In showing her good side as a loving mother and a supportive friend to Jordan, I wasn’t trying to create sympathy for a villain, but write a more well-rounded-and thus more terrifying–one. And Anna, the Nazi-war-criminal-turned-housewife, is trying to build a new life so no one will ever find out what she did in her old one. Most of my characters in The Huntress are dealing with fallout from World War II: Ian, the journalist-turned-Nazi-hunter, struggles with PTSD from his war correspondent years Nina, the former Russian bomber pilot, mourns the loss of all her comrades-in-arms Tony, the soldier-turned-investigator, struggles with guilt that he had a “safe” war while the Jewish branches of his family died in the Holocaust. Kate Quinn: I’m fascinated by aftermath-not just what happens during a war, but afterward, when people have to pick up the pieces of their lives. RGC: Can you speak about your interest in people leading dual lives, or creating new lives from turbulent pasts? How do you create sympathy for characters like Anna who have done horrible deeds? So when I realized she would be right at home in The Huntress, I scooped her from one book and dropped her into the next-and I didn’t need to figure out her voice, because I already knew it very well from writing her old story years before! The novel was ghastly, a thriller that did not thrill in any way whatsoever and was otherwise consigned to the under-the-bed grave of my other unpublishables…but Jordan was a character I loved, and I always thought she deserved a better book.
But that’s because she is actually the heroine of a much earlier novel of mine which was never published. Kate Quinn: Technically, Jordan’s-my youngest heroine, the teenaged photographer in Boston.
Reading Group Choices: Which voice was the first to appear? The historical novel The Huntress by Kate Quinn tracks the intersecting lives of an English journalist, a Russian bomber pilot, and a Nazi war criminal living a secret life in Boston.įor her interview with Reading Group Choices, Kate Quinn spoke about her research process, women in the military, creating vivid landscapes, and the fascinating true stories that she just had to include in the book.
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