09 Aug Farm Life & World History with Books and Buzz

I’m honored to be on the cover of the new issue of Books & Buzz. Here’s a snippet of my interview with Timothy Pike. Read the entire article here.

Welcome back, Tosca, and congratulations on winning the International Book Award for the third time! What an achievement. This one was for The Long March Home, the World War II novel you co-wrote with Marcus Brotherton. How was this project born?

Thank you! This third award was an honor and a surprise, and I’m so happy to win it with my friend Marcus Brotherton for this project, which is so deeply important to us both.

The way The Long March Home came about started, for me, about six years ago when Marcus called me up and told me about this back-burner project he had been working on, off and on between book projects, about the Bataan Death March. I had to admit I didn’t know much about World War II in the Pacific. I was far more familiar with events that happened in Europe. Also, as far as my historical novels go, I’m used to writing about ancient history two thousand, three thousand or more years ago.

We talked, he filled me in, and I said, “Yes, let’s do it.” But it didn’t happen right away; I had two more books in my contract with Simon & Schuster at the time (those became The Line Between and A Single Light—a pandemic duology) and then a real pandemic happened months after the second book came out. Well, that was very weird. Our kids all came home from school and, like everyone else, my family made our way through that strange period of time as best we could—as spectators to the events unfolding in the world around us, living both in but outside of our usual reality. I honestly didn’t get a lot of creative work done in 2020.

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