Three Things About Daughter of Genoa (Mild Spoilers)
I’m blogging every day in the run-up to the US release of Daughter of Genoa. ***Warning: today’s post contains some spoilers for the shape and structure of the plot, but without specific details.***
Sometimes a story will arrive with you more or less ready, and all you have to do is develop it on the page. Daughter of Genoa was not one of those stories. Today I’m presenting three facts about the book: one for each year I spent working on it, from conception to final proofread.
It was written in response to The Exorcist
This isn’t unique to Daughter of Genoa. Everything I’ve written in recent years has been some kind of response to The Exorcist. Writers are (and should be) avid readers, but there are books that stay with you – works that lodge deep in your subconscious and keep on provoking you into thought. William Peter Blatty’s messy, spectacular and profoundly human novel is one of mine. I don’t like everything about the book, and I’m certainly not in tune with the underlying theology. But it always raises new questions and creative impulses, so I return to it often.
“He lifted the Host in consecration with an aching remembrance of the joy it once gave him; felt again, as he did each morning, the pang of an unexpected glimpse from afar and unnoticed of a long-lost love.”
I’ll write more about Father Vittorio in a future post. But he’s definitely a spiritual cousin of Damien Karras: that reluctant hero, that quietly broken man who helps others while struggling to carry the burden of his own Jesuit vocation. A man who once became a priest because the alternative was unliveable, and who ends up paying for that choice with his whole self.
I first read The Exorcist when I was studying theology and contemplating a dissertation project about Jesuit attitudes to exorcism. That project never came to fruition, but my engagement with the book and its world isn’t over yet.
On fake Jesuit colleges and histfic bloopers →
The original ending was different
When I wrote the first draft of Daughter of Genoa, I was mindful that many readers strongly prefer a satisfying ending: a cathartic one, where everything is tied up. This is a completely valid preference, and I wanted to honour it. So I did my best to write an ending that would fit the bill, bringing my heroine Anna back to the newly liberated city and having her discover the fates of Massimo, Father Vittorio and the other people who had become so important to her.
It didn’t work. In fact, every one of my trusted readers told me how terrible it was. I ended up slashing 20,000 words from the end of the manuscript and going back to revise from the beginning. So why did it go so badly when it was such a good idea in theory? There are a few reasons, but here are the main ones.
It didn’t fit with the setting. In wartime Italy, if you lost sight of someone, it could be years or even decades before you discovered what had happened to them – if you ever found out at all. This was especially true if they were deported to a concentration camp or vanished into the Nazi prison system. Trying to tie up everyone’s storylines within a reasonable amount of space meant compressing the action to a degree that just didn’t ring true.
It isn’t the kind of ending I myself like to read. Some of the books I love do have a very neat ending, or a “ten years later” epilogue. But given the choice, it’s not what I seek out. I gravitate to open endings, even if they are abrupt or shocking. So it’s not surprising I couldn’t quite pull off the kind of ending I don’t enjoy as a reader.
It felt right to give Father Vittorio the last word. This point is extremely subjective and personal! But the more I thought about it, the more appropriate it felt to end the book with his last scene.
So that’s how Daughter of Genoa came to end as it does: with one character facing death and the rest scattered. I’m definitely aware that this won’t satisfy everyone. But ultimately, I had to choose the solution that was right for my story.
I had help from the Society of Authors
Did you know that the Society of Authors offers grants for works in progress? The Authors’ Foundation scheme is open to authors who have been previously published by, or who have a contract with, a commercial UK publisher. Applications are open year-round, so you can apply for financial support at any time.
Thanks to my Authors’ Foundation grant, I was able to focus on writing and research at a crucial time in the book’s development, when my always-precarious freelancer life was more than usually stressful. I would recommend any author who qualifies to apply to the SoA. For more details, check out the very helpful FAQ here. There’s also a Contingency Fund for working authors who are in urgent financial need – those who have published two books or more should also consider approaching the Royal Literary Fund.
If things are getting on top of you, the SoA and RLF are there to help.
Daughter of Genoa is published in the US on December 9, 2025. Coming soon: more about Father Vittorio.