Welcome to the world of The TAKER

I was concerned that The TAKER’s early American setting would make it less interesting to international readers. Not even most Americans consider America of the early 1800s to be sexy.

I’m happy to report that this doesn’t seem to be a problem; we’ve sold translation rights in several languages, with a few more deals in the works. And I think the reason that The TAKER is finding an international audience is because the book wasn’t written to read like reportage from a specific time in history: it was written to be like a fairy-tale.

The TAKER mostly takes place primarily in two settings. The first is the remote logging town of St. Andrew. The village is cut off it is from the rest of the world every winter, and this creates a sense of isolation, the impression that the town is like a kingdom, a kingdom that lives by its own rules. In this world, the king is Charles St. Andrew, the man who founded the town and owns its most lucrative enterprise, and the crown prince is his son, Jonathan, with whom the novel’s heroine, Lanny, has fallen in love.

The other setting is the city of Boston, but here we are immersed in a hidden world that exists behind the Brahmins’ mansions and the ivy-covered walls of Harvard College. It may be Boston, but the reader is brought into a world where – despite familiar surroundings – unexpected things could happen at any time, just like in Hansel and Gretel’s forest.

Let’s talk about setting: what’s your favorite book in which setting played a key role? What were you drawn to? Was it the feelings that the setting provoked, or was it an accurate rendering of a real place, perhaps a place you know?