Three historical novels that bring the past vividly to life

I've just come from interviewing three authors -- Janie Chang, Kate Quinn and Jennifer Robson -- at Book Warehouse on Main Street.
All three have written historical novels featuring strong, resilient women and all three were pleasures to interview and extremely well informed on their subjects.

Robson is the author of Goodnight from London. It’s the story of an American journalist, Ruby Sutton, who travels to London during the Second World War to report from England. She soon finds herself in the middle of the London Blitz. Robson said tonight that she was inspired to write about a female journalist in the 1940s by her grandmother, who was a journalist in Vancouver. Robson also had fascinating first-person accounts of the London Blitz because of research she did for her doctoral thesis many years ago. She was able to use the transcripts from those interviews for her descriptions of London during the war. Robson also described her storytelling process, specifically in how Ruby's secrets make her vulnerable so that her character is deeper and more interesting. Robson is the author of three other novels and she lives in Toronto.

Kate Quinn is the author of The Alice Network, a book about a female spy during the First World War and an American socialite searching for a cousin lost in the Second World War. She has done an incredible amount of research about female spies during the First and Second World Wars, and her book is based on an actual spy ring called the Alice Network. She said she likes to write "badass" female characters and she's definitely done that in Eve, the hardened woman who was once a spy in the Great War. The book also includes one scene that has a real massacre as its inspiration -- the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in France, where one village's entire population of 600 people was wiped out by German soldiers. One woman who survived and testifies in a trial of the perpetrators became a minor character in the book. Quinn is the author of more than 10 other historical novels and is from California.

Janie Chang is the author most recently of Dragon Springs Road, a novel about a little girl who loses her mother in Shanghai in the early days of the 20th century. It's a heartbreaking and fascinating story about what it's like to grow up abandoned and to live as a Eurasian -- half white and half Chinese -- at that time in China. Chang is also the author of Three Souls, and like that novel, Dragon Springs Road weaves in some magical realism in the form of a fox spirit, something Chang said is common mythology in Chinese culture. I reviewed her two novels for the Vancouver Sun and the review of Dragon Springs Road can be found here.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com