Marius Gabriel

Marius Gabriel was accused by Cosmopolitan magazine of ‘keeping you reading while your dinner burns’. He served his author apprenticeship as a student at Newcastle University, where, to finance his postgraduate research, he wrote thirty-three steamy romances under a pseudonym. Gabriel's novels include The Ocean Liner, The Seventh Moon, The Original Sin, and the Redcliffe Sisters series, Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye, Take Me to Your Heart Again, and The Designer.

His new novel is The Parisians.

Recently I asked Gabriel about what he was reading. His reply:

I'm currently reading Miranda Seymour's very entertaining life of Mary Shelley, the second wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Miranda Seymour is a novelist as well as a biographer, and so the book is delightfully readable. Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein at the age of 19, was a brilliant and fascinating woman, whose life with the notoriously erratic poet was a mixture of tragedy, high adventure and bitter disillusionment. Highly recommended!

I especially admire Miranda Seymour's ability to bring historical characters to life, which is what I also try to do in my own work. Rather than simply use famous people as a hook upon which to hang a story, I try to portray them as vividly as I can. If I get it right, I see them behaving in my fiction as I imagine they did in their own lives. It's a strange, exhilarating process.

Visit Marius Gabriel's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Parisians.

My Book, The Movie: The Parisians.

--Marshal Zeringue