INTERVIEW ANNA BEHRMANN
Landscape is the most important character in my novels. When I was a child, I would walk with my parents on the Fishbourne marshes in Sussex, and I later walked there with my own children. Both there, and in the ancient woodlands of south-west France, I feel as if I can hear the echoes of all the people who’ve walked those paths before me and those who will tread in the same footsteps long after I’m gone. For me, the truth of our shared past is held within the land, the skyscape and the mountains. It links us emotionally to the people of 19th-century Sussex, or 16th-century Carcassonne.
The human heart does not change so very much. A parent at any given point in history will grieve just as much for a lost child. Fiction is about celebrating our shared humanity. If you can stand in the shoes of a girl from the 16th century and feel you know her, then you can stand in the shoes of a boy on the other side of the world today.