Our last “Author’s Note” from March comes from Guy Gavriel Kay, whose new book is Ysabel:

The books that work are rarely those we force into the light. They are the ones that want to emerge, that demand it, actually, pushing everything else out of the way. That’s what happened with Ysabel.

During a year in the south of France, I started thinking about how some parts of the world still carry the imprint of what has gone before. How “yesterday” in such places isn’t so remote. And it occurred to me that “the past” can mean many different things. It can be twenty-five-hundred years or – in a family working through its scars – twenty-five.

Out of these thoughts and images, Ysabel – the book, and the woman named in the title – came to me.