Welcome to the thirty-second episode of the Tea in the Treetops podcast.
In this special episode, Angelya is joined by the amazing Dr Kate Forsyth to chat about her latest book, The Beast’s Garden, as well as other aspects of her writing. You can find more information about The Beast’s Garden as well as Kate’s other books below.
This episode was recorded on September 14th, 2015.
We hope you enjoy listening and we would love to hear your feedback – anything you would like us to talk about in particular? Just let us know!
You can listen to past episodes of the podcast, as well as the various ways to subscribe on the main podcast page.
Our title music is titled Sea of Dreams and has been used with the kind permission of the composer, Bart Stoop. You can hear more of Bart’s beautiful music at facebook.com/BartStoop.
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The Beast’s Garden by Kate Forsyth
Published by Random House Australia on August 3rd 2015
Genres: Fairytale Retelling, Historical Fiction
Pages: 512
Amazon • Amazon UK • Bookworld
Goodreads
A retelling of The Beauty and The Beast set in Nazi Germany.
The Grimm Brothers published a beautiful version of the Beauty & the Beast tale called ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ in 1819. It combines the well-known story of a daughter who marries a beast in order to save her father with another key fairy tale motif, the search for the lost bridegroom. In ‘The Singing, Springing Lark,’ the daughter grows to love her beast but unwittingly betrays him and he is turned into a dove. She follows the trail of blood and white feathers he leaves behind him for seven years, and, when she loses the trail, seeks help from the sun, the moon, and the four winds. Eventually she battles an evil enchantress and saves her husband, breaking the enchantment and turning him back into a man.
Kate Forsyth retells this German fairy tale as an historical novel set in Germany during the Nazi regime. A young woman marries a Nazi officer in order to save her father, but hates and fears her new husband. Gradually she comes to realise that he is a good man at heart, and part of an underground resistance movement in Berlin called the Red Orchestra. However, her realisation comes too late. She has unwittingly betrayed him, and must find some way to rescue him and smuggle him out of the country before he is killed.
The Red Orchestra was a real-life organisation in Berlin, made up of artists, writers, diplomats and journalists, who passed on intelligence to the American embassy, distributed leaflets encouraging opposition to Hitler, and helped people in danger from the Nazis to escape the country. They were betrayed in 1942, and many of their number were executed.
The Beast’s Garden is a compelling and beautiful love story, filled with drama and intrigue and heartbreak, taking place between 1938 and 1943, in Berlin, Germany.
Read my review of The Beast’s Garden here on Tea in the Treetops.
Kate will be at Supanova Adelaide – 20-22 November at Adelaide Showground
Genrecon Brisbane – 30 October – 1 November 2015 at the State Library of Queensland
Information about Kate’s Writing Retreat in the Cotswolds is on her website.
Other books we mentioned
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Anni
Anni lives in Brisbane, Australia with her young family. She loves everything fantasy and science fiction and believes sleep is really very underrated.
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