Patricia Furstenberg, Writer of Historical Fiction, Children's Books
Travel via Stories
Chasing Dracula at Tihuța Pass, one Saint Andrew’s Eve when the wolves are said to speak and the living seal their doors with garlic, I strode that winding road. Between Fiction and the Carpathians was born there, where the veil thins and the line between myth and memory fades.
Continue reading “Chasing Dracula at Tihuța Pass, Between Fiction and the Carpathians”
On All Saints’ Night, when the veil between the living and the dead grows thin, I return through story to my Transylvanian roots. The Night of Returning Souls, written for Romania Insider is my take on the folklore and ghostly legends that haunt October.
Continue reading “The Night of Returning Souls, It’s All Saints’ Night”
In my new historical fiction When Secrets Bloom out 27 June, Vlad Dracula is no more than a memory, but oh, what a memory he is. He haunts the story not as a specter of horror, but as a mentor whose shadow shaped the life of the novel’s protagonist, Kate, a Saxon healer caught between duty and accusation in 15th-century Transylvania.
Continue reading “What Would You Do if Vlad Dracula Wrote to You?”
Pressed Poppies is a short story told through two voices, echoing across the quiet space where hearts once met. It is a story of parting. A parting that is wordless, weighted, and irreversible. Where affection shrinks under the burden of duty or pain; where all that was left is unsaid. What remains is remembrance: delicate, haunting and full of questions. And red, as the poppies once shared.
Out on Spillwords Press today!
The great halls of Wallachia’s courts echoed with the deep voices of rulers, their boyars and foreign envoys hammering out treaties, forging alliances and, more often than not, deciding the fates of women before they were old enough to understand their worth beyond the ink of a marriage contract. In Moldavia, daughters of noble houses were bartered like fine silks, their marriages securing fragile truces with the Poles, the Hungarians, the upcoming Russians and even Sultans. In Transylvania, a land where Saxon merchants, Székelys warriors and Hungarian lords vied for influence, the Romanians or Vlachs out of the way, noblewomen walked a careful line between tradition and opportunity, sometimes inheriting estates or trading privileges—but always within the confines set by men.
Continue reading “Daring Queens and Their Surprising Influences in Medieval Romania”