Exclusive interview with author Paula Brackston about her new novel The Midnight Witch.
Rating: 3 Stars
by Gabrielle Pantera
“My books always start with a new witch, and in this case I already knew I wanted an urban and glamorous setting,” says The Midnight Witch author Paula Brackston. “I think the first decades of the twentieth century in Britain were such a time of contrasts… beautiful art, fashion, and great wealth, but devastating war, political struggle and poverty. This combination inspired Lilith’s story.”
Set in Edwardian times, this dark and romantic novel explores what happens if members of the British aristocracy were not only wealthy members of the ton (as members of Britain’s high society were called during the Georgian era) but were also powerful witches. An interesting twist on romantic suspense. This complex storyline will intrigue you with the struggle between good and evil. However, the descriptions are so detailed it slows down the story a bit.
The sixth Duke of Radnor has died leaving behind his son Freddy, the new duke, his grieving wife and Lady Lilith Montgomery, his beautiful daughter. Lilith is the new head of the Lazarus Coven. Freddy is weak and addicted to opium. Lilith faces the threat of a powerful group of sorcerers known at the Sentinels. She is engaged to childhood friend and fellow witch Viscount Louis Harcourt Louis. Lilith falls in love with Bram, a talented artist. She can’t keep her life a secret from him. Can she save the coven, her brother and her love?
The book is long, and the story complex, being told from three different viewpoints. Brackston says she did a great deal of rewriting and tweaking. “The more you revisit a manuscript, I find, the more surreal the whole experience of writing the novel becomes. You get so immersed in the world of your story it gets harder and harder to pull yourself back out of it at the end of each day or session.”
Brackston read a lot of fiction and non-fiction set or produced during the Edwardian era and through the First World War as her research for The Midnight Witch. She found some archives online. “The Internet is a wonderful resource, particularly if, like me, you live somewhere remote,” says Brackston. “But, it is easy to get lost in all the available information. Not all of it is useful, relevant, or even accurate, so you have to be careful and double check anything you want to use. I also watch films set in my chosen era, as I find it helps me to tune in to the speech patterns of the time, as well as getting a powerful visual sense of the years I am trying to recreate.”
To make the trailer of her book Brackston used photographs of her great-grandmother, Tweak Strannack. “Seeing her image as Lilith made the book feel much more personal to me,” says Brackston. The trailer is at her website.
This is the third Brackston book featuring witches, after The Witch’s Daughter and The Winter Witch. “My writing career really took off with the publication of The Witch’s Daughter which became a New York Times bestseller,” says Brackston. “This meant I was able to become a full-time writer and concentrate on my books, which has been wonderful. I do sometimes worry that I spend more of my time in a fantasy world than the real one, but my family have their own ways of keeping me grounded.”
She is finishing her latest book featuring a very charismatic witch, set in present day and tenth century Wales.
Brackston lives in Wales. She was born in Dorset.
The Midnight Witch by Paula Brackston. Hardcover: 352 pages, Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (March 25, 2014), Language: English, ISBN-9781250006080 $25.99. Kindle: File Size: 1117 KB, Print Length: 350 pages, Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1250006082, Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books (March 25, 2014), Sold by: Macmillan, Language: English, ASIN: B00FCR3QUC $11.04
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