Synopsis

New York City, 1929. Young Theo Sterling’s world begins to unravel as the Great Depression exerts its icy grip. He finds it hard to relate to his parents: His father, a Jewish self-made businessman, refuses to give up on the American dream, and his mother, a refugee from religious persecution in Mexico, holds fast to her Catholic faith. When disaster strikes the family, Theo must learn who he is. A charismatic school friend and a firebrand girl inspire him to believe he can fight Fascism and change the world, but each rebellion comes at a higher price, forcing Theo to question these ideologies too.

From New York’s Lower East Side to an English boarding school to an Andalusian village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Theo’s harrowing journey from boy to man is set against a backdrop of societies torn apart from within, teetering on the edge of a terrible war to which Theo is compulsively drawn like a moth to a flame.

With historical depth and compelling storytelling, Tolkien weaves a stunning tale about how hope, courage, loss and disillusionment affect the formation of one’s character. Fans of historical fiction and literary fiction will devour THE PALACE AT THE END OF THE SEA.

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Q&A with Simon

You are the Grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien; how did that affect your writing career?

It’s hard to analyze one’s own character and development, but I think that two vital clues in my case are that I was born the grandson of one of the most famous and well-loved writers of the 20^th century and that I never wrote a word of fiction until I was forty-one, even though I clearly had the capacity to do so. I have no doubt in my mind that the two are linked.

I was not a confident person in the first half of my life. I was unsure of my identity and self-conscious in the way I expressed myself, and this fed into an undermining sense of being overshadowed by my grandfather and his immense achievements. But like a pressure cooker inside, my desire to write ultimately forced itself to the surface in the years following the Millenium. I cut back on my work as a criminal law barrister and began my first novel, and when it was turned down, I simply wrote another. Suddenly I was determined when before I had hidden away. I developed my talent, learning as I went, progressing from plot-driven crime thrillers to historical fiction in which the characters became as real to me as actual friends.

My sense of being overshadowed by my grandfather’s achievements had fortunately never poisoned me against The Lord of the Rings. I have always loved Middle-earth and I read the books aloud to both my children. As a novelist, I have never been tempted to write fantasy, but I was attracted by the realism of my grandfather’s writing and the vitality of his storytelling. Whether hobbit or human, his characters are flawed, facing hard choices with extraordinary reserves of courage, and these were qualities I looked for in my own creations.

My grandfather died when I was fourteen, and with No Man’s Land, I feel that I reached the end of my journey to find him again and relate to him in a positive way. After fifteen years as a novelist, I had sufficient confidence in my writing ability to try to bring to life the experience of the British soldiers like my grandfather, who fought on the Western Front in the First World War, and to begin to understand the effect that that experience had on his imagination. As I wrote in the dedication, I felt that my book honored his memory, and I thought that he would have been proud of me. At last, my grandfather and his achievements had become an inspiration and not a block to my self-expression. I felt I was standing beside him and not behind him as I turned my thoughts to my next writing chapter: New York in the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War.

How did you approach the research process for the duology – The Palace at the End of the Sea and The Room of Lost Steps?

My first three books were in the crime genre and plotting and writing took much more time than research. But the reverse has become true since I switched to historical fiction, and research for the duology ended up taking more than three years!

I knew that I was taking on a serious challenge with the Spanish Civil War. Spanish politics in the 1930s were fiendishly complicated and this has meant that there is a huge amount of historical study of the period but almost no novels. I read these studies because I knew I needed to understand the full picture if I was going to be able to simplify it and make it accessible to my readers, and I care deeply that the history in my books is accurate.

I realized that I was going to have to strike a fine balance between painting the relevant historical background but without ever allowing the novels to become a history lesson, because the provision of information for its own sake takes the reader out of the fictional world I am trying to create and make real. It helped that I was writing a coming-of-age story in which the reader could join my hero in his journey towards understanding Spain.

I knew that what mattered most, however, was bringing the relevant history to life, and so I read all the memoirs I could get my hands on, including the accounts written by the survivors of the Lincoln Battalion, searching for vivid passages that would inspire me. It was one thing to know that 2% of the population owned half the land of Spain in 1936; it was quite another to see the “bent-over men coming down the paths from the hills with tied-up bundles of firewood and pine cones on their backs”, looking like “some strange species of tree creature … not human at all.”

And the books’ scope and ambition grew organically as I worked, increasing the amount and diversity of information that I needed. It began as a novel about a War and ended eight years later as a portrait of an era with settings in New York, England and Spain.

Why is your novel called The Palace at the End of the Sea?

The palace at the end of the sea is Ellis Island, the famous immigrant inspection and processing station in New York Harbor. Early in the novel, the hero’s father describes to his son how he and his parents arrived there from Poland at the end of the 19^th century, and how fearful they felt about whether they would be allowed into America. He tells him that on the ferry afterward, he “looked up at the towers of Manhattan and the stars blinking,” and it was the happiest moment of his life.

The boy, Theo, sees the red-brick immigration building and its towers from the boat when he leaves New York at the end of Part One, and recalls his father’s words, causing him to reflect on how his father followed his dreams and earned his fortune, only to lose everything in the Great Depression.

Theo can see through his father’s eyes that Ellis Island must have seemed like a palace after the long hard voyage across the Atlantic, but its shine seems tarnished to him now by the hardship and misfortune that he and his family have experienced in the Depression, and the partly ironic title reflects the most important theme of the duology – the relationship between hope and loss, illusion and disillusion, while also focusing the reader on the city of New York where Theo grows up and begins his journey.

About the Author

I live in Santa Barbara, California where the sky really is as blue as the deep blue sea most days, and I love the roar of the ocean, the majestic mountains, the white Spanish adobe architecture, and the twisting oaks and carpets of flowers in my yard where I walk with my beloved pug, Sadie, twice a day. It’s a long way from the sleepy Oxfordshire village where I grew up and the Catholic boarding school where I spent my teenage years.

I studied modern history at Trinity College, Oxford, and then reluctantly went to law school. I thought that I was putting my life in a straitjacket, but criminal law was a revelation. In the London prisons and police stations, I met people from every walk of life, and I became a barrister because I wanted to represent them in court, rather than just prepare their cases for trial. I loved the drama and responsibility of the work, but then at the age of forty-one, I decided to reinvent myself as a novelist, even though I had never written a word of fiction before! I am the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien, and I think that his immense literary achievements had inhibited me up to then. I started with what I knew and wrote courtroom dramas, and then this developed into crime thrillers with historical settings, and finally character-driven historical fiction. I loved history as a child, and my novels have enabled me to recapture the sense of wonder I felt about the past as being another country, just as real as our own. My focus has been on the turbulent first fifty years of the 20^th century, and my settings have included the London Blitz, the Battle of the Somme, and now, in my forthcoming duology, New York in the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War.

I have been so lucky to have been married for forty years to my wife, Tracy, who has encouraged me in all my creative endeavors. She is a writer herself and an expert on vintage fashion and jewelry, and we have two wonderful children, Nicholas and Anna.