Jennifer Robson talks with Beatriz Williams Beatriz Williams is the author of The Secret Life of Violet Grant and the forthcoming novel A Certain Age, among other books. Beatriz Williams (BW): Congratulations on Moonlight Over Paris! Paris is so close to my heart, and you do such a wonderful job of vibrantly bringing the City of Lights to life in this novel. What drew you to this setting? Jennifer Robson (JR): I think it was a case of Paris being Paris, to be perfectly honest. I spent a lot of time there in my teens and twenties, and I've been in love with the city ever since. I think it's the way it mixes together the grand and mundanethe extraordinary and the everydaythat makes Paris such an unforgettable place. And the food isn't bad, either! BW: You're a trained historian as well as an author. How does your academic background help you in doing research for your historical novels? JR: I think my years at Oxford gave me a pretty thoroughgoing knowledge of British and European social history in the first half of the twentieth century, and so when it came time to dig into the details of life in Liverpool during the immediate post-war period, for example, or what it was like to be an expatriate writer or artist in Paris in the 1920s, I had a sense of where to find the information I neededand sometimes just knowing where to look is half the battle. BW: Readers are treated to glimpses of several familiar namesHemingway, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeraldswhich is always such a delight for history lovers. Was it fun to pull them on to the page? JR: It was so much fun, although a little nerve-wracking as well. I didn't want them to take over the narrative, and at first I wasn't sure if they belonged in the book or not. But the expatriate community in Paris in the early 1920s was a small one, and it seemed improbable that Helena would come to Paris and not meet them. I tried very hard to present the real-life figures as Helena would have seen them, without the benefit of hindsight to sharpen her eye. Ernest Hemingway, for example, is simply Hadley's husband to Helenathe iconic figure we picture when we hear his name simply didn't exist in 1925. BW: Sam Howard, an American and a newspaperman, is an intriguing hero. Where did you draw inspiration from for this character? JR: Sam's character is drawn in part from memories of my grandfather, who was a newspaperman in Vancouver in the 1930s and 1940s. Sam is a little more talkative than my grandfather, who was famously monosyllabic, but they both have a similarly direct, no-nonsense approach to life. Like my grandfather, Sam is also the sort of man whose natural reserve tends to mask the depth of his feelingsa walking definition of 'still waters run deep'. BW: This novel marks the end of your Great War era trilogy. What's next? JR: My next book is set in London during the Second World War. The heroine, Ruby Sutton, is a young and rather unseasoned American journalist who, in the summer of 1940, is given the plum assignment of covering the war from London while seconded to a British newsmagazine. I studied the period pretty intensively while working on my doctorate, and I've always wanted to write about life in Britain during World War II. Read more
Details e-book Moonlight Over Paris: A Novel
🗸 Author(s): Jennifer Robson
🗸 Title: Moonlight Over Paris: A Novel
🗸 Rating : 4.4 from 5 stars (336 reviews)
🗸 ISBN-10: 0062389823
🗸 ISBN-13: 9780062389824
🗸 Languange: English
🗸 Format ebook: PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Audio, HTML and MOBI
🗸 Supported Devices: Android, iOS, PC and Amazon Kindle
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