Wednesday 25 January 2017

Guest Post: Inspiration for The Silk Weaver by Liz Trenow

Today it's my pleasure to welcome Liz Trenow to the blog on the latest stop of her The Silk Weaver blog tour with a guest piece giving us an insight into the inspiration for her central characters Anna and Henri.

My heroine, Anna, is inspired by the eminent silk designer, Anna Maria Garthwaite. Anna Maria was one of the most celebrated textile designers of the eighteenth century, her silks were worn by royalty and nearly a thousand of her designs are in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.  Yet no-one knows how she learned her craft or how an unmarried middle-aged woman managed to develop such a successful business in a male dominated industry. It is this mystery that sparked the idea for the novel.

The boy she falls in love with, Henri, is a Huguenot (or Protestant) whose family fled persecution in France by the Catholic king. The Huguenots were banned from worshipping in their own way and many decided to use all their savings to make perilous journeys in small boats across the Channel to reach safety in England.  I became fascinated by the parallels with what is happening to refugees today and wanted to highlight them in this novel. 

A novel of illicit romance set against the world of the silk trade in London

Anna Butterfield moves from her Suffolk country home to her uncle's house in London, to be introduced to society. A chance encounter with a local silk weaver, French immigrant Henri, throws her from her privileged upbringing to the darker, dangerous world of London's silk trade. Henri is working on his 'master piece' to make his name as a master silk weaver; Anna, meanwhile, is struggling against the constraints of her family and longing to become an artist. Henri realizes that Anna's designs could lift his work above the ordinary, and give them both an opportunity for freedom…

If The Silk Weaver sounds like a book you'd like to read then you're in luck as I've been offered two copies to giveaway to followers of the blog (sorry restricted to UK & Ireland only). Enter via the Rafflecopter form below, the winners will be selected at random next week and contacted for their addresses to pass onto Alice at Pan Macmillan to post the books to them.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

12 comments:

  1. This sounds like a book that I'd very much enjoy reading, and thanks for the giveaway.

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  2. Thank you so much for the chance! :-) x

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  3. Thank You, really need a new book to read :)

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  4. Sounds perfect. I love my historical fiction!

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  5. I'm really enjoying historical romances at the moment, the authors have such a skill transporting us to another world and time.

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  6. I'd love to read this book. Thank you.

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  7. This sounds SO my cup of tea I'd love to win a copy, fingers crossed x

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  8. What a coincidence, I was thumbing through a copy of this earlier today and *almost* slipped it into my shopping trolley, it looks so much my kind of thing. But we had such a lot to buy I thought I'd better not. Then I came home and sat down with tea-and-Twitter and the first thing I saw, Shaz, was your tweet about it!

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  9. Loved The Last Telegram and this sounds really good. I can't wait to read it.

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