History's Scent

We’re gathering together four novelists who’ve attached their fictions to the scaffold of history: Morris Gleitzman is working on the final instalment of his Once series (about a Jewish boy’s experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War); Tina Makereti grew her latest novel, The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, from an 1846 article in the London Times; Majella Cullinane takes on New Zealand military involvement at the Western Front in The Life of De’Ath; and Maxine Alterio’s third historical novel, The Gulf Between, explores the legacies of occupation in post-Second World War Naples. History curator Seán Brosnahan will find out how they went about the business of marrying fact with fiction and how far they fell into the rabbit hole of history.