Dear all
I am very pleased to see the level of interest in the book here.
It is actually being distributed internationally through a variety of people, from Amazon to WHSmiths - I think the deal is that they order copies from the publisher when they receive an order themselves, so it doesn't matter that the book has a UK place of publication.
That said, the Belgarun shop ships the same or next day, so you will save time by going straight to them, cutting out the middle man. Plus, you get a discount.
Anyway, I wanted to post some information about the book.
It's fiction and it's not fiction. There aren't any made up people or events in it, and you won't find Alexandra rolling around the Park in the embrace of General Orlov, or a rebellious Olga conspiring with Duma members to get herself onto the throne. The intention was to tell Alexandra's story
as it actually happened, but I chose to do it in fictional form because when I wrote it - back in 2001-2 - that was the most natural medium for me. I wanted to evoke sympathy for and understanding of Alexandra through the feelings and experiences of her life, from the wonder of seeing the huge Petersburg sky for the first time to the undoubtedly
physical grief of being Alexei's mother, to the brief war-time interlude when I think the whole family felt a sense of purpose and she saw herself and her daughters as "working women" enduring the same sorrow and same sometimes very simple pleasures as any other family whose men were away at war. Being Alexandra as I wrote seemed the best way to do this.
I have written on Directarticle that the book aims to tell Alexandra's political story. This is true, but I don't mean to convey that it is a dry and political book. People can read the parts about politics without caring deeply who each politician is: what I hope they will get from these sections is the mounting sense of chaos and despair as minister succeeds minister and no-one knows what best to do to keep the government on its feet. I hope that in reading these parts people will gain a greater sympathy for some of Alexandra's more apparently hysterical moments (the moments of "Russia loves to feel the whip!" and "they will make all leave and then ourselves") and will even possibly share her feelings for a moment. My essential point is that I wanted readers to emerge with a slightly different view of Alexandra, to hear her side of the Rasputin story, for example, and to understand how her thinking developed in general. Most biographies of Alexandra emphasise her relationship with Queen Victoria, her conflicts with the Dowager Empress. Among her own siblings it is inevitably Ella who gets the most attention. I wanted to remind readers that she also had a father, whose family traditions may have influenced her in ways often overlooked. I have paid more attention than other purely Romanov books do to her relationship with her eldest sister Victoria and her brother Ernie, and THEIR likely influences on her. I also wanted to bring out the relationships with KR's family and with Xenia's, especially in the relaxed early days in Russia when her eldest children were small, and to perhaps emphasise some of the things that were happening in other, less exalted women's lives when Alix was a young girl which she will have witnessed and which were part of her experience before she went to Russia.
And of course, inevitably, Nicholas and the children get a lot of attention, and you have my take on her individual relationships with them.
The research I did for this book in 2001 and 2 also became non-fiction articles that I wrote later after shelving the novel. I went back to it because the publisher came to me, so to speak, and have rewritten some parts and checked again for accuracy.
I have left in a couple of disputed points, simply because this IS fiction, though I know some readers may object. Firstly, I HAVE used the story of Alexandra caricaturing the Dowager Empress in the early days of her marriage, though the source is the Mouchanow book. I left it in because I felt it showed a side of Alix which is also apparent in some of her letters to Nicholas: the mocking, irreverant side. It may not have happened, but it could have done!
And then I have portrayed Alix quietly going to Darmstadt University as a young girl, to listen to lectures unseen. This is something that was alleged in press reports in 1894, and it is unclear whether she really did go. Because this is a novel, I have allowed her the pleasure of doing so.
