LETTER TO READERS, CONTINUED

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That's what happened with Ysabel. Where I was, the air I breathed, the paths we walked (or climbed), the historians I met and the archaeologists and photographers…all conspired towards a novel that felt like a major departure.

But in many ways, as winter came to the south and the book began to take shape, it wasn't such a departure, after all. It was a shifting of the prism, a different way of looking at concerns I've explored for a long time.

Since Tigana in 1990 I've been engaged in using the fantastic to examine themes of history, to bring home to contemporary readers elements of the past that seem to me to be too important to forget. I've carried readers into many different periods: Renaissance Italy, Medieval France, Islamic Spain, Byzantium, the hard northlands of the Vikings and Welsh and Anglo-Saxons—and tried to shape wonder and thought and passion.

This time, in Ysabel, I wanted to bring the past forward, instead.

During that autumn in Cézanne's countryside, I started thinking about how some parts of the world still carry the hard imprint of what has gone before. How 'yesterday' in such places isn't so remote in certain ways, though it might seem so. And it also occurred to me (not for the first time) that 'the past' can mean so many different things. It can be twenty-five-hundred years or—in a family working through it's relationships and scars—only twenty-five.

Out of these thoughts and images, in the brilliant light of Provence, Ysabel—the book, and the woman named in the title—came to me.

I hope you enjoy.

—GGK

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