Kester Grant

what they're trying to achieve.

And Guy Gavriel Kaye, I mean, he's just, Guy Gavriel Kaye is just a genius as well.

And he's greatly influenced the way I wanted to build a world which felt like a fantasy setting and had absolutely no magic in it whatsoever.

As far as historical reading went, my list is incredibly long.

I read very fast, so I managed to

cover a lot of books.

But I think one of the two books that influenced me the most were Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety.

I think having researched and really outlined well all the different aspects of the French Revolution and the characters, but then to read a novel where they were so human and you saw it more as a story that was playing out, it brought so much empathy and so much more understanding to the era for me.

I also loved

a book called Napoleon the Great, which spoke about his, I mean, right from his birth, it traces him all the way up.

And what was interesting about that is that we often forget that Napoleon was, he served during the revolution.

He was actually there for all of that era.

Historians won't forget that, but your average layman will.

And this man went on to become the emperor, or as depending on your point of view, also a dictator.

So that was really interesting.

And another book which really influenced me was A City of Light and the City of Poison by Holly Tucker, which was the history of the first police chief of Paris, Nicolas de la Reine, who was given the commission to clear up the slums and get rid of all the criminals because Paris of the era was very dangerous.

If you walked through the streets, no matter who you were, apparently, apparently they say the nobility would get robbed and murdered for, you know, whatever they were carrying around.

So Nicolas de Lorraine went in and just arrested everyone or created what they called asylums at that time or poorhouses and threw everyone in there, whether the person was an actual criminal or a beggar, which was considered a crime, or of a certain ethnic background, which was not very pleasing to the masses.

They were also just locked away.

And that book really...