mass graves, about the Jews who lay prone, huddled together, waiting for the shot to the back of the head, could have known about the earth shoveled onto their backs, and the wood ash and calcium hypochlorite so they wouldn’t stink, about the new layer of Jews who would lie down on the corpses and offer the backs of their heads in turn. I could have known about the children picked up by the hair and shot, about the kilometer-long lines of Jews or Russians—They’re Asian, they’re not like us--ready to fall into the graves or climb onto trucks to be gassed with carbon monoxide. I could have learned about it before the end of the war. I could have asked. I but I was afraid and couldn’t speak and didn’t want to know.

Earlier that week, when he was explaining that Maximilian Everard controlled more than a fifth of the votes in the state via his sway over his whit

Earlier that week, when he was explaining that Maximilian Everard controlled more than a fifth of the votes in the state via his sway over his white friends who in turn held sway over the Negro tenants farming their land, Paul Johnson had warned Montgomery about the evening they were going to spend at Bluest Heaven, noting, “Those boys there will be true Delta.” Monty had understood the phrase to refer to any white plantation owner from the “Valley of the Lower Mississippi” who was socially entitled, financially comfortable and, as if Zeno had devised a paradox concerning Kentucky bourbon, perpetually fixed halfway between sober and drunk. He knew those weren’t the only paradoxes of their breed. True Deltans were also, simultaneously, ostentatious and genteel, careful of debt but careless with risk, patrician planters and rugged frontiersmen, as hedonisticly liberal as they were politically conservative—the most Mississippian of Mississippians. In the main parlor, a semicircular room with ceilings eighteen feet high and alcoves built into the walls to exhibit marble statuary, Monty was introduced to a group of men who made him realize he’d barely understood the half of it.

The South has, to put it lightly, a fraught past, with slavery and the Civil War and, more recently, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism. We have a perpetual BOGO sale on social issues. In American Pop, I tried to grapple with those issues, not only as they relate to the South, but also as they relate to the country as a whole. There’s a reason I didn’t title the novel Southern Pop. The South’s problems are also America’s problems, and that’s never been clearer than it is in our current political situation. - from The Millions interview

Decades later, over drinks at The Brook one evening, William K. Vanderbilt II would jokingly ask, “What gave you the nerve to even try to land a Teague?” to which Houghton answered that it was the same thing that let their ancestors think about leaving the old country, the same thing that helped those first settlers wrest farmland from the wilderness, the same thing giving their waiter that look of defiance tempered with envy, but on August 6, 1890, the smell of honeysuckle flowers in the air and the taste of apple pulp on his lips, the most profundity Houghton could muster while kissing Annabelle was the thought, Thank God this happened sometime before I die.

Families are always rising and falling in America. But, I believe, we ought to examine more closely the how and why of it, which in the end revolves around life and how you live it.

Soda has always seemed to me such an American drink. It is to this country what wine is to France, tea to England, beer to Germany, or toilet water to misbehaving dogs. Soda is especially pervasive in the South, where I’m from and the region I love exploring, scrutinizing, praising, and criticizing in my work. As Nancy Lemann wrote in the sublime Lives of the Saints, “Southerners need carbonation.” Soda, I figured, would enable me to wed the national and the regional, America and the South, and examine the relationship between them. - from The Millions interview

My first conception of the book was for it to be the opposite of Capote‘s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. I wanted American Pop to be fictional nonfiction. To achieve that effect, I used certain techniques of nonfiction, such as source citations, quotes from interviews, and the use of specific dates and times, similar to what Michael Chabon did in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Susanna Clarke in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. – from The Millions interview

On his way back downstairs, Robert passed a rare photograph from 1910’s notorious “PanCola Summit,” a weeklong motivational sales meeting. The photo featured hundreds of Panhandlers crowded in front of a platform. According to the expose “The Church of Pan, or the Cult of Pan?” written by a British reporter who infiltrated the event, it was less of a pep rally and more of an indoctrination, creating mindless automatons whose only goal in life was to sell sugar water. “This wasn’t the country I’d envisioned,” began the expose, if Robert remembered correctly. “It was the South, a country within a country. But which was more real, the exterior one or the interior, the body or the soul?”

In evolutionary biology, parasitism is a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, ca

In evolutionary biology, parasitism is a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life.[1] The entomologist E. O. Wilson has characterized parasites as "predators that eat prey in units of less than one" - Wikipedia

…when I was writing this, I watched as many documentaries as I could. I wanted to capture his voice, and I felt that with somebody like that, because he was so sharp, so funny, and so clever, you've really got to raise your game. I felt very sure that Vidal would be the only person in the book who would see through Maurice and not be taken in by him. I worked very, very hard on that section and all of his lines to make sure that they sounded right, that if he was still with us and if he read it, he would feel that I haven't let him down. - from the Goodreads interview

“He came from an experience I had a number of years ago with an aspiring writer who sort of attached himself to me,” he says. “We formed quite a strong friendship and it developed into an unhealthy situation. I was very drawn to this man. I’m no innocent in terms of how it all worked out. We were both maybe using each other slightly. The guy was aware of the fact that I’d a crush on him. I was just charmed to be around him. It eventually reached a point where I had to confront that. Not that I was interested in confronting him about it but confronting myself about why I was allowing myself to be manipulated.”from the Gilmartin interview

When you dance with the Rite of Dreaming, you dance with the gods.

There were perks to being the Governor of Irinah

When you dance with the Rite of Dreaming, you dance with the gods.

There were perks to being the Governor of Irinah’s daughter—even an illegitimate one. People obeyed you. Servants rushed to your bidding. Even the ones who loathed you—and there were many—were forced to veil their contempt and keep their loathing eyes lowered. All people faced hatred. All people suffered. Few had the cushion of wealth and privilege to protect them as Mehr did.

The dreamfire was everywhere now. It was in the air she breathed, in the sweat at the nape of her neck. She could feel the strength of it churning the city into a storm. The buildings were drenched in light, debris flying through the air as if the world had tipped on its side and sent everything sprawling. Even the earth felt like it was moving beneath her feet. It was dizzying, terrifying. Exhilirating.

Like so many other of the other mystics Mehr had seen in Lotus Hall, his face was swathed by cloth. Only his eyes and bridge of his nose were revealed but his head was lowered, hiding his gaze. The little of his skin she could see was dark She couldn’t tell if he was young or old, ugly or handsome. He was simply male, broad-shouldered and intimidating with footsteps that were soft, too soft. He had a predator’s tread.

You know I like a good romance. Well, I read a lot of romance…That’s something that romance series do really, really well. they create books that draw on each other but they’re also kind of discrete stories in themselves. You’ve got a beginning, a middle and end. You’ve got a satisfying conclusion. You know if you pick up the next one you’re going to get the same thing. So, that’s what I’m trying to do with the series. - from the Reddit session

She managed to catch herself on her hands before her skull met the floor. Then she bowed to the floor, her forehead to the cool marble. She allowed herself to tremble; feigned being a thing bent and broken by his cruelty. She did not have her jewels or her fine clothes, but she had this power, at least: she could give him a simulacrum of what he desired from her. And hold her crumbling strength tight. Let him think he had broken her. As long as he believed he already had, as long as she fooled him, he would not succeed in truly doing so.

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
-----Ralph Waldo Emerson - from the epigraph

Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.
-----Ralph Waldo Emerson - from the epigraph

The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”

The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”

The question in this case was, "What in the heck is going on?" How can it be that all of the rules—about what kind of leaders people admire and elect to public office, and how we behave as citizens of the world—no longer seem to apply. All the rules seem to be changing. And not only that, but larger, biological rules about our home, the idea that the poles would always be covered with ice, and that there would always be more fish in the sea. All these things that I've always counted on suddenly were no longer true… One of the things you can count on is that people will be very afraid, and they will cleave to leaders who reassure them, even if those leaders behave like tyrannical bullies. When we're afraid, we look for protection. One of the things this book is about is how desperately we hold on to our old world views, even when they no longer serve us, and how we overlook a lot of things to find reassurance.

“I wonder what service is possible…when half the world, with no understanding of Darwin at all, will rally around whoever calls him a criminal and wants him hanged.” – he’d witnessed this very thing in a market square in Boston: the crude effigy dangling from a noose, the monkey’s tail pinned to the stuffed trousers, the murderous crowd chanting Lock him up!…“I suppose it is in our nature,” she said…“When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order.”

”We are given to live in a remarkable time. When the nuisance of old mythologies falls away from us, we may see with new eyes.”
“Falls away, or is torn. The old mythologies are a comfort to many.”
“But we are creatures like any other. Mr. Darwin’s truth in inarguable.”
“And because it is true, we will argue against it as creatures do. Our eyes are not new, nor are our teeth and claws. I’m afraid I see a great burrowing back toward our old supremacies, Mrs Treat. No creature is easily coerced to live without its shelter.”
“Without shelter, we feel ourselves likely to die.”

“…your pupils depend on it, Thatcher. Their little families have come here looking for safety, but they will go on laboring under old authorities until their heaven collapses. Your charge is to lead them out of doors. Teach them to see evidence for themselves, and not to fear it.”
“To stand in the clear light of day, you once said, Unsheltered.”

We’ve been called witches since the beginning of time. Word-cunning, they used to call it—of a piece with invoking demons…We were burned for it too

We’ve been called witches since the beginning of time. Word-cunning, they used to call it—of a piece with invoking demons…We were burned for it too. The Crusade wasn’t new, we’ve always been scapegoats. Well, knowledge is always a kind of magic, I suppose.

…the hours passed slowly, full of small, solid details; at home, in the busyness of farm life, I’d never had the time to sit and stare, or pay attention to the way a tool looked, or how well it was made, before I used it. Here the clock in the hall dredged up seconds like stones and dropped them again into the pool of the day, letting each ripple widen before the next one fell.

There’s a growing trade in fakes, you know. Does that concern you?” He paused, but he didn’t seem surprised not to get an answer. “I’ve never seen one—well, as far as I know-but I’m curious. Could one really tell the difference? Novels, they call them. They must be much cheaper to produce. You can copy them, you see. Use the same story over and over, and as long as you’re careful how you sell them, you can get away with it. it makes one wonder who would write them. People who enjoy imagining misery, I suppose. People who have no scruples about dishonesty. People who can spend days writing a long sad lie without going insane…My father, of course, is a connoisseur. He claims that he would know instantly if he saw a novel. He says that a real, authentic book breathes an unmistakable scent of…well. He calls it truth, or life. I think maybe he means despair.

This is the story of the summer I disappeared - Cora McCloud

I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more - Dorothy Gale

…the tornado was not an act of God

This is the story of the summer I disappeared - Cora McCloud

I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more - Dorothy Gale

…the tornado was not an act of God, but an act of nature. The wild had come to Mercy that day, as she and her siblings cowered in the bunker, the full force of the wild had roared above them, erasing everything it touched.

Everything native to Oklahoma was tough and warlike. Only the strong survived here. Our snakes came with venom and a warning signal. Our insects were armored against predators and dehydration. Our birds possess talons, telescopic vision and hollow bones. These animals were designed for hardship. All weakness had been driven out of their genetic lineage by the dust storms, the droughts, and the tornadoes.

The night was awash with the screech of cicadas. These insects had reached the molting stage of their annual transformation. They first emerged in May as sluggish, flightless, dun-colored beetles, but after enough exposure to heat and sunlight, they would undergo an unpleasant metamorphosis. First they would find a tree or a house or a telephone pole and start to climb—slowly, clumsily, driven by mindless instinct—until they reached a particular height known only to themselves. They would then cling tight, hold still, and gradually become translucent. Their outer skin would slough away. They would burst out through the napes of their former shells and rise into the sky as steel-spun creature with wings as loud as joy buzzers. They left their spent husks everywhere.

The tornado was a gift, Tucker often said. It opened my eyes. Over the past few weeks, he had explained this to me. Most people, he said, were not capable of understanding the plight of the animals. They were too sheltered to comprehend it. Too safe. Even if they knew the facts and figures, they could not imagine the full measure of that kind of devastation.
That’s how I used to be too, Tucker said. The tornado changed me. It had stripped away the façade of human civilization. It reminded him that he was an animal too. The scientific terms—loss of habitat, dead zone, on the brink—were not just words anymore. He knew that what it felt like from the inside now.

I began The Wildlands with this idea: a twosome on a crime spree. But I didn’t want to explore romantic love or even friendship; those stories have already been told. I wanted to write about siblings. The relationship between siblings—its power and effect—often goes unexamined. Then I began to wonder what a crime spree would be like for a child. How would it shape her mind? How would it alter her identity? What kind of person would she be afterward? That led me to Cora, and soon after, Tucker. - from Chicago Review of Books interview

In Tucker, I wanted to write a character who is right in his beliefs but wrong in his actions. He has the facts, he’s fighting for animal rights, and he talks about justice and saving the world. How could Cora not fall under his spell? How could she discern what’s right about his cause but wrong about his choices? Honestly, I agree with Tucker sometimes myself. I’m not on board with his methodology or his violence, but his sense of urgency is something I share. - from the Tinhouse interview

In The Wildlands…I’m writing explicitly about what’s happening to the environment. It’s more urgent than ever. The changes are coming faster than scientists predicted, and the government’s lack of response is terrifying. The Wildlands talks in no uncertain terms about the fact that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction on our planet. During the previous mass extinctions on Earth—caused by meteors or volcanoes or natural disasters—up to 90% of all life on earth perished. It’s happening again right now, and this time we’re the cause. - from the Tinhouse interview

On some level, I understood that something irrevocable had happened. I had crossed a threshold I could not come back from. I did not know yet what it meant for me, but I could feel the transformation; I was changing deep inside, at a level beneath flesh, beneath words.

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one to

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.
-----From Goblin Market by Christina Rosetti

I know what might be happening to me; I just don’t know if I want it to happen, and I have a feeling that there’s nothing I can do to stop it once it starts.

I am always looking for someone, or something, hiding just beyond the forest, past the river, above the trees. A place. A story. A person. A different kind of life. Someone who understands me. Who sees what I see, feels what I feel, who knows, the way I do, that there must be a different way to live. What would happen if I found it?

All men are beasts inside. Some just show it differently than others.

Sometimes you become the person you want to be, you give up everything that you are…but family and faith has a way of calling you back.

Am I attracted to him or do I just want to eat him?

We can all become what we need to be in a time of danger…

Children know that there are monsters, and fairy tales tell them where the monsters can be defeated. - from the Professional Book Nerds audio

Maybe YOU actually really do love the writing process. I personally love the rewriting process. It’s not just that my first drafts suck. It’s more than that. My first drafts aren’t books. They are piles of bones. And only when I finish with all the bones can I go back and figure out which bones are missing and what goes where until I make a skeleton. And then I start again.

“It is believed that the strongest of them can assume any form, be it bat, wolf, swirling mist, even human. They can appear young, old, or any age

“It is believed that the strongest of them can assume any form, be it bat, wolf, swirling mist, even human. They can appear young, old, or any age between. Some can manipulate the elements, producing fog, storms, crashing thunder. Their motives remain unknown, but one thing is clear: they leave a trail of death in their wake, thinking no more of a human life than we would the life of a fly.”

Unna made a skeptical noise and tightened her arm in Svanhild’s “Every man will fail you eventually,” she said. “Look to your own future.”

…She se

Unna made a skeptical noise and tightened her arm in Svanhild’s “Every man will fail you eventually,” she said. “Look to your own future.”

…She seemed to be carved of ice and fire, not the wood and earth that made up most people.

I’m very interested in the ways that women could navigate the challenges of a pre-modern society. I wanted my women characters to be plausible for the time-period, while reflecting the fact that women are people, every bit as much as men, and would rebel, have ambitions, and struggle against their limitations. I’ve tried to represent different ways that women would deal with a violent society in which they had fewer rights than today: Hilda [Rags’s wife] goes along to get along, Ascrida [Svan and Rags’s mother] is nearly broken by what she’s endured but still tries to make choices to keep her family safe, Vigdis [Rags’s and Svan’s stepmother] uses her sexuality to further her ambitions, and Svanhild, the heroine, makes rash and idealistic choices, and then has to face the consequences.

I don’t think it’s possible to write a book that doesn’t comment on social issues. Novels express the values of the writer whether we want them to or not. The characters in [this trilogy] deal with issues of their time, but even these are expressions of timeless questions: how do we balance freedom and security, what do we look for in our leaders, how far will we go for justice or vengeance? I’ve tried to show both the rewards and costs of different ways of answering those questions.

Abbie was sure Church leaders had hoped that changing the temple ritual would change history. You could talk about it; you could expand your view

Abbie was sure Church leaders had hoped that changing the temple ritual would change history. You could talk about it; you could expand your view about it; but you couldn’t change it. Blood atonement was part of the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It had always been and always would be…Early Mormon leaders had taught that certain sins were so egregious that not even the blood of Christ was sufficient to wash away the stain of sin. Such sins required the sinner’s throat to be slit from ear to ear and his blood spill to the earth.