Category: historical fiction

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Historical Fiction in Spain

C.W. Gortner in his blog, Historical Boys, had an interesting post yesterday on the popularity of historical fiction in Spain. He found new novels covering many time periods and written by authors from all over Europe. His impressions of the market there reflect the sense I got when I was in Spain last July. Waiting for a friend at the Barajas airport in Madrid, I stopped in the airport bookstore to see what people were buying. I think fully one quarter of the novels there were on historical fiction, mostly about medieval and early modern topics and set in Spain and the rest of Europe.

I thought that was pretty neat.

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Historical Fiction Sites

I want to write soon about Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games but it is taking me a long time to finish it, not because I am not enjoying it, but because it is so wonderful that I am savouring it slowly, like a box of Vosges truffles that you eat one a night for fear they’ll be gone too soon. So in the meantime, I thought I would list a few of the websites discussing historical fiction that I have found and liked over the past few months. I am doing this because many of these I did *not* find through a simple google search, but rather by tracking my way through a forest of links.

The first place to start is the Historical Novel Society. They publish reviews of recent historical novels (in print, for members) and have a twice yearly magazine. They also hold a yearly conference that seems to move between the States and the UK.

My favourite site for historical fiction, however, is the blog, Reading the Past, which is maintained by HNS reviewing stawart, Sarah Johnson. She is a university librarian with a knowledge of historical fiction that is both deep and wide-ranging, and I have spent many fun hours digging through her archives. She keeps track of reviews, deals, book covers, gossip, and much more.

I am intrigued by another blog, C.W. Gortner’s Historical Boys, which plans to concentrate on men who write historical novels. I am enjoying his author interviews so far. And how can I resist the blog of someone who has written a novel about Juana la Loca? What a wonderful figure to explore.

Historical Fiction is a bulletin board/web forum whose members discuss historical novels about all times and places. They also have a section where they post reviews. I haven’t spent much time here, but I like the breadth of what they talk about.

That’s probably enough for today.

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The image in my header

The photograph in my header is of a place called Támara where an important scene takes place in my novel, Pilgrimage. I wrote the scene before I had ever seen the village, and when I finally visited there this summer with my friend Cecily Hilsdale (who took the photo), I had a big surprise because it was very different from how I had imagined (and written) it. The photo is a little deceptive. Because the church on the right is so huge, it looks like a small village in the middle of a plain with a low mesa in the background. But if you look just to the right of the big church (which would not have been there in the twelfth century when my novel takes place) you’ll see a much smaller church on a height of land. It is a small, Romanesque church, and it would have been there when the novel takes place.

Támara is not a village in a valley; it was actually built on a height of land with the small church at its highest point. And when we drove closer, we discovered that the whole hill had been surrounded by a wall from the late eleventh century. Can you imagine how much effort in men and resources it would have taken to wall in a place that lonely and isolated? But they did it for a reason. Támara is a perfect defensive outpost. From the church on the top of the hill you can see north all the way to the Picos de Europa, west through the plain, and east along the mesa to the pass which is a major route for people coming from Burgos. And if someone approaches over the mesa looking for trouble, people posted as lookouts on the top of the mesa can easily make it back in time to be safe and to warn the village the village of danger, which they can just wait out behind their nice, sturdy walls.

I chose Támara almost by chance to be the site where two armies meet. The truth was better than my fiction.