Anne Fortier's engaging, erudite, and exciting novel The Lost Sisterhood is out in paperback for just $8.80 at Amazon.
Reason TV interviewed Fortier in 2014 when the hardcover first appeared:
The Lost Sisterhood switches back and forth between the travails of Diana Morgan, a contemporary scholar at Oxford, and Myrina, the legendary warrior who would become the first ruler of the Amazons. It's a page-turning thriller that is also packed with ideas about history, gender, self-determination, and the desire for true freedom.
"I hope to raise a lot of questions about the choices that we make by…asking, 'What if a group of women decided to live outside of society, bend the spoon, and override all rules and regulations?'" says Fortier, who was raised in Denmark, holds a doctorate in the history of ideas from Aarhus University, and co-produced the Emmy Award–winning documentary Fire and Ice: The Winter War of Finland and Russia.
To the freedom-friendly novelist, one further advantage of historical fiction is that the entire history of mankind is jam-packed with tragic examples of what Hayek called "the fatal conceit" and the corrupting effects of power—especially state power. Thus the author need not invent a world and infuse it with political philosophy ex nihilo. The world is already there, firmly based on research, and you don't have to exercise much poetic license to illuminate the evils of statism and the heroic nature of the freedom fighter throughout human history. For example, my first novel, Juliet, is partly set in medieval Siena and based on the historical situation that informed Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.It was a time torn between emperor, pope, and corruption and nothing is easier than to let one of the present-day characters speak the glaring truth: "The devotion of the old neighborhood militia was essentially what made the Sienese republic possible. If you want to keep the bad guys in check, make sure the good guys are armed."
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