Naomi J. Williams was born in Japan and spoke no English until she was six years old. Her debut novel, Landfalls, is a fictionalized account of the 18th-century Lapérouse expedition.From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: What did you see as the right blend of history and fiction as you were writing Landfalls?--Marshal Zeringue
A: I tried to hew as closely to known "facts" as I could for this project. Not because I think that's how you're "supposed" to do historical fiction or because I owe it to readers or even to the memory of the Lapérouse expedition.
It was just a challenge I set for myself, a set of constraints around which to work, like the challenge of writing a Shakespearean sonnet, with its particular rules and conventions. I didn't, for instance, make up or conflate any members of the expedition. And I never knowingly altered the timeline of events.
But around those general outlines, I fabricated a lot. I imagined personalities and motivations and emotional baggage, of course.
Many of the women in the book are...[read on]