New Books Network Interview: Linda Wilgus

There are no new stories, people say, and to an extent that’s true. Most novels—stripped of the details that define their settings and characters, as well as the (one hopes) exquisite prose that draws readers into the author’s world—turn out to have quite simple plots. To paraphrase George Carlin, “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gives up and watches sports.” (These days, of course, it could be “boy meets boy” or “girl meets girl,” but the point doesn’t change.)

That’s because readers have expectations, and they don’t take kindly to having those expectations undermined, as Carlin is, in fact, doing in this sentence. It’s the details, and especially the presentation, that turn a basic plot into something we all want to read. And as you’ll hear during my latest New Books Network interview with Linda Wilgus, there are many ways to take a setting or a plot point that’s appeared elsewhere and make it your own. Read on to find out more, but don’t forget to listen to our conversation as well.

As always, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Cornwall, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was best known for its smuggling. The combination of an insular and impoverished countryside, a rugged coastline characterized by numerous inlets and coves, and price hikes caused by the ongoing wars between Britain and France—played out in high tariffs and embargoes—created the perfect conditions for people desperate to make a living to defy what they saw as an unfair law. Over the years, those same characteristics have appealed to novelists from Daphne du Maurier to the present day.

The Sea Child (Ballantine, 2026)—which takes place in an isolated village in Cornwall, although on a river leading to the sea rather than the coastline itself—certainly dips into the long and contentious struggle between Cornish villagers and the British Crown. But at the heart of the story we find Isabel Henley, a young woman who, as a child of four, was plucked from the sea with no knowledge of her parents or her home. Adopted by local landlords, Isabel has grown up, moved away, married a naval man, and, following his death at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), returned to her childhood village. There she discovers that the legend surrounding her—that she is not entirely human but a daughter of the Sea Bucca, a merman who haunts the waters of the Cornish coast—survives and thrives.

Isabel discounts the locals’ tale, but she can’t deny that the river calls to her as she strolls along its banks at twilight …