New Release!
"The Wife Who Risked Everything"
Book Release: August 23, 2022
Book Buy Links: https://geni.us/B0B2978P5Dsocial
Book Blurb:
Berlin, 1943: “No matter what happens, no matter what they do to me, they will never stop me loving you,” he said, placing a kiss on my tear-stained cheek. Based on a true story, this heartbreaking World War Two page-turner shows that, in the face of evil, love is power, courage is infectious––and the voices of many will not be silenced.
“We’re not moving until you release our men!” Margot shouts, her heart racing. In the snow, the Berlin streets dusted with white, she shifts from foot to foot with the small crowd of wives by the iron gates. She has lived in terror that this moment would come: Nazis have arrested her beloved husband.
Margot, a German seamstress, and Jochen, a Jewish artist, were madly in love. But this became a forbidden act in Hitler’s Germany. The days of Jochen filling their sixth-floor apartment with roses to surprise her vanished. Their friends started crossing the street to avoid them. They lost their jobs. And then they found themselves scrabbling for breadcrumbs on the cold cobbles outside the home that was once their own.
Yet even as their world came crashing down, they had each other. Until now.
Now, Margot risks her life to protest outside Gestapo headquarters. As days pass, hundreds are gathered. They refuse to move, even when enemy planes cross the clouds and bombs fall to the ground. Yet defying the Nazis is a death sentence…
Will this evil war ever end? Will she and Jochen survive? What will it take for Margot to see the love of her life again?
Fans of The Tattooist of Auschwitz,The Alice Network and The Lilac Girls will be utterly gripped by this tearjerking and inspirational tale.
Author Bio:
Ellie Midwood is a USA Today bestselling and award-winning historical fiction author, whose works have been translated into 14 languages. She owes her interest in the history of the Second World War to her grandfather, Junior Sergeant in the 2nd Guards Tank Army of the First Belorussian Front, who began telling her about his experiences on the frontline when she was a young girl. Growing up, her interest in history only deepened and transformed from reading about the war to writing about it. After obtaining her BA in Linguistics, Ellie decided to make writing her full-time career and began working on her first full-length historical novel, "The Girl from Berlin." Ellie is continuously enriching her library with new research material and feeds her passion for WWII and Holocaust history by collecting rare memorabilia and documents.
In her free time, Ellie is a health-obsessed yoga enthusiast, neat freak, adventurer, Nazi Germany history expert, polyglot, philosopher, a proud Jew, and a doggie mama. Ellie lives in New York with her fiancé and their two dogs.
Readers' Favorite - winner in the Historical fiction category (2016) - "The Girl from Berlin: Standartenführer's Wife" (first place)
Readers' Favorite - winner in the Historical fiction category (2016) - "The Austrian" (honorable mention)
New Apple - 2016 Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing - "The Austrian" (official selection)
Readers' Favorite - winner in the Historical fiction category (2017) - "Emilia"
Readers' Favorite - winner in the Historical fiction category (2018) - "A Motherland's Daughter, A Fatherland's Son"
Author Interview:
1. What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?—I’ve gone on quite a few for my research, but the one that made the most profound impression on me was the Auschwitz exhibition here in NYC. At that time I was working on The Girl in the Striped Dress and had two more Auschwitz novels planned and seeing the horrors people went through first-hand helped me truly appreciate my characters’ mindset and visualize their surroundings. The atmosphere of the dingy barracks, the gas-proof doors to the gas chambers, the interviews of the Sonderkommando who were forced to work in the crematoriums—one has to see it to understand the true scale of the Nazi terrors and the ultimate fate that awaited all “undesirables.” Definitely the toughest literary pilgrimage I’ve ever gone on but I owed it to the heroic people whose true stories I had the honor and privilege to write.
2. Tell us the best writing tip you can think of, something that helps you.—the best way to deal with the writing block is to write yourself out of it. I know that sometimes writing even a few lines feels like an impossible task, but once you tough it out through those “impossible” few lines, the story will pick itself up and sentences will start writing themselves. And even if they don’t, you’ll still have a few lines more than you had yesterday and it’s already a progress and before long, the chapter will be finished and soon, the whole novel. So, go ahead and write those few lines—it’ll be worth it, I promise.
3. What are common traps for aspiring writers? Advice for young writers starting out.—don’t write for the audience. Write for yourself, a book that you would like to read and the right audience will find you.
4. If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?—keep writing, girl, and don’t listen to anyone who says that writing is a hobby but never a career. It very much is and you will soon prove them all wrong.
5. What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer?—I’m blessed to have quite a few close writing friends. Some of them I’ve known from the very beginning of my writing career and some I met later along the way, but all of them definitely helped me become a better writer as they’re incredible writers themselves. Carissa Lynch writes terrific thrillers that I always devour in one go; Yolanda Olson is my absolute favorite Horror Queen; Rachel Wesson, Marion Kummerow, Paulette Mahurin, and Marina Osipova write the most heart-breaking historical fiction that always pulls at my heart strings and Terry Lynn Thomas always manages to create the fiercest female characters I’ve even come across. All of them taught me something and I’m truly honoured to have them as friends.
6. What was the best money you ever spent as a writer?—my pandemic puppy, Joannie. She’s the proof that happiness can, in fact, be bought for money, ha-ha!
7. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?—when readers began reaching out to me and saying that I opened their eyes to certain issues they previously ignored or that my book or character’s story made them changed their opinion concerning certain things. I never just tell a story of the past, I always make sure to connect it to the present and highlight the sociological issues our society is presently going through and draw parallels with what my characters had to go through and how it affected them. So, whenever a reader tells me how much it touched them and changed them or even propelled them to action, I feel like all my work paid off and words, once again, worked their magic on someone.
8. What kind of research do you do, and how long do you spend researching before beginning a book?—I’m one of those authors with OCD when it comes to research, so I tend to research the hell out of the subject I’m currently writing about using whatever kinds of research there are available. In addition to traditional research methods such as reading historical studies, memoirs and biographies of people I’m writing about, I try to get my hands on anything I can that has anything to do with my current theme. If there are documentaries on the subject, you bet I’ll watch them. If there are novels written by the authors who lived in that country during the era that I’m writing about, I’ll use them too for slang, general speech patterns, descriptions of lifestyle and their surroundings. If there are documents available that I can use, I’ll use them. When it comes to research, for me personally anything goes so I can create as authentic a story as I can.
9. What are the ethics of writing about historical figures?—to write them as authentically as possible. It’s always a difficult task as you write about real people and not imaginary characters, so reading their biographies or memoirs (if there are any, of course) is crucial impo. The closer you stay to their true personality and life story, the better.
10. What is the most difficult part of your artistic process?—as someone who’s been battling depression for years, the most difficult part of the process is to force myself to work even when I’m at my lowest. Sometimes I have no motivation to do the most minimal things (such as eating or getting up to take a shower), so pushing myself to work during these days (and sometimes weeks and months) is always the hardest. However, strangely enough, I wrote some of my most successful novels when I was in the darkest of places mentally, so I guess it’s not entirely a curse but a blessing in disguise.
11. Tell us about your novel/novels/or series and why you wrote about this topic?—my latest novel is titled “The Wife Who Risked Everything” and it tells a story of an “Aryan” German woman Margot who stayed married to her Jewish German husband Jochen when the entire state under Hitler’s regime did anything possible and impossible to separate them. The story itself culminates in the so-called Rosenstraße protests—the only public protest that turned out victorious for the protesters, which were mostly women like Margot. I love writing about strong women who aren’t afraid to put their very lives on the line in their fight for what is right and I felt that Rosenstraße women’s story with Margot as their embodiment was so very important to tell. Margot, who came out to fight for her right to stay married to whoever she wanted in spite of what the state has to say about it is so very relevant today with so many basic human rights being rolled back all over the world, I just had to tell it. Hopefully, it’ll inspire just as many women (and our allies) to pick up their own metaphorical arms and demand for their voices to be heard.
12. What was your hardest scene to write?—gas chamber scenes, no doubt. I had quite a few of them among several of my novels that take place in Auschwitz and those were always the most emotionally charged chapters and such a challenge to write! Tore my heart out, seriously. I think I had to recuperate for several days after writing those scenes as I felt extremely emotionally drained.
13. Tell us your favourite quote and how the quote tells us something about you.—If you’re going through hell, keep going. I didn’t have an easy life growing up and later as a teenager and an immigrant and had been through some really dark stuff that made me contemplate just ending it all on quite a few occasions. However, no matter what life threw at me (and keeps throwing occasionally), I kept staring it back right in the eye, saying, “is that all you got?” and kept going. Recently I got a tattoo to remind myself of it with the words “not over yet” in the middle of an arrow (the full meaning would be, “your battle is not over yet”), so yeah, that one and Churchill’s quote about hell are the ones that resonate with me the most. Don’t give up. All the best things are waiting you just around the corner.
*****
Thank you to Ellie Midwood for this fabulous interview and congratulations from The Historical Fiction Company on the release of your new book!