Kate Furnivall is a British historical novelist known for sweeping stories of love, conflict and survival set against the political upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Raised in Wales, she studied English at university in London and later worked in advertising before becoming a novelist. Her interest in historical fiction was sparked by discovering the story of her Russian grandmother, who fled the Bolshevik Revolution and escaped through China. That family history inspired Furnivall’s first novel, The Russian Concubine, which became a New York Times bestseller. Her subsequent research has taken her across Russia, China, Malaysia, Egypt, Italy and France, and she places particular emphasis on memoirs and contemporary accounts when reconstructing everyday life.
Furnivall’s novels typically combine romance and adventure with periods of revolution, war and political instability. The Russian Concubine, The Concubine’s Secret and The Jewel of St Petersburg explore revolutionary Russia and its aftermath, while Under a Blood Red Sky turns to Stalinist repression. Other novels range across wartime Malaya in The White Pearl, Egypt in Shadows on the Nile, Fascist Italy in The Italian Wife, occupied and post-war Europe in The Liberation, The Survivors and Child of the Ruins, and 1930s Paris in The Crash. Across these books Furnivall tends to place fictional families and relationships inside major historical crises, using displacement, divided loyalties and political danger to drive both the adventure and the emotional drama.
