Book Review & Author Interview: ILIUM by Lea Carpenter
I had the pleasure of interviewing Carpenter, who's fantastic new espionage thriller ILIUM published this week...
I wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan of espionage thrillers, and have never quite connected with those stories in the ways I do with other genres I tend to prioritize. That being said, Lea Carpenter’s ILIUM, out this week, is a fantastic addition to the spy genre. It’s ALIAS by way of John Le Carre, about a young woman who falls for a charming older man who ultimately recruits her to spy on a wealthy Russian Oligarch living off the coast of France. The book is a slow-burn thriller, smaller in scope and sizzle; but what it lacks in size, it makes up with some of the best character work I’ve read in a long time. Carpenter does so much with so little, an author who manages to infiltrate sex and romance and mystery into a story without overtly showing her hand. The book is mysterious and sexy and violent, and I’ve been thinking about it all week. At 215 pages, it’s the perfect post-holiday read for those of you struggling to kick-start your 2024 reading goals.
I was lucky enough to get to interview author Lea Carpenter last night, and have included portions of the interview below. I hope you enjoy!
RATING: 4/5
JORDY’S BOOK CLUB INTERVIEW: LEA CARPENTER (AUTHOR OF ‘ILIUM’)
**This interview has been edited for length**
Jordy (JM): first of all, I want to say Congratulations and Happy publication week. I know it's a big week with the book finally hitting shelves. Can you tell us a little bit about what that’s been like?
Lea Carpenter (LC): Well, my husband (who's also a writer) says that when a book is about to come out it’s the “calm before the calm” (laughs); the idea that it's really hard for a book to find its way in the world and so many books tend to catch on after the fact, whether it's related to a television adaptation, or just some you know, some strange social media lightning bolt, but the traditional systems of launching a book have changed so much that now sometimes the public is pretty quiet upon launch. I had a really great pub launch this week, (in particular) with a group of people who come together who really were interested in espionage and wanted to talk about that subject matter, but I'm happy to be here and hopefully we'll be doing a few more events, and I think the nice thing about the book is that its sort of like giving birth, and you have to sort of let go and hope hope [the book] finds its way.
JM: I'm so curious, what is a group of people “interested in espionage” look like, and how do I join?
LC: Well outside of employees at the CIA, I think it looks like a group of women who really liked ‘The Night Manager’ (laughter). If you like that, you’re going to like THIS book.
JM: This is your third book, so I’m curious if it’s getting easier for you, the writing and the publishing experience, or is it still tough? what’s that experience like from start to finish now that you’ve done it a few times?
LC: I think you you are able to look back and see what you did wrong. Actually, my last book was an attempt to write about the spy world, and I'm proud of it, but I see now where I was not able to quite do with the plot what I was [ultimately] able to do with this book. I think when I started studying spies and espionage and CIA for my first book, I really wanted to prove to the reader that I knew what I was talking about. I was so anxious to prove to the reader that I knew about special operations that I included a glossary at the end of the book and I now look back and am mortified that I did that, and I think by the time I came to [ILIUM] having worked on so many iterations of spy stories, I kind of had absorbed the knowledge, and I could almost put it away and just tell a story. I think in my earlier writing, I was anxious to do a lot of showing (and not telling). And in doing that, I would be invited into this club of writers who were allowed to write about war and espionage and topics that have traditionally been books by men, about men, for men, which can (and did) feel intimidating to female writers. And when I first went down the research path on my last book, I had someone very senior at CIA who said “you know the women can't write espionage, women only write crime”. And I thought I thought a lot about that. I don't think he was trying to be a jerk, but I think crime and espionage, these are actually pretty different genres. They require different things. So hopefully, I wrote a classic work of espionage. Whereas my last book was more a character study of a woman trying to figure out what her relationship with espionage was.
JM: And for people who haven't had a chance to read the book yet are just discovering it this week. Can you give us a brief synopsis?
LC: Sure. I have an author's note in the book. And in the author's note, I pointed out that the book, in a way, was born out of my reading the story of a guy