Featured Interview With Samantha Grosser
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I grew up in Bristol, England, before moving to London to study English Literature at the Polytechnic of North London, graduating with a BA Hons in 1988.
A nine-month stint at a public relations company in London after graduating furnished me with the funds to go travelling and I spent about 18 months in Asia and Australia, returning home via the Trans Siberian Express – one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
A year later found me teaching English in Tokyo, where I met my Australian husband, and developed an ongoing love for all things Japanese. I now live in Sydney with my husband, son and a very small dog called Livvy.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I’ve been an avid reader for as long as I can remember. I have a vivid memory of pretending to read grown-up books not long after I started school and barely knew my ABC! I started writing stories as a child, mostly about horses. Then, in my teens and twenties, I lost confidence in my writing, though I never lost my passion for reading.
It was only when I met my husband when I was 29 that I began to write again. So I guess he is my muse.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
This is always a hard question. Some of my favourite authors include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michael Ondaatje, Tracy Chevalier, Hilary Mantel, Melvyn Bragg, and Christopher Isherwood. My go-to genre tends to be historical fiction, but I’ll read anything that’s well-written, with complex characters and a good story. I’ve been inspired by all the writers above, but growing up I read a lot of 19th Century novels, and I think their imprint is still deep in my writing DNA.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The Officer’s Affair is a wartime drama of love and loyalty that explores the lives of three people caught in the devastating legacy of the Second World War.
When Danny Lock returns to England from the battlefields of Europe, it is not the joyful homecoming he dreamed of. Disabled and embittered, he knows he can never have a normal life, while his young wife, Rachel, struggles to understand the man her husband has become.
Then Captain Andrews comes to visit. His attraction to Rachel is instant, but the tension between the two men seems to stem from an earlier time.
As all three strive to shake off the ghosts of the war, they must each face their own searching questions about the nature of love and loyalty.
I wrote the novel over the course of a year or so, and it grew from a single idea of a young woman with two children forced to live with her parents during the Second World War. Like most writers, I played with the idea for a while and kept asking “What if?” until a story began to develop in my head.
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