"Book of Forbidden Words"

Louise Fein is the author of Daughter of the Reich, which has been published in thirteen territories, the international bestseller The Hidden Child, and The London Bookshop Affair. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from St Mary’s University. She lives in Surrey, UK, with her family.

Fein applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Book of Forbidden Words, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Book of Forbidden Words opens with the musings of Lysbette Angiers, a young girl living in the household of Sir Thomas More in London in the 1520’s.

How would life be in a land where there was no thieving because nobody needed to?” Lysbette thinks. “Where there was enough time for leisure besides work, and where learning and reading was a pleasure enjoyed by all, boys and girls… And like her nobody had a penny to their name but they, unlike her, didn’t care because it was a place where gold and silver, where money itself had no value at all… In Utopia, nobody cared what religion you had. You could believe in God and the immortal soul of man, or the sun or moon or anything else, and nobody punished you for it…

The subject matter of page 69 of Book of Forbidden Words is uncannily pertinent to the novel. Lysbette, one of the three protagonists of the novel, has just read a little book that was written a few years previously by Sir Thomas More, her guardian, entitled Utopia. The book has a profound effect on young Lysbette and comes to influence her greatly in later life. The theme of Utopia and Utopian ideals run through Book of Forbidden Words and are central to the story of what happens in both timelines, namely the turbulent religious wars of the 1500’s and the oppressive suspicions of 1950’s McCarthy era America, and the uncanny echoes between the two eras.

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--Marshal Zeringue