City of Stolen Magic

"City of Stolen Magic is set in the middle of the 19th century. Magic exists but it’s not as whizz-bang as in The Elemental Detectives . The baddies are the East India Company . It’s anti- colonialism . The story starts off in India and comes to London. It’s a debut, she’s a new writer. One of the lovely things when you read a book is when you’re there with a character from another background, who knows things that you don’t know but you can relate to. There’s a lot readers will get out of this. It’s another facet to British history. The thing about British history, especially in the 19th century, is that it was such a lot of the globe. A quarter? A third? To see it from different perspectives is very important for young people. Apart from being a good story, you’re getting a different view of something. It’s important that we’re aware how things got to be as they are today. It’s about the East India Company which is suppressing magic, and there’s the righteous indignation that magic has been stifled. We’ve got a young protagonist, Chompa, who is taken to London to be used by the Company. But she is going to fight back. With her character Chompa, Nazneen shows that magic is for everybody, in a historical context. People read for so many reasons. What would it be like if…? How would I cope with great danger and risk? Would I be able to say loudly, ‘It’s not fair!’ and do something about it? That’s what a lot of the characters in all these books are doing, they are being indignant and finding things out and taking action, having agency. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think the best stories are really just about love. I don’t mean romantic love, I mean familial love, I mean interpersonal love about finding one’s place and belonging in the world, how we make friends. I think good fiction, whether it’s historical or not, shows us that and that’s what people want to know about. There are other historical novels for this age group I would like to have chosen as well. The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner is set in the French Revolution. She writes phenomenal children’s books, phenomenal history. She is one of my all-time favourites. Elizabeth Laird is brilliant. She’s a beautiful writer and deserves to be read. And Candy Gourlay’s Bone Talk is a brilliant historical novel. She has written a sequel for older readers, Wild Song , published this year."