Emily Hauser's Blog

For The Immortal – the triumphant finale to the acclaimed Golden Apple trilogy – comes out on June 14th 2018, and to celebrate, we're giving away 2 signed first edition copies! If you just can't wait, pre-order yours here.

Simply enter your details in the form linked below for a chance to win your very own copy of For The Immortal by Emily Hauser, the critically acclaimed author of For The Most Beautiful and For The Winner.

https://goo.gl/forms/m6gpQXxc1hCczW1q1

I'm back from a fantastic trip to Greece researching the world of Atalanta, Jason and the Argonauts for book 2 of the Golden Apple trilogy (see more on my trip to Greece here). Now that I'm in one place for a while, I thought I should get to grips with one aspect of my second book that's hugely important for my heroine: archery.
​
​For those of you who may not have heard of Atalanta (and she's a sorely neglected figure – one of the reasons I'm telling her story), she was known in ancient myth as the fastest runner alive and an incredible archer. She was brought up on the slopes of Mount Pelion and taught herself to hunt; she participated in the legendary Calydonian boar hunt, and was the first to wound the boar. And, according to one classical source, she so excelled in her fighting skills that she even took part in the mythical voyage of Jason and the Argonauts for the Golden Fleece – the only woman to join the heroes Jason, Theseus and Hercules on their quest.

I have been writing many scenes in For the Winner in which Atalanta hunts and fights with her bow; but to convey the sheer familiarity she would have had with her weapon, I felt I had to get comfortable with using a bow myself. Luckily, I don't live too far away from the Harvard Archery club; and so I signed myself up for a couple of archery classes, to try to learn to wield a bow as Atalanta did. One of the first things I learnt about archery was that it's not as easy as it looks. An arrow doesn't fly in a straight course towards the target, since it loses momentum and drops with gravity as it flies – so you have to aim a little up from your target, making it very difficult (at least for a beginner like me) to be accurate. It's also extremely tiring: by the time I was finished, my right arm was aching and my fingers were sore.

But it's also a lot of fun, and, in a way, meditative. You have to be entirely focused if you want to get everything right (as my instructors kept telling me!): remembering your posture, keeping your elbow close, stretching the bowstring back just the right amount, and of course, aiming with an eye to your distance from the target. Imagining using a bow in a thickly wooded mountain environment, as Atalanta would have done, against a fast-moving target, gave me a huge amount of respect for the amount of skill involved; and it also allowed me to feel that much closer to my warrior heroine. I've included a couple of pictures below: feel free to leave questions/responses in the comments!

I am so excited to be travelling to Greece next week to explore the world of Jason and the Argonauts for my next novel, For the Winner (coming out June 2017)! The myth of Jason's journey to capture the Golden Fleece is one of the oldest and most mysterious legends from ancient Greece, a quest to the very ends of the earth by some of the greatest heroes of the age. Follow me here and on Twitter @ehauserwrites over the next couple of weeks for a virtual tour of all the sites of Jason's Greece – from the ruins of his Bronze Age palace at Dimini to a modern reconstruction of the Argo!

Pre-order For the Most Beautiful and get a signed bookplate and bookmark!
​
​Here’s the scoop: If you pre-order the paperback edition of For the Most Beautiful and email a copy of your receipt to ehauserwrites@gmail.com, I will send you a signed bookplate (it has an adhesive backing) and a cool bookmark!
​ ​​​
Why pre-order? Frankly, because it helps me. Pre-ordered books count towards first week sales numbers which gives the book the best chance of hitting best seller lists. Plus, strong pre-order numbers can inspire my publisher to print more books, which focuses both the publisher and booksellers on the book’s prospects. So, if you can pre-order, I’d really appreciate it!
​
Where to pre-order? Your local independent bookstore, Amazon, Waterstones, Penguin Random House.

The fine print: Forward an email receipt or a photo of a paper receipt for the paperback edition only to ehauserwrites@gmail.com by June 29, 2016. Be sure to include your mailing address.
​

Pre-order For the Most Beautiful and get a signed bookplate and bookmark!

​Here’s the scoop: If you pre-order the paperback edition of For the Most Beautiful and email a copy of your receipt to ehauserwrites@gmail.com, I will send you a signed bookplate (it has an adhesive backing) and a cool bookmark!​​​



Why pre-order? Frankly, because it helps me. Pre-ordered books count towards first week sales numbers which gives the book the best chance of hitting best seller lists. Plus, strong pre-order numbers can inspire my publisher to print more books, which focuses both the publisher and booksellers on the book’s prospects. So, if you can pre-order, I’d really appreciate it!

Where to pre-order? Some retail suggestions: your local independent bookstore, Amazon, Waterstones, Penguin Random House.

The fine print: Forward an email receipt or a photo of a paper receipt for the paperback edition only to ehauserwrites@gmail.com by June 29, 2016. Be sure to include your mailing address.

I'm very excited to reveal the paperback cover of For the Most Beautiful, which will be published in the UK on 30th June! An insider secret is that the dress on the cover was initially red – we changed it to purple to match it to a robe that Helen weaves in the Iliad. Let me know what you think in the comments!

I'm very excited to reveal the paperback cover of For the Most Beautiful, which will be published in the UK on 30th June! An insider secret is that the dress on the cover was initially red – we changed it to purple to match it to a robe that Helen wears in the Iliad!



Let me know what you think in the comments!

I'm excited to be participating tomorrow in Endeavour Press' first ever virtual Historical Fiction festival, alongside other fabulous historical fiction authors like Manda Scott and Hallie Rubenhold.

From 4:00pm-4:30pm GMT+1 (UK time) I'll be online on Twitter (@ehauserwrites) and here on Goodreads, ready to answer your questions about For the Most Beautiful, the Trojan War, writing and publishing historical fiction and more! Really looking forward to hearing from you all at 4pm tomorrow!

You can read my latest blog post here, recently written for the Endeavour Press Virtual Historical Fiction Festival which I'm excited to be participating in from April 18-22 2016. The post is also copied in below.

When it comes to historical novels about the ancient world, most of us tend to think of Rome. There is (relatively speaking, for an ancient historian) so much evidence still surviving from the Roman world: from the letters they wrote, preserved on wooden tablets in Vindolanda, the Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall, to the food they ate, like the circular loaf of bread preserved in a baker’s oven in Pompeii.

But when it comes to the Bronze Age, we have much less to go on.

As a scholar and researcher of the classical world, I felt I was on fairly firm ground when I decided to do a retelling of Homer’s Iliad in my first novel, For the Most Beautiful. After all, I’ve studied Homer’s epic tale for over ten years, both at Cambridge and at Yale. What I didn’t know, however, was just how important it would be to unlearn what Homer had told me – and to go back to the archaeology of the Bronze Age itself.

The crucial thing to understand about Homer’s Iliad is that it was written down in 750 BCE – that’s about 500 years after the Trojan War. This means that tools and customs from the 8th century BCE (most notably iron, which wasn’t used yet in the Bronze Age), make anachronistic appearances in Homer’s Troy in ways that just wouldn’t have been historically accurate to the 13th century BCE. Not only that, but Homer’s Trojans behave in notoriously Greek fashion – they wear Greek clothes, eat Greek food, practise Greek customs, and even worship Greek gods. Yet I wanted the Trojans in For the Most Beautiful to be as historically authentic as I could make them. I wanted to make sure that they felt like a real, historical people with a culture, a society, a religion all their own – not just a reflection of one Greek poet’s imagination.

And to discover who the Trojans really were, I had to dig a bit deeper.

For a long time the existence of the site of Troy was in doubt – until Heinrich Schliemann discovered the remains of a Bronze Age city on the site of Hisarlik in north-west Turkey. The site of Troy (or Ilios, as Homer calls it) gives up many important secrets to a researcher and novelist on the path to tracking down the real identity of the Trojans. For one thing, there is the predominance of seashells in the archaeological record – suggesting a diet rich in shellfish, as well as the presence of a rich dying industry (the colour purple came from the shell of the murex in antiquity). Yet Homer (notoriously) avoids having his characters eat fish at all. The intricate construction of the city – an upper citadel with a lower city beneath – is preserved in the archaeological record in ways that we cannot guess from Homer. Most importantly of all, perhaps, details of the Trojans’ dealings with the massive Hittite empire to the east – preserved in meticulously kept Hittite correspondence – suggest that, rather than being Greek as Homer would have us believe, Troy was actually an independent Anatolian kingdom, in some sort of loose alliance with the Hittites.

By visiting the site of Troy, discussing the current excavations with the head of the excavations at Troy, Prof. Dr. Ernst Pernicka, and researching the latest finds in journal articles, I was able to uncover a different Troy from the one Homer describes – a rich culture with its own character and history, its own language, its own gods.

And it’s these Trojans – fiercely independent, wealthy, resourceful, with a culture and a religion all their own – who ended up becoming the heroes of For the Most Beautiful, and of the Trojan War.
​
Find out more about Emily on her website: www.emilyhauser.com and follow her on Twitter: @ehauserwrites

You can read my latest blog post here, recently written for the Endeavour Press Virtual Historical Fiction Festival which I'm excited to be participating in from April 18-22 2016. The post is also copied in below. When it comes to historical novels about the ancient world, most of us tend to think of Rome. There is (relatively speaking, for an ancient historian) so much evidence still surviving from the Roman world: from the letters they wrote, preserved on wooden tablets in Vindolanda, the Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall, to the food they ate, like the circular loaf of bread preserved in a baker’s oven in Pompeii.

But when it comes to the Bronze Age, we have much less to go on.

As a scholar and researcher of the classical world, I felt I was on fairly firm ground when I decided to do a retelling of Homer’s Iliad in my first novel, For the Most Beautiful. After all, I’ve studied Homer’s epic tale for over ten years, both at Cambridge and at Yale. What I didn’t know, however, was just how important it would be to unlearn what Homer had told me – and to go back to the archaeology of the Bronze Age itself.

The crucial thing to understand about Homer’s Iliad is that it was written down in 750 BCE – that’s about 500 years after the Trojan War. This means that tools and customs from the 8thcentury BCE (most notably iron, which wasn’t used yet in the Bronze Age), make anachronistic appearances in Homer’s Troy in ways that just wouldn’t have been historically accurate to the 13th century BCE. Not only that, but Homer’s Trojans behave in notoriously Greek fashion – they wear Greek clothes, eat Greek food, practise Greek customs, and even worship Greek gods. Yet I wanted the Trojans in For the Most Beautiful to be as historically authentic as I could make them. I wanted to make sure that they felt like a real, historical people with a culture, a society, a religion all their own – not just a reflection of one Greek poet’s imagination.

And to discover who the Trojans really were, I had to dig a bit deeper.

For a long time the existence of the site of Troy was in doubt – until Heinrich Schliemann discovered the remains of a Bronze Age city on the site of Hisarlik in north-west Turkey. The site of Troy (or Ilios, as Homer calls it) gives up many important secrets to a researcher and novelist on the path to tracking down the real identity of the Trojans. For one thing, there is the predominance of seashells in the archaeological record – suggesting a diet rich in shellfish, as well as the presence of a rich dying industry (the colour purple came from the shell of the murexin antiquity). Yet Homer (notoriously) avoids having his characters eat fish at all. The intricate construction of the city – an upper citadel with a lower city beneath – is preserved in the archaeological record in ways that we cannot guess from Homer. Most importantly of all, perhaps, details of the Trojans’ dealings with the massive Hittite empire to the east – preserved in meticulously kept Hittite correspondence – suggest that, rather than being Greek as Homer would have us believe, Troy was actually an independent Anatolian kingdom, in some sort of loose alliance with the Hittites.

By visiting the site of Troy, discussing the current excavations with the head of the excavations at Troy, Prof. Dr. Ernst Pernicka, and researching the latest finds in journal articles, I was able to uncover a different Troy from the one Homer describes – a rich culture with its own character and history, its own language, its own gods.

And it’s these Trojans – fiercely independent, wealthy, resourceful, with a culture and a religion all their own – who ended up becoming the heroes of For the Most Beautiful, and of the Trojan War.
​
Find out more about Emily on her website: www.emilyhauser.com and follow her on Twitter: @ehauserwrites