[00:00:00] Jane: Welcome to Historical Happy Hour, the podcast that explores new and exciting historical fiction novels. I’m your host, Jane Healey, and in today’s episode, we welcome award winning author Suzanne Nelson to discuss her novel, The Librarians of Lisbon, a World War II story of love and espionage, which released on February 4th.
Welcome, Suzanne. Thank you for coming.
[00:00:24] Suzanne: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to talk about it with you tonight.
[00:00:27] Jane: Me too. So I’m going to do a quick intro and then we’ll dive into questions. Everyone tell me where are you zooming in from and what you’re reading. I always ask that at the beginning.
So Susanne Nelson is the award winning author of dozens of middle grade novels, including Your Bacon Me Crazy, amazing title, which was adapted into a movie for the Hallmark Channel. Her YA novel, Serendipity’s Footsteps, was a Sydney Taylor honor book. She has written articles about parenting for the Washington Post and teaches writing workshops for adults and children.
She loves reading and writing historical fiction. She lives with her family in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Again, welcome. Thank you. So let’s dive in. Tell everyone about the inspiration, make sure I’m holding this up right, and the premise of this Beautiful World War II story of Bea and Selene, two librarian friends from Boston who end up in Lisbon, of all places, Lisbon, Portugal, during the war and take on these fascinating roles.
[00:01:25] Suzanne: Yeah so really, I feel like this book here I have it here too, I have the hardcover here I feel like it really started with the characters and the location. That was really what the story was built around. And when I learned that Portugal was neutral during World War II, And it was this hub for allied and access spies.
It, oh, sorry about that. It really everything came together because I knew that librarians were recruited by the American government during World War Two to go abroad into occupied Europe and also into Lisbon and Portugal and Rescue manuscripts that were in danger of being looted from the Nazis and get them to safe locations, but also they were there to mine information and find artillery manuals and underground resistance newspapers and topographical maps.
Lots of information that the government prior to Pearl Harbor did not have. So when Roosevelt realized that he was seriously lacking in intelligence about the Axis powers, that was when he started recruiting academic scholars and librarians. So the book is We call it, my editor and I call it Casablanca romance meets the espionage of James Bond world.
And I think it really does that the librarians that go there are they go there initially to do this librarian work, but then they each get recruited for much more dangerous missions after they get there. And then the story kind of goes from there, but the characters are loosely inspired by scholars and librarians who were actively overseas during the war.
So that seemed to mesh perfectly with Portugal and its neutrality, and the fact that it was this playground for spies. And it was also this really fascinating location because it was also one of the only Exit points from occupied Europe it because of its neutrality. So you had these spies operating there.
But then you also had exiled Royals. You had authors and illustrators and scientists and mathematicians that were coming from occupied Europe and trying to leave to get to the United States and Brazil and Canada. So they were there and a lot of times they got stuck there because they didn’t have the proper paperwork to leave.
So they just lingered in Portugal sometimes for months or even years and then you had other, you had families and just regular people who were flooding into Portugal too who were also trying to leave. So you had this great mashup of social circumstances and people that were all congregating in Portugal during those war years.
And you also had this huge dichotomy of, the party atmosphere at the Casino Estoril and the palaces in Sintra. And then you had people in Lisbon who were trying to leave that couldn’t get jobs and were living, some Lisboetas took them into their homes or they were living in hostels there.
So it was really these two extreme worlds that coexisted during that time, which was just fascinating to me.
[00:05:02] Jane: Yeah, and I think too, I, one of the things that I love, when I discover a new World War II book like this is I don’t think Lisbon’s been And I think that’s what we’ve talked about enough in, in, in fiction and World War Two fiction, frankly.
And so that, that was really intriguing. I think you and we’ll talk more about Lisbon too as a setting. But I think it’s such a fascinating setting. I want to talk about Bea and Selene two very distinct characters, very different from one another. What was your character development like for these two friends?
And you’ve, obviously you’ve written many books, so I don’t know if you have a process for it, or if this was different because this was an adult novel. Talk to me about that.
[00:05:42] Suzanne: Really, I think for them, I wanted them to be complete opposites, and I think Everyone who’s had deep and abiding friendships has one or maybe two of those rare friendships where you meet someone that, that pushes you to be this version of yourself that you wouldn’t be around other people.
And I think Bea and Celine both do that for each other. Celine is this outgoing, vivacious woman, but she’s also been She’s very cynical about men in the book. Because of her beauty and because everyone makes assumptions about her beauty and her talents because of her charm, she, that angers her.
She wants to be respected for much more than that, and that’s part of why she ends up in Lisbon. And then you have Bea, who is much more reserved, quieter, and She’s also has her own story, her own backstory for her reasons for going to Portugal, which I won’t give away any spoilers, but she has secrets that she’s harboring, and the two of them play off of each other, their friendships they bring out these, Celine B tempers Celine’s spontaneity and her recklessness, and Celine encourages and brings out this aspect of B and encourages her to be more assertive, more outgoing, more adventurous.
And I think as the book goes on, even though they’re on these two parallel paths with two separate missions, what they know and love about each other feeds into the people that they grow into over the course of the novel.
[00:07:30] Jane: Yes. Yeah. It’s like a yin and yang thing. I love that. Yeah. I read your piece on crime reads in which you discussed how librarians don’t really fit the stereotypical profile of what a spy would be and yet they were very good spies and OS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA, recruited a lot of intellectuals, a lot of academics.
Why do librarians make good spies?
[00:07:58] Suzanne: I think it’s the way that they think. You and I both do research when we take on historical fiction novels, and I love the research aspect of writing. That’s one of my favorite parts. And I think probably our brains work a little bit like librarians and academics brains work in that respect.
We’re able to hone in on details and what I read about the academics and scholars that were doing this during the war. They were fantastic. They could comb through directories and pull out names and manage to craft a narrative around that and be able to say I think these people. Are really important to the Reich.
They were crafting their own narratives based on the information that they were gathering. And that fascinates me. And I think we, we do that as writers too. We comb through all of these non fiction books that we read when we’re researching. We go visit places and take tours and gather facts.
And then we’re able to weave them into, in, in our cases, fiction with little tidbits of nonfiction, but I think academics and scholars were such a huge asset to the war effort and it really, you don’t realize so often what’s going on behind the scenes, the little green man behind the curtain you don’t see that person very often, but, Those women and men that were overseas that were doing that work and that were, collecting Adele Kibre and Maria Josefa Meyer.
They were collecting thousands of reels of microfiche film and sending it to the United States. They had documentation of access attacks on allied powers that the U. S. government didn’t really know fully about yet. They just had, they had a knack for really finding needles in haystacks, and they did, and they were great at it.
[00:09:59] Jane: Amazing, I know, and I think Yuri too, it wasn’t, a lot of bi work is not glamorous, it’s actually very labor intensive and tedious and, all about digging in and I think that, that’s what made like librarians like your two characters so good at it. It’s that attention to detail and like you said, being able to call things from tons and tons of information too.
[00:10:21] Suzanne: Yeah, and in the Crime Reads article, I talk about Agent Garbo too, and he was phenomenal because he was actually an MI 15 agent. He crafted a network of 27 fictional spies that he told the Germans were based in England that were reporting on British troop activities and movements, and they were completely fictional.
And for the first year and a half or so that he was doing it. He’d never even been to England. Eventually, M I 15 brought him to London when they realized what he was doing. But at first they initially rejected his attempts. He went to them and he said, Hey, I want to work for you. I want to be a spy.
And they said, No, we don’t know who you are. We don’t trust you. And so he went to Germany instead. And I’m not to Germany. But, in Portugal, he was in Lisbon, and he went to the Germans. And he said, Hey, I have information. And it was all fiction. It was all crafted narratives. So he wasn’t actually in the thick of things, doing the spies in the secret shadows and corners thing.
He used his storytelling skills to weave this network of spies, and he was instrumental in D Day. So he had a huge impact.
[00:11:39] Jane: Yeah, that, that was an incredible, I like the fact that was a real character in history is unbelievable. Yeah so good. I want to ask, this is a good, I want to ask about your research because you have very detailed author notes, which I always love in the back of the book bibliography so this is a two part question.
Talk about your research, your process, sources, and also was there anything you That you came across in your research, I’m always curious with writers, that changed the narrative in a huge way.
[00:12:09] Suzanne: Oh I definitely think that one of the things that changed the whole course of the story actually was when I realized what a huge impact Wolfram had on the war.
Which a lot of people don’t really know that I knew nothing about it and when I
[00:12:26] Jane: that’s actually one of my other questions so talk about what I didn’t either I didn’t know I vaguely had heard of it but talk about what Wolfram and the trade of Wolfram in Portugal talk about that aspect of what a big part of the war it was.
[00:12:39] Suzanne: So when I first started researching Lisbon, I actually read this fantastic book. It’s called Lisbon, War in the Shadows of City of the City of Light by Neil Lockery. And he talked just really briefly about Wolfram. And I. I thought, Oh, my gosh, I know nothing about this. So I went down a research rabbit hole right at the very beginning before I’d even outlined the book or done anything like that into Wolfram and for those of you that don’t know, Wolfram is it’s a mineral that contains a metal called tungsten.
So in Portugal, it’s called Wolfram. And in World War Two, it was indispensable to both the Allied and Axis powers because they were mining wolfram, and they were using it in artillery manufacturing because the metal tungsten is very strong, and so it created this impenetrable So the allied and access powers, Portugal was had a huge wolfram cash during the war, and so they were basically the number one country in the world with their stores of wolfram.
So both the allied and access powers were trading actively with Portugal during the war to try to get their hands on as much of it as possible. But there was this whole black market. There was swindling going on. There was siphoning, the Germans were smuggling it out of the country and the mines themselves, some of them were actually owned by Portuguese barons and wolfram barons, but then there were other minds that were owned.
By Germany, and and then, meanwhile, you had the allies that were trying to take as much too. So eventually, dictator Salazar, who was the prime minister of Portugal during the war, right prior to D Day, in the months leading up to D Day, he finally put an embargo on Wolfram and stopped exporting it entirely.
But if he hadn’t made that decision, Really, there’s no knowing what the actual outcome of the war would have been, which to me was incredible that this mineral and this metal had such a huge impact because war is so much industry and people don’t think about that either. Where is the weaponry coming from?
Where is the artillery coming from? That was where it was coming from. So the fact that there was this huge smuggling black market that was going on then, and then, I wanted to incorporate that into the story. And I wanted Agent Gable, who was inspired by Agent Garbo, to be in Portugal during that time.
He ended up having that mission, which is totally fictionalized in the book. But I wanted, I wanted the Wolf Room to be a part of it, because it played a huge role in the war.
[00:15:35] Jane: Yeah so interesting. And the fact that Portugal is playing so you mentioned there’s two, obviously there’s romance and there’s two romantic interests and you talked about how Garbo, the double agent Garbo was based on a real historical figure talk about the other romantic interest, Raphael, who, oh, I want to make sure I get this right.
Oh, Luca, sorry, Luca is based on the diplomat Sousa Mendes, right? Yeah, Aristides. Yeah, and he was an extraordinary historical figure as well, yes. Yeah, so talk about Luca, the romantic interest, and who his character is based on, because that’s another origin story that I really loved.
[00:16:18] Suzanne: Yeah so Luca is loosely based on Aristides who he was the Portuguese consul general during the war, and he was stationed in Bordeaux, France, and he, right after the invasion of Paris in June of 1940, people fled France, and they fled Paris, and they passed through Bordeaux, and He was working there for Portugal, but he was in charge of signing visas and exit papers to allow people into Portugal.
Unfortunately, in June of 1940 just prior to that, I believe in 1939 Dictator Salazar passed something called Circular 14, which basically, Prevented more refugees from entering into Portugal, in particular, what salads are called stateless persons who unfortunately the predominance of those were Jewish.
So at that point in time when Paris was invaded. There were no more visas that were supposed to be signed to allow people into Portugal and Aristides de Sousa Mendes completely ignored Salazar’s orders over the course of several days. He signed thousands of visas and People that went on to become incredibly famous later, their lives were saved because of this man.
So I always think, because I’m also a children’s book writer, I think of Margaret and H. A. Ray and Curious George, which, they had the manuscript with them. And he signed their visas and they got into Portugal. So Salazar got wind of what he was doing and tried to shut it down and he didn’t listen.
He just kept signing. He asked Salazar for permission. Salazar said no. And then ultimately. His life ended really tragically. He went to trial, they brought him back to Portugal. The trial was rigged. He was found guilty. All of his property was confiscated and he ended up dying in poverty. So in the case of Luca Caldera, I changed that.
I gave him. Sousa Mendez’s backstory and, it forms his character because it’s one of the reasons why at the beginning of the novel when you meet him, he’s incredibly cynical and he’s stuck in Portugal and he can’t leave and you don’t know why but he has a totally different, he has a different future and I crafted a romance for him and a love story because I, I guess the romantic in me wanted him to have, a better ending than the one that he got.
And it’s fascinating because he was basically blacklisted and censored out of Portuguese history for decades. And it wasn’t until The 1980s. I believe that Israel was the first country to really recognize his efforts in rescuing people. And now, recently, they have a museum that’s in his honor in Portugal now.
And so they’ve really everyone is embracing it and talking about it now. And he’s become a hero. They call him the Oscar Schindler of Portugal. But his story is just incredible.
[00:19:41] Jane: Yeah, when I read that in your notes, I couldn’t believe that he had been buried, right? He’s responsible, I think, in the notes, it said over 3, 000 lives, at least, that they know, right?
Incredible. I have writing questions, and then I will take questions from the audience after that. If you have questions for Suzanne, put them in the chat or the Q& A. Do you, this is a dual narrative. Was that always your plan for this story?
[00:20:06] Suzanne: That was, yes. My editor and I talked about that at the very beginning.
We wanted it to be two separate points of view. And I’ve done that before. I did it with one of my young adult novels, Serendipity’s Footsteps, and that actually had three points of view. So that was the first time I took that on. It is very challenging. I find it very challenging as a writer to do that, but I also find that, plot wise, it can offer certain advantages, for instance, in Bea and Selene’s case, I was able to give them two separate missions, and They know things that are happening about each, they have all these suspicions and things as they interact with each other in the book because they’re keeping secrets from each other.
So that really add, the fact that I had dual points of view really added to the suspense and the tension in the plot because of that. Because they see each other doing certain things and they question motives and. And what’s really going on and there’s misunderstandings that happen. So I think it really was necessary for the, this particular storyline.
And also it was just really fun to have two separate missions for these librarian spies and two missions that were also very intertwined with Portugal’s war history.
[00:21:25] Jane: During
[00:21:27] Suzanne: the war that there were Nazis in Portugal that were actively seeking out people that had fled there. They didn’t want them to leave.
So there were people that were being hunted, which is really disturbing that in a neutral country that was occurring. But Salazar as a dictator also was very. He didn’t very, he wasn’t vocal at all because he was treading this tightrope of neutrality. So he made sure that anything that was happening that was below board didn’t get discussed and no one knew about it except probably him.
Of course. And the PBDE, the Portuguese Secret Police. Yeah. So the PBBEs were fun.
[00:22:11] Jane: So talk to me about, you mentioned plot what is your writing process? Do you, are you a plotter or are you a pantser? Do you plot things out? Do you write by the seat of your pants? Are you somewhere in between?
[00:22:22] Suzanne: I am in between.
I have done it both ways. And I will say that When I’m a pantser, I, there’s always a moment when I’m a pantser where I get to a certain point in the manuscript and I get stuck for a period of time. That seems to happen when I’m flying by the seat of my pants. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, it usually works out, it’s always worked out.
But, there’s a few excruciating days in there where I literally will sit down at my computer and say, Oh my gosh, I had the beginning, I had the ending. What the heck is happening in this moment right here? So but it’s worked out. When I outlined this particular one was so complicated plot wise I did a really extensive outline so that made it easier for me when I went to write it because I Didn’t get into the glut of the what is happening in this moment in this chapter.
I already had it mapped out. I really outlining is not always fun for me. So I’m so tempted to just be a pantser all the time, but I also secretly know that outlining will help me in the long run. So I think it just depends on the mood I’m in when I take on the story and also how complex the plot is.
If I know I’m doing a really complex plot, cause I also did it in Serendipity’s Footsteps. I outlined that too. There were so many moving pieces and when you’re jumping around in time. I feel like outlining is also very helpful. If it’s a, if it’s a progressive, naturally progressing through time plot, and you’re not jumping around, then maybe you can be a pantser.
[00:23:59] Jane: I find, and you must have found this too, with all the research you had to do for this, that did it help you keep your research organized as well, like plotting things out, and like where things, what research you needed where, like I find that Is one of the reasons I have to have some sort of at least rough outline because I need to have a way of organizing my research.
I’m not super organized, but I do my best,
Yeah, I feel like that’s I do use Microsoft Word. Are you Scrivener? I use
[00:24:26] Suzanne: Word. I keep hearing about Scrivener and I just, I don’t have the time right now to learn a whole new process, but I’m so intrigued. I want to check it out. But I’ve used Word for, for 20 something years.
So I think I need some, I need a little bit of free time to, to learn a new program. And then I would love to see what it does and what its capabilities are. Yeah.
[00:24:49] Jane: It’s pretty, yeah, Scrivener, and it’s really inexpensive, and I’ve probably only used like 20 percent of its capabilities, but I definitely, I like it for organizing research, and outlining, and all that stuff but people, I understand Word is also still my like, go to for later on drafts, and I don’t think I’ll ever change, I don’t think I’ll ever go to Google Docs or anything else.
[00:25:12] Suzanne: I’ve never, I’ve always used word, but I think part of that is probably residual after effects from me being an editor for almost a decade too. Oh
[00:25:21] Jane: yeah. That’s
[00:25:22] Suzanne: right too.
[00:25:22] Jane: Yeah.
[00:25:23] Suzanne: Because back when I was an editor we actually You know, now you do track changes and everything in Microsoft Word. And when I was editing, it was all by hand.
We were doing all the line editing by hand still, and mailing the manuscripts back to the authors. And it was so much fun. And I remember when track changes got introduced as a writer. I was it made me completely paranoid for a little while. I did not trust the technology at all.
[00:25:52] Jane: Of course. I trusted my red pencil.
Yes, the red pencil always. So you’ve written a number of books for young people. And this is your first adult novel, historical fiction. What was different about this process?
[00:26:11] Suzanne: I wouldn’t say that the process was necessarily different. I would say in a way it was liberating to write for adults because as a YA and middle grade author, I always keep in the back of my mind where my readers are developmentally. What themes and context I’m using in the book and how it’s going to resonate with them and they’re going to relate to it and with adult novels.
I didn’t I still thought about that, but I wasn’t constantly thinking about, what’s the maturity level of the readers that I’m writing for? And is this. To mature of a concept for them and, I’m a very firm believer in using sophisticated language and writing for kids to I, I am, the children’s literature world is full of some of the most amazing literature that I’ve probably ever read and at the same can be said for adult lit too.
It’s just, it’s a overflowing fountain of talent in both of those worlds. So it’s not really changing the vocabulary, but it’s just more the freedom to play with concepts that are adult concepts and, not have to worry about that. So that was really liberating.
Oh, that’s great. Yeah. But the process is still very much the same. And I would actually argue that. With children’s writing, especially with middle grade, when you’re trying to keep a story. Succinct and you don’t want it to get too unruly with page count. You’re thinking about your word count a lot and how long are these chapters?
Am I going to lose my reader? If I have a 10 page chapter those things still hold true to the adult market, too, because you always want to keep that forward momentum, but but I think in the children’s world also, are my paragraphs too long? How do I want to break up this page?
So it’s not overwhelming.
[00:28:13] Jane: Yeah, the parameters are a little tighter. Yeah, I would imagine for that. Yeah. Interesting. How did you strike a balance between. Fact and fiction in this novel and were there any strict rules that you had as you were writing it in terms of fact versus fiction?
[00:28:30] Suzanne: I didn’t really have any strict rules.
I think it was more conscious decisions along the way of what I wanted to include as far as, especially with regard to, I would say, Agent Gable and Lupa Caldera, because I, those two characters I based probably more On their real personas in history their true historical figures, at least their backstories were relatively similar.
I didn’t have a whole lot of information about their personalities, so I, that was fictional, but it was how I imagined that after everything had happened to Aristides de Sousa Mendes. I would imagine that he would have been completely disillusioned and cynical about his home country and about Salazar, this man that he was working for that, and he did say You know, up until he died he said, I did what my conscience told me to do and that was his response, for saving people and disregarding the rules.
So with both of those men, as I was crafting their characters, I had to make decisions about. how I wanted their futures to be. I didn’t want, I didn’t want Agent Gable, my fictional Agent Gable to go off to Britain halfway through the story, which is actually what happened in real life.
I wanted him to hang in there in Portugal and Luca, I wanted him to have a different ending than the one that he had in real life and a chance at finding redemption and love and also to find hope again after being So ruined by his country. I wanted him to have that chance. So a lot of it was just making conscious decisions along the way.
And Celine and B were such a mashup of different spies and librarians and academics that I encountered in my research that I didn’t really have to think about their their stories and their futures and everything was much more fictional, but I think anytime you’re. Mixing fiction and nonfiction, you do have to be careful if I had written agent Garbo and written him as a real person, I would have had to do it totally different differently than the way that I did.
I would have taken a totally different tack than the one that I did. And the same with Aristides de Souza Mendes. If I were going to write him as a character, It would have been a totally different process because I would have a lot more conscientious of being true to who they were as individuals and not fictionalizing their personalities and that sort of thing.
[00:31:18] Jane: Yeah, that makes total sense. I’ve run into that. And I, yeah, I completely relate. I, so you have been an editor and you’ve taught writing and you’ve. You’ve published a bunch of books, what’s the best advice you can give to aspiring authors about writing and getting published?
[00:31:36] Suzanne: So for a long time, when I was first starting out when I was an editorial assistant and I was working on other people’s books, and meanwhile, I was frantically, behind closed doors, telling no one that I was secretly writing my own and submitting my own and getting rejected and nobody knew.
And I was very much in love with just writing as a craft and language. And it took me a really long time and a lot of working on other people’s manuscripts and a lot of writing cover copy for those books and figuring out what the sale points for those books were for me to wrap my head around the idea that whatever I was writing if I had any hope of it getting Out of my door and into other readers hands, it had to have something propelling it forward constantly from the first page to the end.
And whether you’re writing a character driven story where the evolution of the characters is and their relationships with each other is the crux of the narrative. Or you’re writing a completely plot driven story, or you’re writing a combination of both. You always have to keep in mind that forward momentum.
Always. And, you’re not writing to the market, but you’re writing with your readers in mind. Are they still going to be hanging in there on page 50, on page 100, on page 150? What are you giving them that’s going to make them keep turning the pages? And early on in my career, I did a lot of writing under pseudonyms, work for hire pieces.
And that helped me a lot too, because those were so plot driven. And I was also one of several authors that were writing for any one series under these pseudonyms. So I would say be writing books two and four while another author was writing book one and three. And we had what was called a Bible of characters, and those characters had predetermined personalities, and we had to make our voices sound the same in the writing so that, whoever was reading the series wouldn’t be able to tell that there were different authors, and That was a huge challenge, but it also taught me so much about plotting and about writing to point.
And I would say that’s a great process for anyone to actually experiment with and take on because you learn so much. Oh
[00:34:09] Jane: yeah, I was like that, that must have been like a class in itself on how to structure a book, beginning, middle, end. Yeah, and carry it through. That’s, yeah, that’s fascinating.
That must have been like a really good education.
[00:34:21] Suzanne: Yeah, and you also have to, it takes a lot of discipline too, because You can’t let yourself all the places that your brain is going with all the different things that you want to do with it. You can’t, you, you just hone in on what you’re told to do. It’s a great exercise.
Yeah. And so that was really early on in my career. And I feel like that it really hit home with me how important that momentum. Is for every book.
[00:34:50] Jane: Yeah. Momentum, structure, forward motion. Yeah. Completely. That was a hard lesson for me to learn. It took me a lot longer. So how can readers best keep in touch with you?
And do you zoom with book clubs?
[00:35:02] Suzanne: I do zoom with book clubs. Yes. And I do it for free. There is a link on my. Website, if you go to www. SuzanneNelson. com and you click on the adult, there’s two different branches of my website, there’s the children’s branch and the adult branch, so you click on the adult branch and under contact, it’ll, there’s a form that anyone can fill out for a book club chat request, I do them online.
If I’m nearby you, then maybe I can do it in person as time allows. So I do that. I’m also on TikTok and Instagram at Suzanne Nelson books on Twitter at Suzanne Nelson books or X on Suzanne Nelson books and Facebook Suzanne Nelson books. So I’m, you can find me all over the place.
[00:35:53] Jane: But we have time for a couple quick questions.
And in the Q and A, it’s basically the same question, which is by two people. Did you travel to Portugal as part of your research?
[00:36:03] Suzanne: I did. I did travel to Portugal. I was there in November and actually I had a draft of the book already done when I went. Yeah, when I went. So I went, I will admit I went with a little bit of trepidation because I was there and I thought, Oh my gosh, what’s going to happen if I get there and all the research that I’ve done is, I’ve written this whole thing and I’ve created this whole world in this environment.
And what if it’s completely wrong? So I was very relieved when I got there and it was, it was true to, to what I had written and the research that I’d done, which was a huge relief. And it was also great because I was able to go to all the places that I included in the book and. And talk about them.
I actually, for anyone who is interested and looks up my TikToks or my Instagrams, I have a lot of videos where I’m actually, and there will be more coming in coming weeks where I take you. To the location. So you can see exactly what it looks like. And then when you’re reading the book, you have a frame of reference for that particular location in the story.
So it was amazing to, to be there. And also very eyeopening because in all my research Especially when it came to Dictator Salazar. I understood who he was on the periphery, but there’s this fascinating museum for anyone who travels to Lisbon. It’s called the Aljube Museum of Resistance and Freedom, and it used to be a prison.
And you go there and there’s these amazing displays about the censorship and what he did to maintain control while he was prime minister. It’s actually quite terrifying, but it’s also just So incredibly informative and moving, and it gives you a really great context for the environment that Portugal was during that time, because he was prime minister for a very long time and then eventually became incapacitated.
And what was so fascinating was. His government continued. They basically hid the fact that he was incapacitated and he maintained power, even though he was completely incapacitated. Yeah so that was really fascinating. But Lisbon is this fantastic. City and it’s just Alfama, which is one of the places that Celine does some of her spy work in the novel is just this maze of little tiny alleyways and stairways and these tiny little buildings with these little doorways that you have to crouch down to walk through.
It’s so beautiful and right in the middle of all these buildings, you see these not groves of orange trees, but you’ll see. Like two or three orange trees just coming right out of the pavement, basically, and they were still they had fruit on them in November when I was there.
[00:38:55] Jane: Oh, wow. Yeah, I haven’t been to Lisbon.
That is on my list. Audrey Tiedemann says traveled to Portugal last year. Just amazing. Someone asked is Porto mentioned in the book. I know they had a huge Jewish population there.
[00:39:09] Suzanne: No, yeah, Porto’s not in the book. It’s predominantly, it’s Lisbon and then Sintra and Estoril. Because, most of the spycraft that was going on in World War II was in those areas.
Especially Estoril, which is a very short train ride from Lisbon. That place is just fascinating because that’s where Ian Fleming as a naval secretary, Drew inspiration for his James Bond character and the Hotel Palacio is there and they have the spy bar and that’s where Agent Garbo hung out and also another double agent, Dusko Popoff, who was the inspiration for James Bond hung out in the Hotel Palacio in the spy bar.
It’s just such a font of fun. Spy information and history. Totally. Yeah.
[00:39:59] Jane: That question was Carol Cohen. Thank you, Carol. One more question because we’re running out of time. Christine Mott asks, and I should have actually asked this. What made you decide to write an adult book after writing children’s books for so long?
I didn’t even ask that. Like why now? Did you decide to?
[00:40:17] Suzanne: So I actually I’ve wanted to write historical fiction adult novels for a very long time. Part of it was the timing because I was, for Scholastic, I wrote a whole series of ten foodie books, including You’re Baking Me Crazy. And those were coming out basically one a year.
So for almost ten years, I was just consumed with writing those. So I really didn’t have A whole lot of time, but I was very fortunate with this book because actually my publisher Zando approached my agent and said, do you know any children’s book YA authors that would want to actually take a stab at writing historical fiction?
And I basically was like, Oh me. That’s amazing. Yes. So I’m eternally grateful to my editor at Zando and my agent. Cause my agent. Basically texted me right away and she said, Suze,
[00:41:10] Jane: you have to do this. That’s, oh, I love that story. That’s so cool. Very, that’s awesome. Yeah. Suzanne, this is lovely.
Thank you so much. Congratulations again. The Librarians of Lisbon just came out and Suzanne does book clubs via Zoom. And you know where to get in touch with her. Thank you again for coming on. And next up is a week, two weeks from tonight we have Jane Yang to talk about the Lotus Shoes. You can register at janehealy.
com. And I should probably give a shout out. My husband would be mad if I didn’t. The Women of Arlington Hall, my book that’s coming out this summer, is available for pre order. And yeah, that’s it. So thank you so much. Remember to like and subscribe YouTube and pod and and follow the podcast. Thank you everyone.
As always, this is an amazing crowd on this cold night. And I wish you so much success Suzanne with this amazing book.
[00:42:01] Suzanne: And same to you. I’m so excited about your book. I can’t wait to read it.
[00:42:05] Jane: Thank you so much. Good night, everyone. Thank you. Take care.
