Category: Charlatan

Monday bookishness – Book pairing

Published on by Kate Braithwaite1 Comment

As a reader and writer of historical fiction, I always love the real history behind the stories and often read ‘around’ the novels I’ve enjoyed. No surprise then, that this post from Bookbub was right up my street:

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If you click on the photo, you can read the article and see 9 well-known historical novels paired with a non-fiction counterpart. You’ll see The Paris Wife on there, a book I really enjoyed a few years ago. It’s paired with Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I did read that after finishing The Paris Wife, as well as The Sun Also Rises and as I’d never read Hemingway before, I’m happy to say I got an extra benefit from picking up Paula McLain’s novel.

Of course this got me thinking about my own book pairings. I have a shelf of research books for each novel so choosing just one is not easy, but if I had to do it, here’s how I’d pair each of my 3 books to date:

Find out more about Charlatan here, and The Affair of the Poisons here.

And about The Road to Newgate here and The Strange Death of Edmund Godfrey here.

And finally take a look at The Girl Puzzle here and Nellie Bly, Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist here.

I’m SO tempted now to post a photo of the main non-fiction source for my current work in progress…. but I’m holding that back, at least for now 😉

Dec 20th – Queen Anne: the politics of passion by Anne Somerset

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“She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, Britain’s last Stuart monarch, and five years later united two of her realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. She had a history of personal misfortune, overcoming ill health (she suffered from crippling arthritis; by the time she became Queen she was a virtual invalid) and living through seventeen miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births in seventeen years. By the end of her comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had emerged as a great power; the succession of outstanding victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, had humbled France and laid the foundations for Britain’s future naval and colonial supremacy.

While the Queen’s military was performing dazzling exploits on the continent, her own attention—indeed her realm—rested on a more intimate conflict: the female friendship on which her happiness had for decades depended and which became for her a source of utter torment.” (Amazon blurb)

queen AnneWhy read Queen Anne: the politics of passion?

Two excellent reasons. First, because I went to see The Favourite yesterday. I loved it. Amazing acting and some hilarious one-liners. I wasn’t totally sold on the bunnies but all-in-all it’s a film I thoroughly enjoyed. All the clothes, sets and cinematography were just a pleasure to behold. The film is historical fiction, however, and I’m fascinated to learn what was true and what wasn’t etc. – hence the book choice.

Then reason 2. Queen Anne: the politics of passion is written by Anne Somerset. Not only did her book about the Affair of the Poisons massively inform the story in my first novel, Charlatan, but Anne Somerset also was extremely kind to me during the writing of it, said lovely things about it and let me quote her on the cover of the novel. In the land of the lowly new novelist without the backing of a big publisher that was a big, big, deal to me.

If Queen Anne: the politcs of passion is half as good a book as The Affair of the Poisons, and if Queen Anne’s life is half as interesting as it appeared in The Favourite, then this will be a great read.

Who doesn’t love a bargain?

Published on by Kate Braithwaite1 Comment

For the first time since it came out in September 2016, Charlatan is on sale as an ebook for only $0.99 or 99p or equivalent across all platforms and countries! You can grab it now by clicking here: mybook.to/charlatan

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“A dark, tale of mystery, sorcery, and a woman’s desperate pursuit to charm the most powerful man in seventeenth-century France. A poisoning scandal at the court of King Louis XIV threatens even Athénaïs, his glamorous mistress. She seems unaware of the accusations made against her, but how far has she really gone to keep the love of the King?”

 

Having spent so much of the past year thinking about The Road to Newgate, (especially my characters Anne, Nat, William, Henry and, of course, Titus Oates) it feels weird to put Charlatan front and centre again and read through the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads to make some social media adverts like this one:

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It’s my first book. The product of a long and steep learning curve and one I’m still on. I do love the cover, although I’m not sure I’ll ever read the insides again!! But it’s a pleasure to sit here with a cup of tea and look at some pictures of the characters I spent so much time with – only to abandon them when the book was complete.

Here are a few pictures I don’t think I’ve shared before. They are from my copy of The Affair of the Poisons by Frances Mossiker – a book which fell apart during the making of Charlatan!

I’m hoping a few new readers of The Road to Newgate will grab this chance to take a trip to 17th century Paris this week. I’ll be watching Amazon like a hawk, that’s for sure!

Cover reveal!

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I’m very excited to get the go ahead from Fireship Press to start using the cover for Charlatan! The advance reader copies are ready and publication looks like being in September/October. Should be firmed up soon. In the meantime, here’s my favourite quote from the back cover:

“I enjoyed it enormously…you brought the Affair flooding back to me with added excellent detail. It really is a remarkable achievement.” – Anne Somerset, author of The Affair of the Poisons.

And the cover itself…. I love it!

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Book love

Published on by Kate BraithwaiteLeave a comment

sun kingToday I have been writing the historical afterword for my novel and to help me do it I’ve pulled down from the shelf some of the books I have loved best while working on Charlatan. It’s almost impossible to pick a favourite, but The Sun King by Nancy Mitford has to get a special mention.

I bought that book fourteen years ago. That’s a life time ago – in fact that’s my oldest child’s lifetime ago, pretty much, as it was not long after I had Dominic (somehow now 14 and six foot 2) that I found myself I pushing him around in his pushchair in the small Suffolk village we lived in at the time, quietly dying of boredom. Adjusting from working full-time to being at home with a baby was a task in itself, but at least I had mastered the art of sitting on the floor with a small child and playing with him with one hand while holding a book and reading it in the other. The trouble was that all I had on my shelves fiction. I needed something a bit more challenging.

The answer came in the form of the village second-hand book store which, very handily for a mother with a pushchair, had books in boxes set out on tables on the pavement. That’s where I came across this:

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The cover of my copy is not quite so attractive as the edition now available on Amazon that is pictured above! But what a wonderful read it is, packed with detail, generously illustrated and delivered with Nancy Mitford’s inimitable voice and wit. In chapter six I first came across the Affair of the Poisons. Mitford provides a lively, gossipy outline of what happened in Paris in the late 1670’s and early 1680’s but what really caught my interest was when she wrote that she had gleaned much of this information from another book altogether, from which she said “most of the foregoing facts, which are only like the visible part of the iceberg, have been shamelessly culled.”

How much did I want to know about the rest of the iceberg? So much! And although I never managed to find a translation of Georges Mongredien’s book about Madame de Montespan, (the book that Nancy Mitford referred to) I did find Anne Somerset’s The Affair of the Poisons. And maybe a few more…