Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Farthing

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Farthing

Jo Walton is the author of The King's Peace (2000), The King's Name (2001), The Prize in the Game (2002), Tooth and Claw (2003), Muses and Lurkers (collection, 2001) and Farthing. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, and the World Fantasy Award for Tooth and Claw in 2004. Her style is to take a familiar element and pair it with the unfamiliar in order to put a new and interesting spin on things. For example, in Tooth and Claw she mixed elements of Anthony Trollope's Victorian society with dragons to create a story that Booklist described as "a little masterpiece of originality".

She describes her latest book, Farthing as "a cosy mystery with fascists". When asked whether Farthing has political relevance she replied, "I certainly wouldn't have written it if I hadn't been absolutely white hot furious about current politics". The first draft took 17 days to write.

She is presently writing a new fantasy, Lifelode, and a sequel to Tooth and Claw. She comes from Wales, but lives in Montreal "where the food and books are more varied".

Coming Soon: Ha'penny will be published in October 2007. A bomb explodes in a London suburb in 1949. The brilliant but politically compromised Inspector Carmichael of Scotland Yard is assigned the case. What he finds leads him to a conspiracy of peers and communists, of staunch King-and- Country patriots and hardened IRA gunmen, to murder Britain’s Prime Minister and his new ally, Adolf Hitler.

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This "beyond the book article" relates to Farthing. It originally ran in September 2006 and has been updated for the August 2007 paperback edition. Go to magazine.