Behind the Book: Family on Ice
I wanted to write prehistoric people as they were, not as primitives. Here is how the real Toba supervolcano and a single family became Family on Ice.
Tag: Historical Fiction (Page 2)
Fiction WritingWestern Writer’s Handbook
If your western feels fake, your characters are thinking like modern people in period clothing. Frontier psychology is the fix, and everything else follows from it.
Fiction WritingHistorical Writer’s Handbook
Readers forgive small factual slips; they never forgive modern souls in period dress. Accuracy is getting the facts right. Authenticity is understanding how
FictionIslands on the Water
On the most beautiful morning he can remember, a young fisherman sees three great vessels with white wings that were not there the night before, and little boats putting out from them toward his shore. He watches the strangers come…
FictionThe Hole
Two soldiers, one American and one German, fall into the same shell crater in the Ardennes when the temperature hits minus thirty-two. The cold doesn't care which side they're on, and neither can survive the night alone.
Book ReviewsOutlander
A WWII nurse swept back in time to 1743 Scotland, torn between two husbands across two centuries. An immersive, richly researched epic of history, romance, and adventure that launched a beloved series, ambitious and absorbing, with frank content and a…
FamilyFamily on Ice
The Toba eruption cut sunlight across Eurasia seventy-four thousand years ago. A family group tries to stay alive through it, in prose with no quotation marks and no comfort.
Ancient RomeA Treachery of Legions
Rome, 69 AD. Marcus Antonius Primus marched without orders, won at Cremona, and then let a city burn. He tells it himself at sixty-three, with decades to have chosen a version.
EspionageTango in a War Zone
In a basement milonga during Argentina's Dirty War, a resistance courier dances tango with an intelligence operative who carries a list of seven people scheduled to disappear.
FictionA Garden in Hiroshima
Three generations of women tend a garden behind a house in Hiroshima, growing morning glories in soil that was sterilized by the atomic bomb and refused to stay dead.
Class AllegoryThe Fisherman’s War
An aging Icelandic fisherman takes his eighty-ton boat against the Royal Navy during the 1958 Cod War, armed with nothing but stubbornness and the conviction that the fish belong to Iceland.
AmbiguityDead Letter Office, 1923 (Version 2)
A postal clerk in 1920s New York discovers a letter that shouldn't exist — addressed from the dead to the living — and gets recruited into a shadow office that delivers mail between worlds.