Q&A With Isabella Valeri 

I’m honored to be doing this Q&A with Isabella Valeri, whose debut novel Letters From The Dead is available to read now wherever books are sold! 

Q: Isabella, would you please give a brief description of Letters From The Dead?

A: Letters from the Dead, both the first novel and the larger series, is a story about the only daughter and youngest sibling of an old-money, dynastic family and how she fights (not always successfully) against the seductive wealth and power around her, labours to avoid being caught up in the many fights for control within and without her family, and contends with the darker destinies that await her.

As she tries to navigate the forces that seek to dominate her (including her own parents) and wield her for their own purposes, she must confront some dark truths about her family, the inner circle around them, and the many sinister secrets that an old-world dynasty inevitably harbours (one does not rise to power innocently, after all).

The first book is very much a coming-of-age story, following the only daughter from youth to adolescence and then post adolescence, from tutors on the estate, to an all-girls boarding school in the United States, to university, and beyond, and touches on themes of the role as the only daughter in her family, and how her independence, agency, and freedom (including the freedom to love) is influenced by origins she cannot really escape.

The characters in Letters from the Dead exist in a sort of dual universe. As with many old-world estates in Europe, the family’s lands, on which the only daughter was born and spent the entirety of her first twelve years, are almost frozen in time; stuck in a bygone era, isolated from and unable to adapt to or accept the modern world around them (both figuratively and literally). But for little hints here and there, you could almost believe that you were still in the 18th century when you walk through the halls of the grand manor that is the family seat. It is the same with many of the old-world estates and “country houses” that still exist in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.

Early in Letters from the Dead the only daughter’s grandfather, the patriarch of her family at the time, says something quite prescient to her:

“My dear, the future; it is for the young. They alone are suited to bring a dynasty safely into their epoch.”

Among the many themes in Letters from the Dead, this lingering question is almost ever-present: who better than a daughter bringing a powerful but sclerotic old-money family into the modern world? Of course, there would be many forces (male heirs, family members, other old-world families, secret societies) willing to fight against that future.

Some to the death.

Letters from the Dead is not a novella. Really, it is an epic. From early on I knew that it would be impossible to really explore all the nuances and texture of the contest for power within a family that had nearly twenty generations of history without leaning into the complexity, detail, and depth that such an important subject demanded.

I think readers will enjoy the literary, dark academia, perhaps even gothic world that Letters from the Dead will immerse them in. I’m thrilled to be able to share it. 

Q: Could you talk a bit about where the idea for the novel came from? How long did it take you to write Letters From The Dead? Is it fair to say the characters in the story are loosely taken from you and people you know in your life?

A: It is funny that you ask this question because just recently I went back in my writing software (I use and absolutely adore Scrivener for all my long form writing) and found one of the early files had a “created on” date in August of 2014. (Has it really been that long? Apparently so!)

I started on the work that became Letters from the Dead and the sequel The Prodigal Daughter, which is due out next year (I submitted my manuscript to my publisher on New Years Eve), more than a decade and a half ago. During a very dark period in my life, a time when I was very isolated and alone, I began a blog, really an online diary, that achieved a bit of notoriety. Eventually, I took that work down, but years later, when I was in a much more stable and safer place, I revisited it and started compiling many of my writings into a single whole.

I think I really started considering that there was a novel in it all somewhere right about then, in August of 2014. So, I guess you could say that it took a decade to write Letters from the Dead and The Prodigal Daughter.

Certainly, there is quite a bit of “write what you know” in the Letters from the Dead series. I am, after all, a daughter of those two worlds, the old and the post-modern. But I’m not actually allowed to tell “true stories” anymore.

I do get asked this question about the line between reality and fiction in Letters from the Dead quite a bit. By way of an answer, I have somewhat shamelessly repurposed a line that Jack Carr (author of The Terminal List, the first book in the James Reece series) wrote in the preface to his debut novel:

“I am not James Reece. He is more skilled, witty, and intelligent than I could ever hope to be. Though I am not James Reece, I understand him.”

(My publisher, Emily Bestler, also publishes Jack Carr, but this is not a plug, I promise).

Likewise, I am not my main character. She is wittier, craftier, and more collected than I have ever been. Likewise, though I am not my main character, I understand her.

Naturally, many of the characters in the Letters from the Dead series are amalgams of people I knew or met. I have been privileged (or perhaps cursed) to meet many strange and colorful personages during my life, from both the old world and the new, so to speak, and a good portion of them just begged to be caricatured in fiction.

I was myself in the middle of a horrific and very nasty family fight that went on for years and probably paid to send the children of a dozen lawyers through university, so certainly that had an influence on books. Likewise, as my main character, I faced my own exiles before my life calmed down enough to allow me to think about writing fiction.

Early on, something else impacted the way I thought about my characters and environments they traversed. Gillian Flynn published Gone Girl in 2012, and commenting on that book, and her other novels Sharp Objects and Dark Places, lamented the way female main characters were represented in fiction. Online she’s quoted as saying:

“I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains.”

I’m not sure if that’s an accurate quote, but I remember taking the essence of her critique to be that female protagonists were almost boring. I remember that sentiment clicking with me, that one gets tired of reading novels where, in the end, the protagonist gets the man of her dreams she once despised, and -surprise- out of nowhere he inherits his family’s vineyard in France in the middle of Act III, and they lived happily ever after. (Clearly the author of such a book has no idea how much work owning a vineyard is).

So, I don’t really write female protagonists. I write female anti-heroines. I find them far more interesting, and the worlds that my characters must survive require of them a bit more villainy (to borrow from Flynn) than normal.

I also find female main characters who emerge from the womb (so to speak) fully formed with a mastery of martial arts, lock-picking, computer hacking, parkour, and an immunity to spider venom, beyond tiresome. (I think the technical term is a “Mary Sue”).

Because Letters from the Dead is so much about what trials a woman trying to navigate being the youngest and the only girl in a dynastic family would have to face, I felt I had to really focus on two things when crafting her “origin story” so to speak. First, I had to show exactly how she acquired the skills needed to embark on her journey and survive the forces that aligned against her, and second, I had to bring the reader into the world she inhabits and give them the same knowledge she acquires as she comes of age. Early on in Letters from the Dead readers will meet Professor Lechner, the only daughter’s tutor. Through him, along with the only daughter herself, readers will learn about the nuances of secret societies, hidden knowledge, bearer bonds, old-world finance, her family’s sometimes dark history, even military strategy and how to wield the reins of power. They are all lessons that will give the only daughter, and the reader, the tools to embark on the journey she must undertake for the remainder of the series.

The idea to explore the “princely education” of a young daughter in such a family, an unusual bit of teaching for a girl, came from a bit of history, the story of Arsinoë IV, sister of Cleopatra. In 48-47 B.C. she took command of the Egyptian army and fought Julius Caesar with alarming (but fleeting) success, apparently still a teenager, or just barely into post-adolescence at the time. She and her sisters, Berenice and Cleopatra, were each Queen of Egypt at one time or another. Berenice was only deposed when her father, Ptolemy XII, enlisted Roman help to retake his throne. Once he had, he executed her.  I always used to wonder: How, as teenagers, did the daughters of Ptolemy XII learn to command armies? Would they hide outside their father’s war councils listening, absorbing? Did they have tutors that sat with them on the palace floor in Alexandria, moving little models around miniature sand-battlefields to teach them desert warfare tactics? Did their father understand what a pandora’s box he was opening by letting them learn the art of warfare as one might teach sons?

And so, drawing somewhat from lessons from tutors I had myself when I was young, Letters from the Dead explores the sort of education the only daughter of a dynasty must have to compete with her rivals in a very patriarchal setting.

Donna Tartt, whose work I adore, opens The Secret History with a line from Plato’s Republic: “Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes.”

But what, I remember wondering about the education of our anti-heroines?

Q: What lessons & emotions do you hope readers feel after they finish Letters From The Dead?  

A: With the Letters from the Dead series, I have tried very much to write the books I would want to read. For me there is always this bittersweet feeling when I finish a book I love. I hate that it is over. I always want more. I want to know more about what happens to the characters in the book, even some of the minor ones. I want more detail about some of the settings in the book. The best books for me are those that totally immerse me. I have a place high up in the Alps that serves as my writing retreat, but also my reading refuge. There’s nothing better than being stranded up there during a heavy snowstorm, the only sounds of the snowfall (it is a sort of hiss, if you listen very carefully) the occasional crack from the fireplace, where I can occasionally look up from my book and out of the window at grape-sized flakes falling outside. The rest of the world just falls away when I read a good book, but that means I am really demanding a lot of the author. A lot of texture, a lot of world-building, a lot of craft and care put into setting, tone, mood. And so, I have tried to write those books, books that just transport you until you can almost smell the old paper and leather bindings of the ancient texts in the Grand Library, feel on your cheeks the prickle of the fall mists that blanket the estate in the mornings, hear the creaks of the manor as it endures the gusting winds of the thunder blizzards that come down from the High Alps.

I remember after I finished Donna Tartt’s The Secret History the first time I just cried for half an hour. Then I set about trying to learn as much as I could about all the settings and characters and influences that formed Tartt’s book. Once I discovered that she had apparently based the book’s setting, the fictional Hampden College, on Bennington College in Vermont, which Tartt attended with author Brett Easton Ellis, I almost obsessively hunted down pictures of the campus trying to add to the texture of the experience. It almost felt like stalking, but I knew I would re-read the book and, hopelessly greedy reader that I am, I wanted to squeeze every little bit out of her already gorgeous and brilliant prose.

But this means that the books that I love (and therefore the books that I write) are long and lush. Recently, I thought there has been this very unfortunate resistance to long-form fiction, to literary fiction. One hates to blame attention spans, this being a cliche sort of critique to make of the post-modern Facebook, TikTok, Twitter/X, and Instagram world (ok, I admit it, I have Twitter and Instagram accounts) but I do think that the last many years have been hard on deeper works of fiction. At the same time, several genres get a sort of “length pass.” Historical fiction is allowed to be long, for example. Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, one of my very favourite books, is 215,000 words. If you add the other two books in her Thomas Cromwell series, Bring up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light, the series is nearly 675,000 words. Science fiction can also run very long. Frank Herbert’s Dune is another book I re-read all the time; it is over 200,000 words. Likewise, no one blinks at the word counts of fantasy novels. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Rings (which I try to read every couple of years) is more than 190,000 words.  Even Erin Morgenstern’s beautiful and beautifully gothic The Night Circus is more than 120,000 words. I think the rationale is that historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction draw on a great deal of world building.

Letters from the Dead doesn’t really fit into those genres, of course, but the environs of an old-world, old-money family and the dynastic morays of the characters in it are just as alien to the vast majority of readers as Mantel’s rendition of Thomas Cromwell’s England, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Herbert’s Arrakis, the tents of Morgenstern’s mystical and mysterious Night Circus when it visits Victorian London, not to mention the secret academic society that meets to uncover the lost mysteries of ancient deities in the ivy-covered Lyceum on the edge of the campus of Tartt’s Hampden College.

I always felt that to do justice to the sense of intrigue, wonder, and mystery that I felt when reading those books (among my other favourites) that feeling I want readers to feel when they delve into the world of Letters from the Dead, I had to build a world for them worthy of those emotions. I am incredibly fortunate that my publisher, Emily Bestler, was so willing to take on the risk of publishing a rather long book (two, actually) that probably defies easy genre categorization.

As to what lesson to take away from Letters from the Dead? Well, with respect to the first book, I will quote my anti-heroine’s father on the moment when your destiny presents itself:

“You must choose.”

Q: What can fans expect from the sequel The Prodigal Daughter? Will you write a third and fourth book or will The Prodigal Daughter be where the saga will end? 

A: Letters from the Dead leave so many of the large questions it raises unanswered and ends on a significant cliffhanger. So much so that some of my test readers called me up in agony after they finished the first book. I had to remind them that it is my job as an author to torture them. But, as I mentioned, I already submitted my final manuscript for The Prodigal Daughter, the second book in the series, to my publisher. It has a tentative publishing date in the middle of 2026.

The Prodigal Daughter picks up right where Letters from the Dead leaves off, just as my anti-heroine has been recalled from her first exile, forced to leave behind the love of her life, and returned, almost involuntarily to her family’s Alpine estate. I won’t spoil it, of course, but the only daughter of the dynasty must face the possibility that her ancestral home will become a prison, that her fate will be decided for her if she does not act, and that true love is not part of the destiny her family has in mind for her. Whereas Letters from the Dead is a slower burn, and in her formative years my anti-heroine is more at the mercy of the tides created by the forces that seek to control her, in The Prodigal Daughter she begins to be faced with the need to act. As a result, The Prodigal Daughter is, by necessity, a much more plot-driven book. Unless she wants to become a pawn in someone else’s game, the only daughter will have to learn how to take the lessons she has learned and use them to craft her own destiny. Old world dynastic families play for keeps. They are not above blackmail, coercion, kidnapping, or even murder, and not everyone will survive a contest with them. Even worse: the only daughter’s family is not the only dynasty that seeks to control her. The shadowy and dangerous enemies only alluded to in Letters from the Dead begin to make their presence felt in The Prodigal Daughter. Eventually, passivity becomes impossible. One path or another must be taken.

“You must choose.”

It is not clear yet if the Letters from the Dead series will be three books in total or four, but the third book, Along the Nape of the Earth, is already written, so readers can rest assured that there are many mysteries left to uncover and explore.

Q: If/When Letters From The Dead ever became a movie or television series, which actors do you envision portraying the characters? The entertainment industry needs new ideas again! 

A: Historically, there’s been quite some interest in a book-to-film effort for Letters from the Dead. I think it would make a beautiful and compelling film or series, and someone seems to agree with me at least a little bit: the story itself has been optioned three different times, even before I finally finished and published Letters from the Dead last month. I was amazingly lucky to have the interest of David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2) and his wife and sometime producer Kelly McCormick in potentially making the story into a feature film. They were beyond kind to invite me to Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England when they were filming Hobbs & Shaw. I cannot say enough about their hospitality on that trip, and how generous they were in letting me linger just behind the cameras to watch them work. Learning about the creative process of filmmaking changed my writing forever (and I think for the better). Natalie Portman’s production company handsomecharlie films was also interested in it for a time. Much of that interest cooled off with COVID and the like, and I wanted to focus on finishing the first two novels before going through the work of adaptation for the screen, but I’m certainly hopeful that we can revisit those ideas now that the book is out.

I couldn’t begin to try to be the casting director for any film or series based on the Letters from the Dead series, but it certainly will be fun to speculate if Hollywood wants to delve into the dark world of dynastic intrigue. I cannot say enough about my agents Mollie Glick and Matthew Snyder at Creative Artists Agency. They have been huge believers in both the literary and book-to-film sides of Letters from the Dead and I’m sure if there is a Hollywood deal to be made, they will bring it to fruition.

[Keep up with all the news on Isabella Valeri’s work, as well as her podcasts and video casts on her website: https://www.isabella-v.com]

If you’re interested in getting your hands on a copy of Letters From The Dead, click on this link https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Letters-from-the-Dead/Isabella-Valeri/9781668065068