In the time when I wanted to set the novel, the 1720s, it was already a major business presence in Britain and the growing British empire. And, of course, it was destined to become a significant arm of Britain's global presence in the late 18th and 19th centuries. There were also a number of elements in the story of the East India Company at this time that presented interesting parallels to the world of business today – the Company’s financial ties to the government, how its cheap imported goods hurt many domestic industries, its efforts to limit the power of unions, etc. The story is not an allegory of a contemporary company, but there many interesting points of contact between the way business is done now and the way it was done almost 300 years ago.
This makes your sixth book, all with Random House. What’s your secret?
My secret is that I like to write books, and I am not happy unless I am working on something. As soon as I finish a novel, I start researching the next one. Once I took a day off between books, but I didn't like it.
What kind of frustrations have you encountered since becoming a published author?
I think the thing that frustrates me most is the general notion in our culture that novels are movies in embryonic form, only waiting to be born. A novelist's success, in many ways, is measured by whether or not his work has been adapted to the big screen. Don't get me wrong — I love movies, and I would love to see successful adaptations of my work (a couple are in the early stages right now — hooray!). When I was growing up, everyone's parents read novels. Now, novel-readers are more of a subset of society, like stamp collectors or spelunkers. And, as various media outlets — newspapers, magazines, television — shrink their coverage of fiction, it only exacerbates the trend. So, it's time for fiction-reading to go mainstream once again. Who's with me?
Your agent is Liz Darhansoff of Darhansoff, Verill and Feldman. How did you get accepted by such a prestigious agency?
I was very lucky. I went through the usual harrowing process of sending out query letters and sample chapters and getting rejections — everywhere from polite to scathing. Then, a friend of mine who had recently published her first novel — the talented writer and filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro — offered to read my manuscript and then pass it along to her agent, Liz Darhansoff. And from there, everything went about as well as I could possibly hope.
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