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| Moorea Corrigan (photo: John Bosley) |
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Moorea Corrigan holds an undergraduate degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Master of Publishing from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She lives and works in Colorado. Corrigan's debut novel for adults, Thistlemarsh (Berkley, April 21, 2026), set in the aftermath of World War I, imagines a crumbling, magic-cursed manor house inherited by a woman so desperate to restore it that she makes an ill-advised bargain with a Faerie lord.
Tell us a bit about Thistlemarsh.
The brief one-sentence summary is that it's about a girl, who is a nurse from World War I, returning home after a terrible time on the front. She's been bequeathed her childhood home by her uncle, but there are tons of caveats, and if she can't fulfill those caveats by the end of the month, the house goes to her mortal enemy. So she makes a deal with a faerie, but there are consequences for those deals, and ramifications that she really can't anticipate.
I hope that's it's enchanting, that it's folkloric. I hope that it's very whimsical, but not so whimsical to overlook the element of darkness in the fairies. It's not necessarily a Tinkerbell fairy, this is more traditional, like Celtic folkloric fairies. I also associate the novel with spring; there's a lot of rejuvenation and rebirth, and there's a theme of gardening in it. There is romance, a little bit, and fun creatures throughout that were fun to research and fun to write.
It's historical fiction, it's romance, it's fantasy, it's dark, it's funny, it's light--it's a little bit of all the things.
Yes, kind of everything. My personal description for it is something like Labyrinth, something Jim Henson-y meets period drama. A fantasy period drama. Sort of a Downton Abbey vibe, but with the three stages of a trial.
What made you think to combine the historical fiction and the fantastical fiction the way you did?
I love them both, and I'm interested in that overlap of origins and the truth and the tale, although it doesn't have to be the only truth. And that specific time in British history, after World War I, was really the dissolution of the manor house. All these men had died, and death taxes were so high that many families couldn't afford to keep up the houses. So this idea that I had of something happening fantastically also fit in historically with what was happening at that time.
That feels true of Mouse's cousin and brother, who are both talked about a lot on the page but don't actually appear in the book itself. As I was researching, it really struck me how that loss was like a cannon blast in the middle of society, a hole where all of the men who had died once were, and where they should have been in the narrative. Their absence is heavy and can be felt, because it would have been felt by the characters in the book.
And Mouse only inherits because they are gone. Except her brother is still alive, just incapable of inheriting, so that's another wound. In a fairy tale, maybe he would have been restored to who he was, but in real life, it's important to know that not everyone gets fully restored, and that's okay, and they can still live full lives even if it's not the life they might have had. So in this setting and this time, there are faeries, but there's also real-world problems.
For the historical elements, how did you set about your research into World War I history?
The Fae stuff was more like unconscious research, because I consume so much of that media anyway. The World War I topics were more intense research. There's a great podcast called "Not So Quiet on the Western Front," and it goes into incredible detail on different aspects of the war. At first, I planned to set the book during the war, so I did loads of research on trench warfare and weapons, zeppelins and bombing raids. It really challenged my thinking about World War I; there were not that many bombing raids, and the Germans didn't have tanks! Then I turned to more of the home front history. I watched an episode of Mavericks on YouTube, where they talked about women nurses during the war, and even that wasn't all that common at first, becoming more allowable later in the war. And, after a time, the British army stopped bringing home the bodies of dead soldiers. All of those soldiers' bodies are buried out there. That created this kind of national trauma that you can still feel in the U.K. today; every village has a WWI monument.
That was all kind of dark, and then there were times when I was like, okay, I've got to go do some fantasy research, because these statistics are so depressing.
That reminds me of the missing father in A Little Princess.
I grew up reading A Little Princess. And then I read The Secret Garden right as I was starting to write this book, and that very much influenced the shape of Thistlemarsh, particularly in Mouse's relationship with her brother and cousin.
When you needed a break from the more bleak historical research around the war, what did you look to? Fairy tales and lore?
I went to school in the U.K. I was in Edinburgh for four years, and there was so much of that just in the daily world there, just in the town, a lot of heraldry. And I've always been interested in fantasy stuff. I grew up reading Diana Wynne Jones, that kind of thing. In high school, I got really into fairy lore and any kind of fairy tale, and that interest continued into adulthood. I listen to a lot of folklore podcasts, like "Grim Reaping," where they give historical and political background on Grimm's Fairy Tales. And then "Three Ravens" podcast, which goes over the folklore of each county in England. Fairies in particular interest me when they get to the more mischievous side of the stories. My favorite tale as a kid was Rumpelstiltskin, and I love the movie Labyrinth and the novel Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and many of Robin McKinley's books, where fairies may even be trying to be helpful, but they often mess up. There's a twist in the tale, and that's what's interesting to me, a twist on what we think we know. --Kerry McHugh