Q&A with Meghan Nesmith, author of A World Apart

Could you introduce your main characters to us?

A WORLD APART is a love story between our two protagonists: Kit, the second son of a down-on-his-luck English lord who moonlights as an aspiring gentleman magician; and Wil, who began life as an Anglo-Saxon labourer but has been trapped in time for 800 years by virtue of an insidious bargain he made with the Queen of the Fae. Kit is all romance, daydreams, and unruly curls, whereas Wil is hard edges, fiercely loyal, sensible.

What made you choose to set the two characters between two different time periods?

The simplest answer is that I wanted an intractable obstacle to overcome. Kit and Wil came to me fully formed and very in love, and I knew my job was to figure out how to keep them apart. I’ve also long been interested in “thin places,” which exist in nearly every cultural and religious tradition — I am fascinated by the idea that another world could be ticking along right beside our own, and all we have to do is pull back the veil.

London has always felt like a thin place to me, in the way that so much history, so many lives, are quite literally woven into the foundations of that city. I love the idea that you could be walking the same streets as your soulmate walked, only they happened to be doing so 800 years ago. With all that in mind, it made a cruel kind of sense to me to have Kit and Wil existing in parallel: two people so perfect for each other, so deeply in sync, yet never the twain shall meet, etc.

Who was your favourite character?

Agatha, definitely. I knew Kit was going to be on the marriage mart, knew he was going to have to fend off a few eligible ladies, but I imagined them as quiet, meek women who could be easily disposed of. Agatha is a force. She’s so dynamic, so unabashed, so free. I let her say all the things I would never say, be as brash as she wished. My editor was constantly having to reel me in because I just kept letting her run amok. I really love how she challenges Kit, and how she presents a vision of a life that could actually make him quite happy, one he hadn’t really believed was accessible to him.

How did you create the magic and the rules within the world?

Susanna Clarke’s work is a major influence, and I love how she takes such an academic approach to magic. She treats magic with a seriousness that I really admire, and I know Kit would as well. I wanted to adopt a similar scholarly approach, and to show how magic could exist alongside our own more rational world.

I think of magic as a sentient force: playful, unpredictable, maybe even a bit naughty. It is elemental — as much a part of the environment as gravity and enacting the same kind of pull — but unless you are open to it, you can’t perceive it. The idea of belief as bulwark is one I’m really interested in: how does belief shape the world around you? What does it enable you to see and what does it obscure?

Will we learn more about the Queen’s backstory in the second book?

The really fun part of writing a duology (for me) is depth; if book one is like, a dating profile (Kit is an Aries and loves punting on the Thames!), book two is choosing silver table settings for your 25th wedding anniversary. Every character has room to expand, and we get to know them so much more deeply than we did in book one. It was absolutely delicious, for me, to spend that kind of time with them, to discover nuances and secrets and surprises. So yes, we definitely learn more about the Queen, though I will say that she experiences a real reversal of fortune between books one and two that allows us to see her in a new light, I think.

How have you found the debut experience and what has surprised you?

I’m an older debut (I’m 42) and there has been real joy in debuting at a time in my life when I do not feel quite as dependent on external markers of success or praise. (They’re still nice, though!) The surprise is that it is happening at all! I had accepted that publication might not be in the cards, so the idea that I might soon see my book in a store or library is pretty overwhelmingly wonderful.