I am thrilled to welcome author, David Gilman onto the blog today. David is the author of The Knife Maker of Venice. It's a powerful historical adventure perfect for fans of Kate Mosse, Ken Follett and Robert Harris.
The Blurb
A young Englishman captured by slavers must survive the snakepit that is seventeenth-century Venice.
1604 - As pirates seeking slaves to sell in the markets of North Africa terrorise the coasts of Europe, headstrong Richard Sheriff and his sister Elizabeth are torn from their Devonshire home and thrust into a waking nightmare. Richard's skills as a blacksmith see him fetch a high price, but the pirate captain has other plans for Elizabeth and once they are separated, Richard has no idea of his sister's fate. They must both learn to survive on a deadly voyage into the unknown.
Sold into servitude in Venice: glittering, vicious city of secrets, he is apprenticed to a knife maker. Richard's talents soon win him renown... but haunted by his sister's absence, he vows never to stop looking for her, knowing she would do the same for him.
First he must survive that city of ghosts. Will the siblings live to see each other again, or will they join the myriads lost to Venice, where life is cheap, profit is all, and escape nigh-on impossible?
Welcome to the blog David and for answering some questions about your new book.
Q What first sparked the idea for The Knife Maker of Venice?
A My publisher, Nic Cheetham, caught me unawares during our annual meeting and asked me to write another standalone novel before the next volume in my Master of War series. I had nothing in mind, and then a memory from 30 years ago gave me a starting point. When I returned to the UK after working and living in South Africa, I toured around the southwest coast looking for somewhere to live. I saw a plaque at Dartmouth Castle commemorating the seizure of a boy by pirates in the seventeenth century. There was the germ of the story. Little did I know what I had let myself in for.
Q Why Venice for this story? What does the city allow you to explore that another setting might not?
A It's a magical city. I visited several times and every time felt different. There’s so much to explore and its history is fascinating. I am still in awe as to how all that brick, mortar and beauty were built on a swamp. There’s a story around every corner.
I had already completed a great deal of research, but I learnt an awful lot more by spending a day with a local accredited guide walking the fondamente and calli. Being Venetian, she was soaked in its history. She showed me nooks and crannies and, in some cases, dismissed my understanding of events in Venice. At that time, I thought I had done what I considered to be my own painstaking research. So, as has happened to me in the past with my Master of War series, having someone local proved to be an enormous help.
Q Tell us about your central characters, Richard and Elizabeth, and how it was writing their brother and sister dynamic in this story?
A I always prefer to throw someone in the deep end – why should the writer be the only one? And in this case, I was very keen to have a shared female protagonist. So, we have a talented apprentice blacksmith, Richard Sheriff, ambitious but constrained by the restraints of his trade and social status in the small market town of Totnes. A young, headstrong man with a keen sense of social justice that gets him into continual trouble. And Richard will reach a time in his journey when he has to go against all his deep-seated beliefs.
His sister, Elizabeth, older by four years, works as a house servant in a wealthy merchant’s house nine miles downriver in Dartmouth. She is an intelligent and partially educated woman but carries her own dark secret of something that happened in the merchant’s house one night.
Richard and Elizabeth were orphaned a decade ago when Richard was ten years old. The hardship of their lives is tempered by their love for each other – who looks after whom is the question they often ask each other. And it’s something from Elizabeth’s past that hurls them both into a terrifying fight for survival when they are torn apart.
Q How much historical research went into this novel, and what were the most surprising things you discovered?
A The Knife Maker of Venice heralded one of the most challenging books I’ve written. It demanded constant research across many historical facts. It was the immediate period following the death of Queen Elizabeth I, at a time when corruption and harsh laws caused misery. What had seemed a simple idea was anything but. I researched blacksmithing, knife making, sailing, the slave trade, the wealth of Venice, and the secret trials and executions that took place there. The multi-national traders and the restrictions on trade; and discovering that there were various slave markets in north
Africa – notably in places governed by the Ottoman Turks – for Europeans who had been seized, but there were no slave markets in Venice where slaves were nonetheless bought and sold beyond the Republic of Venice. Hypocrisy at its most blatant. The wealth of characters is drawn from their various backgrounds and circumstances. All of this research and the characters that emerged from it made an enticing time writing the novel.
And I remember being surprised to learn that there were tourists on holiday from across Europe visiting the city in the early seventeenth century. Enjoying the sights and attending extravagant balls and the theatre. And I suppose that as the research unfolded, I was surprised at so many small facts that I wasn’t aware of.
Q What do you hope readers take away from the novel once they’ve finished it?
A I always become immersed in the writing process for a novel, so my hope is that the journey that the reader and writer share becomes a narrative and visual feast. Do readers care about my characters? Are they swept along with the story and the predicaments these people face? And perhaps more than anything else is the hope that the storytelling takes the reader out of their own lives for a while and plunges them into a dangerous and vivid world they can believe in.
Many thanks David for your fascinating answers to my questions. It has been a pleasure to have you on the blog today.
Book Details
ISBN: 978 1035910373
Publisher: Head of Zeus -- an Aries Book
Formats: e-book, audio and hardback
No. of Pages: 512 (hardback)
Purchase Links
About the Author
David Gilman has enjoyed many careers, including paratrooper, firefighter, and photographer. An award-winning author and screenwriter, he is the author of the critically acclaimed Master of War series of historical novels, and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize for The Last Horseman. He was longlisted for the same prize for The Englishman, the first book featuring ex-French Foreign Legionnaire Dan Raglan. David lives in Devon.
Follow David on @davidgilmanuk, and
You can also find David at:
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