Exclusive interview with author Lauren Willig and a review of her new novel, a family saga stretching from WW1 to present day
by Gabrielle Pantera
Rating: 3 stars
“Back in my grad school days, my field had been Tudor/Stuart, with an emphasis on the mid-seventeenth century, so I had always assumed that once I moved away from the Napoleonic Wars, I would look back to the familiar world of the seventeenth century for inspiration,” says Ashford Affair author Lauren Willig. “After seven years of writing about Napoleonic spies, I knew it was time for me to write something that didn’t involve knee breeches and black cloaks. The Ashford Affair was one of those ideas that came out of left field and turned my writing plans upside down.”
In her new book Lauren Willig weaves a tapestry of family members’ lives that flow from one to the other. The Ashford Affair encompasses three generations of love, loss, lust, power and secrets. The story moves from Manhattan to England to Kenya, from World War I to present day. Make sure you’ve got time to sit and read this novel as you won’t want to stop. The details from World War I and Africa are splendid and give depth to an already rich story. There is mystery, too. What if secrets of the past were revealed? How would that change your feelings for the people around you?
We meet Clementine Evans as she is about to make partner at a Manhattan law firm. As her life starts falling apart, she wonders if she’s doing what’s really right for her. At the ninety-ninth birthday of her grandmother Addie, Clementine leans there’s a family secret surrounding her grandmother. Early in the twentieth century five-year-old Addie Gillecote’s parents died in an auto accident. Her fathers half-brother Charles Lord Ashford takes her in. Her aunt Vera Lady Ashford is cold and uncaring. At Ashford Park Addie will be raised along with her cousins – but not with their priviledges.
A friend had given Willig a copy of The Bolter, a biography about a woman who remarries many times. “Idina Sackville’s checkered career of husband-swapping got me thinking, not about The Bolter herself, but about those people who were bowled over in the Bolter’s wild progress from marriage to marriage,” says Willig. “What would happen to a close friend, caught up in the Bolter’s self-destructive wake?”
Willig couldn’t get these characters, a modern heroine and the two historical best friends, out of her head. She brushed up on World War I England and 1920s Kenya, put on hold the next book in her popular Pink Carnation series, and began writing the book that became The Ashford Affair.
Willig’s first book, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, a tongue-in-cheek swashbuckler about spies during the Napoleonic Wars, came out in 2005. “By a very strange quirk of fate, I signed my first book contract my first month of law school, and spent the next few years juggling a dual career,” says Willig.
The Ashford Affair, has been chosen as an Indie Next Pick and received a starred review in Library Journal. This book is not yet optioned for film or television.
Willig recently finished her second stand-alone novel for St. Martin’s Press. Moving between 2009 and 1849, as a woman raised in New York is drawn back to the suburbs of London by an unexpected inheritance. She finds a lost Pre-Raphaelite painting that reveals a secret forbidden love and family scandal.
Willig currently lives in Manhattan. She was born in Philadelphia. For further details, including her book launch events, see www.facebook.com/ LaurenWillig/events and www.laurenwillig.com.
The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig. Hardcover: 368 pages, Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; First Edition edition (April 9, 2013). Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-1250014498 $24.99
