Medieval Castaway

Poor Banished Children has been reviewed in The Weekly Standard. I was glad she talked about the psychology of slavery because one of the things I was trying to do with the book was to explore precisely what might happen emotionally and psychologically to a person taken into slavery, to get 'under the skin' as it were, of a woman in a situation few of us could ever imagine having to bear. I didn't want it to be just a stock portrayal of victimhood because there are plenty of those out there and I hope I partly succeeded in bringing some of those emotional complexities to life.

The only thing that amuses me, reading reviews are the number that contain the words 'this is not for the squeamish.' The strange thing is that I am an exceptionally squeamish person who would probably have to keep closing my eyes if I ever watched this novel as a film, but I was so shocked by some of the stories I read when I was doing my reearch for the book that I was determined to be as realistic as possible. The original draft was much more graphic, but a friend who read it suggested that in some situations 'less is more' and advised me to go through the manuscript with that thought in mind. I went through and toned down or edited out any detail I did not think entirely necessary and also made use of techniques such as dream sequences and disturbed flashback (where the narrator is distracted or confused in the act of trying to remember) to soften the horror slightly. I realise that the end result is still very violent in some places, but I hope not gratuitously so.