Blogs

Five Fast Questions . . . with Helen Simonson

 
Five Fast Questions is Rakestraw’s irregular interview series. This week, we talk with Helen Simonson, a bestselling novelist. The author of the beloved bestseller Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, she has a new novel, The Summer Before the War, publishing in March 2016. Born in England, Simonson now lives in Brooklyn. Helen Simonson visits Rakestraw Books on Tuesday, 29 March 2016 at Noon.
 
1. What inspired you to write The Summer Before the War?

  The Edwardian period was such a glamorous time, filled with elegance and the stirrings of social progress - and amazing technological advances including the telephone, the motor car, electric light, the flying machine.  It also ended in the crushing horror of World War One.  For a writer this sense of a brief idyll doomed to destruction would be an irresistible draw, but I always start with character and it was Agatha Kent and her nephews, walking into my head, that inspired this story

2. Setting plays an important part in this new novel. Do you have a particular connection to this part of England?

Five Fast Questions . . . with Jonathan Evison

 
Five Fast Questions is Rakestraw’s weekly interview series. This week, we talk with Jonathan Evison, a bestselling novelist. The author of  All About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, and the recently published This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance, he is the winner of several awards including the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and a Rakestraw Book of the Year. Born in San Jose, California, he now lives on an island in Western Washington. "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving", starring Paul Rudd, premiered at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.
 
1. What inspired you to write This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance?

Meanwhile Back at the Castle: Books for "Downton Abbey" Fans

 
Ashenden by Elizabeth Wilhide. Upstairs and downstairs stories braid together in this century-spanning novel starring an English country mansion and the people who lived and worked there.
 
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. The narrator of this delicious comedy of manners -- seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain -- is one of the most charming girls ever to inhabit a dilapidated castle deep in the English countryside.
 
Blandings Castle by P. G. Wodehouse. The perfect introduction to the world of the Earl of Emsworth and his stately home, misbehaving relatives, dignified butler, and that noble pig, the Empress of Blandings.
 
Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell. Lady Emily rules her large extended family with a manner that is as distracted as it is loving.