Biography
Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today b her husband now live in San Diego with three rescue dogs.
Publications
Empress of Rome Book Series
Mistress of Rome, (2010)
Daughters of Rome, (2011)
Empress of the Seven Hills / Empress of Rome, (2012)
The Three Fates, (2015)
Lady of the Eternal City, (2015)
Borgia Chronicles
The Serpent and the Pearl, (2013)
The Lion and the Rose, (2014)
Standalone novels
A Year of Ravens, (2015)
A Song of War (2016)
Publications
The Alice Network, (2017)
In the aftermath of World War II, Charlie St. Clair is pregnant and unmarried. When her parents banish her to Europe so she can terminate her pregnancy, Charlie instead heads to London to find out what happened to her cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war. A year into World War I, Eve Gardiner is recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she is trained by Lili, who manages a vast network of secret agents. Thirty years later, Eve is still haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network. But then a young American barges into her crumbling London house and utters a name she hasn't heard in decades, launching them both on a mission to find the truth, no matter where it leads
Publications
The Huntress, (2019)
When the Nazis attack the Soviet Union, Nina Markova risks everything to join the legendary Night Witches, an all-female night bomber regiment. When she is stranded behind enemy lines, Nina becomes the prey of a lethal Nazi murderess known as the Huntress. Transformed by the horrors he witnessed, British war correspondent Ian Graham has become a Nazi hunter. Yet one target eludes him: a vicious predator known as the Huntress. To find her, the fierce, disciplined investigator joins forces with the only witness to escape the Huntress alive: the brazen, cocksure Nina. But a shared secret could derail their mission unless Ian and Nina force themselves to confront it.
Publications
The Rose Code, (2021)
1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. Vivacious debutante Osla is the girl who has everything—beauty, wealth, and the dashing Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses—but she burns to prove herself as more than a society girl, and puts her fluent German to use as a translator of decoded enemy secrets. Imperious self-made Mab, product of east-end London poverty, works the legendary codebreaking machines as she conceals old wounds and looks for a socially advantageous husband. Both Osla and Mab are quick to see the potential in local village spinster Beth, whose shyness conceals a brilliant facility with puzzles, and soon Beth spreads her wings as one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts. But war, loss, and the impossible pressure of secrecy will tear the three apart.
The Diamond Eye, (2022)
Author's note
Like many historical novelists, Kate Quinn includes an Author's Note at the end of the novel, perhaps because this one poses some unique challenges.
Her primary source is Lyudmila's personal memoir, but Mila suffered from alcoholism, PTSD, and multiple battlefield concussions. Thus her memory may not always be reliable.
And then there are the editors in the Soviet propaganda office who would alter the details to fit their concept of the ideal Russian heroine.
Author's note—historical background
The Third Reich regarded Russians as racial undesirables fit only to be exterminated; Soviet soldiers were routinely slaughtered or starved if they were taken prisoner, unlike the more by-the-book treatment of French and English POWs.
The Russians responded with equal savagery once the tide turned in their favor, but at the beginning of Germany’s terrifying and overwhelming invasion, all the under-equipped Red Army could do was mount a fighting retreat, letting the harsh terrain and Russian winter do to Hitler what it had done to Napoleon. That strategy came at a horrifying cost: millions of Soviets died wearing down the German advance.
And many of those front-line lives at stake were women.
The USSR was the only Allied nation to employ women on the front line in their actively fighting military branches. Approximately 800,000 women served in the Soviet Armed Forces during the war, or about 5 percent of the total military personnel.
They were more likely to be shunted into communications and medical personnel, but many managed to play a more active part: bomber pilots, like the Night Witches; tank drivers, like Mila’s friend Vika—and snipers.
Author's note—historical background
Hollywood has colored our view of sharpshooters. We imagine them as militarized serial killers; at best they’re the odd man out on a squad of regular guys, the one described as having ice water in his veins . . . And the idea persists that killing from a distance, from hidden nests, is somehow dishonorable or unfair . . . but skilled marksmen have been used by every army since the invention of firearms (and before that the bow and arrow).
Many of the feats described in this novel—her training of a platoon, the assaults on Gildendorf and No-Name Height, her recruitment of the ranger Vartanov whose family had been murdered, the Kabachenko homestead and the bond she formed with a young girl who had been raped by German soldiers (“Kill them all”)—are drawn directly from the memoir Lyudmila wrote later in life.
Women snipers in the Red Army had about a 75 percent chance of dying in combat.
Author's note—historical background
The Diamond Eye is different, because nearly every person named comes straight from the historical record. Lyudmila’s fellow delegates Pchelintsev and Krasavchenko; her officers General Petrov, Lieutenant Dromin, and Captain Sergienko; her platoon mates Fyodor Sedykh and old Vartanov; her Odessa friend Sofya and medical orderly friend Lena Paliy . . . all real.
Wherever I have conflicting information, such as the exact name of Lyudmila’s regiment or the precise evening of the Soviet delegation’s White House farewell, I have used Lyudmila’s version.
It has been something of a delicate dance to treat Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s memoir as the concrete original source of its heroine’s memories, yet also a document with which the propaganda office took some liberties.
Cast of characters—Lyudmila
From Author's Note:
The woman known as Lady Death defies [the sniper stereotype]. She comes across in her memoirs and the anecdotes of her peers as warm, funny, charming, a bookworm, a loving mother, an introvert who savored her alone time but could nevertheless be the life of the party. She did not even have the requisite ice-blue or cold gray eyes most snipers are described as having!
It didn’t take long for the girl from Odessa—the graduate student who had been finishing the world’s nerdiest dissertation on Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Ukraine’s accession to Russia in 1654, and the activities of the Pereyaslav Council—to begin racking up a serous tally.
Her true tally might have been less than the 309 eventually finalized for official purposes; it could also easily have been much more.
Cast of characters—Lyudmila
From Author's Note:
She disliked her own growing fame, viewing herself simply as a soldier with a job to do: the enemy were invaders who had been ordered to attack; she was a defender who had been ordered to push them back, and that was that. Her anger at the Germans flowered into hatred as she saw the damage Hitler’s forces inflicted on her homeland, but Lyudmila still prided herself on clean kills and utter professionalism.
Red Army women were vastly outnumbered by male soldiers and commonly regarded as sexual perks for the officers. . . . until a three-day duel with a German sniper catapulted her to fame.
To me, Lyudmila Pavlichenko comes across as the real deal. Her memoir bears the stamp of Soviet propaganda, but her technical recall of a sniper’s skills, weapons, and routine is exactly where her voice is the most precise and vividly individual. There are inaccuracies in her timeline, but a woman piecing her memories together through the fog of war and the PTSD of multiple battlefield concussions is bound to get a few details wrong.
Cast of characters—Lyudmila
From Author's Note:
She says extremely little (and nothing good) of her first husband Alexei Pavlichenko, the older man who seduced and impregnated her after a dance when she was barely fifteen. Lyudmila’s only comment about Alexei, after he abandoned her and their son Rostislav, is:
“Fortunately, my son is nothing like his father.”
She paid a price for her tremendous courage. Although she survived her war, finished her dissertation, and achieved her dream of becoming a historian, she saw many of her friends die, she struggled with PTSD, and she outlived Kostia . . . but she devoted her later years to war veterans, recorded her story for posterity, and died in the arms of her beloved son, surrounded by family and swearing at death until the very end.
Cast of characters
Lena Paliy: "a second-year student in the Odessa medical institute, slicing up shriveled blue corpses on the dissection table" who becomes the friend Mila meets on the military train after enlisting. They sleep alternately to keep a watch.
And it is to Lena that Mila tells the story of Alexei, her first husband and Slavka's father, when she met him at the dance, age 15. At the end of that trip, they also cut each other's hair.
Later it is Lena who throws Lyonya out of the steam room so that she and Mila can use it, thinking he's civilian instead of military.
In the war, she's a nurse who takes care of Mila.
Vika: Mila's before-the-war friend, and a demi-soloist at the Odessa ballet, newly returned from the Bolshoi school in Moscow
She wasn’t even twenty, but had one of those flowery nicknames dancers get—“the Nightingale” or “the Dragonfly.” Early in the novel, she has tickets to La Traviata.
During the war, she becomes a tank driver. Her twin brother Grigory, also a dancer, is killed.
Cast of characters
Sofya: friend, worked with Mila at the Odessa public library
Captain Sergienko: Mila's first commanding office, gave her her first platoon, protective. Seriously wounded, and replaced.
Marksman: assassin who plans to kill FDR and blame Mila
Pocket Square: assassin's contact
Alexei Kitsenko (Lyonya) : a tall, funny, good-looking Red Army lieutenant in Sevastopol.
From Author Notes:
Kitsenko is frequently described as her junior sergeant and fellow sniper, her partner with whom she hunted night after night as part of a lethal, inseparable team—but Lyudmila described him as the lieutenant who commanded her company.
Cast of characters—Lyonya
From Author Notes:
My conjecture is that two men may have been confused, and that Lyudmila was romantically involved with both her company commander and her sniper partner at different points. Thus I separated the two and described Kitsenko as Lyudmila did: Lieutenant Alexei Arkadyevich Kitsenko, nicknamed Lyonya, her superior officer and eventually second husband.
Whether they were legally married or not (he is not listed on her grave as her spouse), Lyudmila regarded Lyonya as her husband in every way that counted: they had a whirlwind courtship culminating in the attack where Lyonya carried the wounded Lyudmila off the front line, gave blood for her surgery, visited throughout her recovery, and invited her to dinner in his dugout (complete with flowers in a shell-casing vase!) the day she was released. He proposed that night; he and Lady Death were inseparable from then on. But after barely three months together, Lyonya was hit by mortar fire right before Lyudmila’s eyes. He died in her arms hours later, and she nearly went mad from grief.
Cast of characters—Kostia
Konstantin Shevelyov (Kostia): Mila's sniper partner who always has her back, quiet, a reader (War and Peace). Technically, Mila out-ranked him.
From Author Notes:
The other place I filled in a historical gap is around Lyudmila’s sniper partner, and around her final husband Kostia Shevelyov. Lyudmila’s partner is named in her memoir as Fyodor Sedykh: [a sniper and therefore an intimate relationship] . . . . yet she makes no mention of him after Sevastopol. Likewise, the man who became her husband after the war is a complete blank: we know nothing about Kostantin Shevelyov except his birth and death dates. Why does her memoir contain so little about two men who would have been so important to her?
Cast of characters—Kostia
From Author Notes:
I gave her a reason: Konstantin Shevelyov had good cause to fly under the radar, and his famous wife was doing her level best to keep him out of her own limelight. In the carnivorous Stalinist regime, there could be any number of reasons a man might want to lie low. Thus I turned Kostia into Lyudmila’s sniper partner so I could introduce Lady Death’s final husband into the story and pay homage to the records that indicate a romantic link between her and her partner, but also gave him a background that explains why she might list another name as her partner.
[So Kostia is ] a fictionalized composite of two real men.
Cast of characters—Eleanor Roosevelt
A First Lady and a Russian sniper becoming friends may seem wildly improbable, but many of their scenes in The Diamond Eye are taken directly from Lyudmila’s memoir: their discussions on American segregation (which appalled Lyudmila, as did British colonialism in India); Lyudmila falling asleep in the presidential limousine with her head on Eleanor’s shoulder; Lyudmila tumbling out of a canoe at the Hudson estate and ending up in the First Lady’s bedroom as Eleanor hemmed a pair of pink pajamas for her and they chatted for so long that FDR had to retrieve the unlikely BFFs for dinner!
Author note:
Another park mystery is the lost ring of Teddy Roosevelt, which fell off during a presidential hike in 1902. It remains missing to this day, and I enjoyed crafting a possible fate for it, too!
Questions for discussion
Structurally, the timeline of the novel is Washington, D. C., August, 1942 and that portion is narrated in 3rd person. The rest of the novel is Mila's life before this visit, and defined as "5 years ago" or "11 months ago" or "5 months ago" and delivered in 1st person.
According to a review in the Wall Street Journal, "Interspersed into this chronicle are third-person flash-forwards to Mila’s tour of the United States," and the planned assassination of FDR, with Mila taking the blame. So this reviewer sees the primary narrative as Mila's life during the war, and the years before, when she met Alexei, married him, had her son Rostislav "Slavka."
Why is the narrative structured this way? Is the trip to Washington flash forward, or Lena's war years flash backward?
Questions for discussion
Most historical novels are based on some measure of historical fact, the amount varies from author to author, and from subject to subject, depending on the source material available. With Hamnet, for example, and Marriage Portrait, Maggie O'Farrell had little to work with and so the novels are primarily fiction. David McCullough, on the other hand, is known for writing from archival documents with minimal fictional creativity.
This novel grapples with a slightly different problem. Admittedly, for Mila, there are sparse documents available, and what is available is largely not trust worthy. So Kate Quinn worked primarily from Mila's personal memoir, supplemented by factual documents such as the military records of combatants, battle histories, news media accounts of the Russian visit to the U.S. and their meeting with FDR and Eleanor. But even those are biased, record only dates and cities, questions asked and comments made. There's no personal insight, journalism doesn't do that.
And so, Kate Quinn is trying to "humanize" Mila Pavlichenko, to fill in the blanks, to discover how she felt about what she did, and that's where the memoir enters the picture.
Questions for discussion
This novel has been described as an historical novel, combat novel, wartime love story, and assassination thriller—multiple genres—but it is also predominantly a first-person narrative of a woman's life which "thrusts the reader into the heroine's world" (WSJ).
In other words, we see events through Mila's perspective dominantly, and the novel is therefore about her relationships with people and about events during the war when she's a sniper.
So how would you describe Mila?
Questions for discussion
At one point, Mila and her platoon of snipers are looking for a vantage point from which to attack the "Hitlerites" as Mila calls them. They come upon what was
"one of those beautiful little farms you see all over the countryside: a cozy farmhouse with a husband and wife, sons and daughter, all tending the vegetable garden, the chicken coop, and the pigpen."
The mother, Serafima Nikanorovna, let's them in; she knows she really has no choice. The Fascists have already been there, taken the food, chickens, pigs, and anything else they wanted. They also raped the 17-year-old daughter Maria, 4 of them, who cringes when Fyodor politely approaches her.
Then Mila asks her if she will help her with something, showing her the leaves she had gathered for son Slavka; she asks if Maria knows what trees they come from.
Questions for discussion
On another occasion, they come across Vartanov, a "thin stooped figure [who] looked more like an elderly wood sprite than a woodsman. He tells them he's a "ranger," has been, in these woods, for more than 30 years; and tells them, "if you listen to me, I can give you the German staff headquarters at Mekenzia.”
Mila doesn't know how to navigate the dense forest; they need him, but need to verify his loyalty first. And he wants to join the platoon, attacking the Nazi headquarters, because:
“That homestead the Germans turned into their headquarters was mine. . . . I lived there with my son and his wife, my own wife and my younger children. We had a banya, a barn, greenhouses, we all worked dawn to dusk; I couldn’t tell you where the war even was, or what it was about. I was off to the municipal authority offices ten days ago, to register some supplementary expenses—and that was the day a party of Hitlerite scouts came along, lined my family up alongside my house, and shot them all.”
What do we as readers learn from these passages?
Questions for discussion
You could also say that this novel is an odd juxtaposition of detailed factual descriptions--of sniper rifles, tactical positions, trenches, battlefield hospitals, wounds—and the personal relationships developed amid it all.
One reviewer wrote that this novel was about "character psychology."
Is that true? What are the relationships in this novel?
Questions for discussion
Quinn mentions the stereotype of a sniper—a cold, steely-eyed, unemotional serial killer. And, interestingly, we get that in her characterization of the sniper sent to assassinate FDR.
But many of the other relationships in the novel seem to be included as a kind of "foil" to Mila.
What are her other relationships and what do they reveal?
Questions for discussion
Quinn begins many chapters with references to memoirs:
Mila's begin with: My memoir, official version
followed by My memoir, unofficial version
Other chapters include "memoirs" by others, such as Eleanor Roosevelt.
Why does she do this?
Breakout room question
What do you think of the novel's ending?
Next Week:
More on anthropomorphism and animals as protagonists
Preparatory to Remarkably Bright Creatures