From the Boston Globe-bestselling author of The Clover House, we chat with Henriette Lazaridis about her latest book release Terra Nova, which is a haunting story of love, art, and betrayal, set against the heart-pounding backdrop of Antarctic exploration.
Hi, Henriette! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with my husband and a goofy tuxedo cat. GrubStreet where I teach novel classes (though I teach on Zoom as well) is just across the river in Boston. In a previous life, I raised two kids in the suburbs, and in another previous life, I taught English literature at Harvard, just about a mile from where I live now. The other important fact about me is that I’m an inveterate athlete. I row on the Charles River and also trail run and ski as much as I can.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I grew up very attuned to both language and story, as the only child of Greek immigrant parents. My parents told me stories from the Odyssey and from Greek myth from when I was very young. And I grew up speaking Greek at home (from a bilingual French- and Greek-speaking mother, to boot), so I became fascinated with etymology and meaning and the playfulness of language early on. I loved reading—mostly adventure stories and detective books. By high school, I decided to read what I thought were all the Great American Novels (focusing on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as I recall), because I was going to be a writer like them.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
Encyclopedia Brown is the first one I can remember by name. But I remember reading some book or other well before that, and discovering that those things in the table of contents were chapters. No one had explained this to me and I was reading out of order, as if they were stories, and I was a bit confused! The book from my childhood I still love and treasure is James Ramsay Ullman’s Banner in the Sky, about a young Swiss boy determined to summit the mountain his father died climbing.
Your latest novel, Terra Nova, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Antarctica, suffrage, love, rivalry, ethics
What can readers expect?
There’s a big chunk of Antarctica narrative, but most of the book takes place in London (in 1910), so readers can expect a fair bit of vicarious freezing and starvation, along with politico-social events from the suffrage movement. Readers will also spend some time with photography and subversive new art. Plus a love affair!
Where did the inspiration for Terra Nova come from?
When I was seven, I saw a public-television documentary about Robert Scott’s race against Roald Amundsen to be first to the South Pole. I became fascinated with Scott then and there, and even named my Golden Retriever Scotty after him, just a few months later. I’ve always admired Scott, but also wondered—as I got older—what it must have felt like for him to reach the South Pole and find his rival’s flag already there showing he’d lost. I began to wonder what would happen if some fictional explorers behaved less nobly than Scott did. And the novel took off from there.
Can you tell us a bit about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
I had difficulty writing the character of Viola—or, rather, figuring out what her own artistic mission should be. Early on, I had considered that she should be involved in the suffrage movement, but something made me set that idea aside. I had to go through several iterations with Viola before coming back to suffrage and making that an integral part of her art.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Though not all the dogs fare very well in the novel, I was really happy writing a couple of the canine stories in particular, towards the novel’s end. My Golden Retriever Finn used to come stare at me while I wrote in the mornings before his breakfast. I know he was just hungry, but I like to think he was watching over the novel’s dogs.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a novel about a young woman physicist in 1972 whose mother disappeared when she was ten. I’ve been immersed in research about the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos, as well as the history of fusion—and contemporary fusion projects that are happening at MIT just down the road from me!
Lastly, what have been some of your favourite 2022 reads? Any 2023 releases our readers should look out for?
I really loved Jean Hanff Korelitz’ The Plot, Erica Ferencik’s Girl in Ice, which depicts the frozen north (so of course I was fascinated), and Maggie Shipstead’s sweeping Great Circle. I just finished Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety whose narrative voice kind of blew my mind. I’m excited for Kathy Sherbrooke’s The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly and Nancy Crochiere’s Graceland. And I’d be remiss in not saying I’m excited to read In an Orchard Grown from Ash, by Rory Power because she’s my daughter and I loved the first one in that duology.
