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Jessie Burton studied at the University of Oxford and then went on to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is the author of three novels for adults, The Miniaturist (2014), The Muse (2016) and The Confession (2019), and is both a Sunday Times no. 1 bestseller and a New York Times bestseller. The Miniaturist sold a million copies worldwide in its first year and has also been adapted for television by the BBC. Jessie is now published in forty languages. Her first children's story, The Restless Girls, was published by Bloomsbury in 2018.
Jessie Burton's website
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What was the inspiration for The Miniaturist?
I was visiting Amsterdam when I came upon this dolls' house in the Rijksmuseum. It had been built in 1686 and was a thing of true decorative beauty. The owner was a woman called Petronella Oortman, who had commissioned it as an exact replica of her own townhouse in the heart of the city. She had spent as much money on it as you might on a real house, and miniature pieces had been made for its interior as far away as Japan and China. I was so curious as to why she would miniaturize her existence, why she would purchase food she couldn't eat and chairs she couldn't sit on...and then there was the city of Amsterdam and its history. A place of trade and power, contradictions of outward modesty and bursting inward pomp - and the dolls' house was a perfect symbol of this, of the need for secrets, for control, for domestic harmony that covered over inner chaos.
The streets of 17th-century Amsterdam come alive in this novel, and the social structures are richly explored. Can you describe the research conducted to create this authentic world?
I researched as I wrote. I needed the fictional story to pose factual questions rather than just me absorbing historical facts and ...
Alix Christie was born in California, spent her childhood summers in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, and has lived in Paris, San Francisco, and Berlin. She has been a widely published journalist for thirty years, ... (more)
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Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Harvard University and lives ... (more)
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