Bestselling author and Harpeth Hall alumnus V.E. Schwab took the world by storm with her Shades of Magic series. She’s now returning to that world in her new book, “The Fragile Threads of Power” — and she returns to Nashville for an event at Parnassus Books on Oct. 5.
Schwab spoke with WPLN’s Marianna Bacallao about her newest novel.
Marianna Bacallao: In this series, there are four Londons, all with varying levels of magic. What made you want to revisit that world and its characters?
V.E. Schwab: I think it’s that I design a world first, and then, I created my insiders so that I could design my outsiders. And I knew that I could only ever graze a very small piece of both the story I wanted to tell and the world I wanted to tell it in. One of the things that fascinated me so much was this idea of how places change over time. And so, I wanted to step forward in time, seven years, and look at the ramifications and the aftermath of the world that we had created and moved through in Shades of Magic.
MB: How do you balance writing the characters that readers know and love with the new faces in this book?
VS: I mean, it’s terrifying, right? Because the inclination is to give readers what they love. And my goal is to make it feel like a passing of the torch, make it feel like we are sharing space. And I think in many ways, maybe it holds me to a higher standard as a writer because it makes me work even harder on the new characters to have them enjoy that amount of space, to have them take up that space in the reader’s mind.
MB: Your two new leads are both teenage girls dealing with the transition between having no power over their lives to having a lot of power — not only over their own life, but the lives of many others. What were you most excited to explore with these two?
VS: Yeah, I never anticipated that it would shake out this way because I’ve written young adult fiction plenty of times, and the Shades of Magic series and the Threads of Power series are both adult fantasy. In YA fiction, often, we are kind of operating within a very narrow window of time where everyone’s experiencing these firsts. But I am fascinated with how our past informs our present, because how our present then becomes our future. And so, I wanted to look at these girls and be able to take them from adolescence and build them into the adults that they will eventually be and really get this chance to dig into their childhood and dig into the root system of them before we grow their branches.
MB: Listeners might also be familiar with your novel “The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.” In the acknowledgments of that book, you mention developing your story ideas while walking in East Nashville. I know you’re a fantasy writer, but is there anything of the city that influenced your writing?
VS: I think it always does. I think, you know, we think fantasy has nothing to do with reality when the truth is the kind of fantasy I write is a departure from reality. And what that necessitates is this “what if” moment. You move through the real world, and you ask yourself, “What if everything was like it is, except… What if the world is like this, but?” So, I think back to my very first novels, which were inspired by Nashville; I would move through the city, different parts of it — I was raised in Brentwood, and then I lived in East Nashville for a long time — and I would see absolutely ordinary things. And yet, they would make me wonder: Where does the magic sneak in? Where do you turn a corner and find yourself stumbling upon something stranger and more wonderful than you thought to be there?
Schwab’s newest book, “The Fragile Threads of Power,” is out Tuesday. She will be in Nashville on Oct. 5 for an event with Parnassus Books.
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