The Vanished Days

"Susanna Kearsley is one of my favourite authors. She’s Canadian. But she has had a lifelong fascination with Scotland, particularly the Jacobite era , and specifically one family that really existed, the Graeme family, which appears in most of her books, if not all. This particular story, The Vanished Days, is about a young widow called Lily, who is trying to claim her husband’s portion of money from the failed Darien expedition, and a man named Adam who has been sent to investigate Lily’s claims. Adam and Lily have a history, and as you move through the story, you don’t know who is telling the truth and what their motives are. As you go back and forth between their perspectives—and back and forth in time, from the late 1600s to the early 1700s—you have this mystery that builds and grows. You want to know what their relationship is, what she’s hiding, and what he’s hiding from the people who have sent him. Again, it all takes place in a beautiful, lush Scottish setting. It unfolds from the Highlands all the way down to Edinburgh, and it builds and grows with the scenery of the story. You can tell that Susanna Kearsley loves this country, its history, and its people. I’ve always felt that my job as a writer of historical fiction is to make my readers really care about the people that I’m writing about—especially because all my characters so far have been real people—and Susanna accomplishes that. She pulls you in, gives you this amazing setting and people you care about, and throws you head-first into their lives. It becomes this wonderful, immersive experience. Every time she has a new novel come out, I go and buy it and read it immediately. I’ve loved them all. Yes. I didn’t set out to write novels about real people and events. It just happened that way. My first novel was based on real people, then my publisher wanted another one. You know how it goes—you get inspired, you find ideas everywhere. So, thus far, all my characters have been real. But it’s intimidating. You want to portray their lives accurately, but you are a novelist telling a story, and no one’s life is recorded perfectly in its entirety. We have dates, events, maybe letters or autobiographies. But we don’t ever get to know what was said behind closed doors, or what people’s motives and intentions were. So we have to fill in the gaps. I like to find my stories in the gaps between the facts. And then, at the end, in the author’s note, I do my best to ‘fess up to anything that I don’t know, made up, or had to rearrange for the sake of the story. Because there does come a point, usually when I’m about 75% done with a novel, where I have to give myself permission to say: This is a novel. Some of this is real, some of it is not, but I’m telling you a story."