The Ambassador’s Wife is a novel as adventurous as its free-spirited protagonist, Miranda. With confidence and evident enjoyment, author, Jennifer F Steil explores the methods and strategies of high level diplomacy; the possibilities and dangers of cross-cultural friendship; and–centrally–motherhood, in its many complex, and conflicting incarnations.
Set in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Mazrooq, Steil’s first novel kicks off when Miranda, an artist, art teacher, and wife to the British ambassador, is abducted by terrorists. She is desperate to return to her husband and toddler daughter. But when she is handed a starving baby to nurse in captivity, that bond changes her life in dramatic and unexpected ways — and ultimately forces her family to make an impossible choice.
The Ambassador’s Wife, Steil’s first novel, will be adapted into a forthcoming TV series starring Anne Hathaway. Jennifer F Steil is married to the EU ambassador to Bolivia, whom she met on his prior posting in Yemen, during her stint as editor-in-chief of the English language Yemen Observer. Her novel obviously draws on her idiosyncratic life experiences in a country where she experienced a (brief) abduction while hiking in the foothills, and where she became a mother.
I asked Steil to participate in a Mums Write! Interview because I wanted to find out about the challenges of integrating her rich life experiences as a writer-mother into fiction.
Click here to read the interview.
Click here to access the Writer Mother interview library
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