But as an adult, you start to learn how you work inside the world. When you’re a kid, you learn how the world works. There’s regime change, there’s religious fights, and of course Hild herself was going through all sorts of life stuff that she didn’t go through as a kid. There’s so much stuff that happened during this era. So now I have this book that’s about 45% longer than Hild, and covers maybe a third of the ground that Hild did. So eventually, I just thought, fuck it, and and just decided to do four years instead of 16 or 14 or 15 years. I kept trying to fit too many words into too small a pot, and I kept hitting problems with it. But once I got going, I realized that if I kept to that chronology, the book would end up being a million words. Whereas Menewood, the second book, I had intended for it to go from her being 18 to 33. The first Hild book covers a longer period in Hild’s life, it’s from her birth…

You’ve just finished the first draft of Book Two of Hild. Following the completion of the first draft of Menewood, the much anticipated sequel to Hild, Griffith was kind enough to speak to The Fantasy Hive over Skype.

Since then, Griffith has written an incredible range of fantastic novels, from the near-future SF of Slow River (1995) to the noir trilogy The Blue Place (1998), Stay (2002) and Always (2007), which follows the adventures of badass bodyguard/PI Aud Torvingen, to Hild (2013), the first book in a historical epic that follows the life of St. Nicola Griffith’s iconic debut novel Ammonite (1992) won the James Tiptree, Jr Award and the Lamda Literary Award on its initial release, and signified the emergence of a special new talent in speculative fiction.

Spear nicola griffith review