Pub Day Spotlight: Chris Bohjalian
Celebrating The Jackal's Mistress
Boy, do we love Chris Bohjalian here at Friends & Fiction. We are thrilled to be able to celebrate his pub day today for The Jackal’s Mistress with this Pub Day Spotlight interview. Chris’s new book is being met with rave reviews across the board, including a trifecta of starred reviews from Library Journal (“page-turner…vividly drawn characters…compelling”), Booklist (“elegant, poignant, and richly atmospheric”), and Kirkus (“a masterful yarn”). The Washington Post calls the book “a moving tale about the difficult choices people must make in dangerous circumstances,” and the Minnesota Star Tribune says, “it’s hard not to get pulled in from the first sentence....The Jackal’s Mistress gallops along, sweeping us up in its heart-pounding final pages.” We think this is Chris Bohjalian at the absolute top of his game as a master of historical suspense. And we’re honored he took the time to talk to us here today.
Dubbed a Civil War “Romeo and Juliet,” by your publisher, your latest novel (your 25th!) is sweeping historical fiction in which a Vermonter and a Virginian navigate the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence. That’s a tiny bit of what the book is about. Can you tell us a little more?
The Jackal’s Mistress was inspired by a true story of remarkable courage and grace in the Civil War. In September 1864, a Vermont officer was left to die in an abandoned rebel farmhouse when the Union army pressed deeper into the Shenandoah Valley. But the young wife of a Confederate soldier — the fellow captured the previous year at Gettysburg and now missing somewhere in the vast, Union prison camp system — and two formerly enslaved people risked their lives that autumn to try and keep him alive.
I wrote about the episode for Reader’s Digest in 2003, but it never crossed my mind there was a novel in it. Back then, I was writing contemporary-set novels such as Midwives and Trans-Sister Radio.
When I was in Richmond, Virginia in 2022, however, I felt the weight of history and was reminded of that article. And, by then, I had written five novels that were historical fiction. So, when I returned to Vermont, I re-read the magazine story and knew instantly there was a kernel for one heck of a love story. Moreover, it seemed to me that if our nation ever needed stories of courage and healing, it was now.
It seems to me that this novel explores themes of trust, suspicion, and loyalty, of the impact of war on our humanity, and what it means to be a good person. Did you have these or other themes in mind as you set out to write this book? In other words, one of our favorite questions at Friends & Fiction is: what’s the book really about?
In 2012, I published, The Sandcastle Girls, a love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide. I’m a grandson of two survivors. The novel educated perhaps millions of people around the world to a part of history they had known nothing about: the Ottoman Empire’s systematic annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians and the ethnic cleansing of its Armenian minority from everywhere but Constantinople during the First World War.
Had I written a memoir of my grandparents’ experiences during the Genocide, very few people would have read it.
Often, however, we will approach the toughest parts of history through fiction, which is why I love to read and write historical novels. So, The Jackal’s Mistress is a reminder of why the Civil War happened and why it mattered — and why an accurate moral compass might be the most important part of the human soul.
This book takes us to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1864. It’s a land fraught with conflict, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth between North and South, under constant threat of itself becoming a battlefield. What research did you have to do to bring this place and time so vividly alive on the page? I saw a video snippet you posted online with a towering stack of source material. How long in the making was The Jackal’s Mistress?
Yes, you really have to do your homework when writing a novel, whether it’s historical fiction or a police procedural. You never want to wake the reader from what John Gardner called the “fictional dream” with inauthenticity — bad research. As Civil War historian Howard Coffin told me when I interviewed him about the Vermont Brigade, if I didn’t have my facts right, I would hear from a lot of readers.
So, I read primary sources (letters and memoirs), histories, and the great novels written about the war. I also interviewed historians, some with a particular niche, such as Dr. Ken Borie, who taught me a lot about Civil War medicine. And, with my lovely bride, Victoria Blewer — who is both a great photographer and my first reader — I traveled from the Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, through Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, into the Shenandoah Valley (with a day at the site of the Third Battle of Winchester), and south to Richmond, Virginia.
Ask me about bone saws. (Wait: please, don’t.)
My favorite part, of course, was actually writing the novel, and living in the minds of my fictional hero (Vermonter Jonathan Weybridge) and heroine (Virginian Libby Steadman), and seeing where their stories would lead me.
Let’s talk about your characters in this novel. Libby Steadman is the wife of a missing Confederate soldier. By night, she’s filled with longing for her husband she fears is dead in a Union prison camp. By day, she’s hard-working, running a gristmill that provides grain to the Confederate Army. Where did Libby come from? How much is based on an actual person and how much did you fictionalize?
We know little about Bettie Van Metre, the inspiration for Libby Steadman. In 1864, she was 24, married to Peter Van Metre, and with the help of two formerly enslaved people, Dick and Ginny Runner, running her husband’s gristmill and raising her 10-year-old niece. She once wrote that she tried to save the life of a Vermont solider because she would have wanted a Yankee woman to try and save her husband’s life, had he been left to die far from home.
But let’s be clear: Libby Steadman is not Bettie Van Metre.
What mattered to me a great deal while writing this novel was this: I wanted to reverse the Civil War tropes when we think of “demure” nineteenth-century women and “courageous” nineteenth-century men. In my novel, Libby Steadman is a wonderful badass: charismatic and smart and going to do what it takes to get what she wants and do the right thing.
How about Captain Jonathan Weybridge? He too is so vividly drawn. At first labeled a jackal by Libby’s young niece, Jubilee, we soon come to see his human decency. How much is real versus made up, and what inspired Jonathan for you on the page?
We know a bit more about Henry Bedell, the inspiration for Jonathan Weybridge. His story was chronicled over a few pages in Aldace Walker’s 1869 memoir, The Vermont Brigade in the Shenandoah Valley. Bedell was a farmer in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, a lieutenant, with a family back home. Walker was the Middlebury College valedictorian, class of 1862, but by 1865 had already risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel. When Bedell had a leg and much of one hand blown off in a battle with Jubal Early’s Confederates in 1864, it was Walker who put a tourniquet around Bedell’s thigh that saved his life. Still, Walker assumed Bedell was going perish once his leg had been amputated.
My fictional Yankee officer, Captain Jonathan Weybridge, has the injuries of Bedell and the voice of Walker.
And, again, this is a novel. Most of the story is “made up.”
You write women so well. The Booklist review for The Jackal’s Mistress says, “Elegant, poignant, and richly atmospheric. . .Bohjalian once again demonstrates his profound respect for women, endowing his female protagonists with depth and nuance.” To what do you attribute this uncanny ability to create such complex, nuanced, deeply human, and incredibly believable female characters?
Thank you. I’m honored you feel that way.
I’ve always been fortunate to be surrounded by women much smarter than I am, beginning with my wife — who has read all 3.6 million of my published words before anyone else. I’ve also had only two editors in my thirty years with Penguin Random House — Shaye Areheart from 1995 to 2010, and Jenny Jackson from 2010 through the present — and both of them are brilliant. Jackson is also the wonderful novelist who gave us Pineapple Street.
You really know how to ratchet up the tension. You are a master at slow burn historical suspense. Talk to us about your craft. Do you begin with character or plot? Do you outline? Do you always know where the story is going before you set pen to paper, or does it flow out of you as you go?
I begin with a vague premise: a midwife is on trial after a home birth ends tragically; a flight attendant who’s a functional alcoholic wakes up next to a dead body in a hotel bed far from home; a lonely woman in 1864 is faced with what looks like a no-win predicament that will endanger herself, her niece, and her friends.
Then I let my characters take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story. I never have an outline.
But Doctorow once observed that writing a novel is like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see 200 or so feet ahead of you, but usually you get where you’re going.
Chris, you are such a chameleon as a writer. No one could ever accuse you of being a one-trick pony. Over the course of your 25 novels, you’ve introduced us to binge-drinking flight attendants, Italian cops, midwives, homeless teenagers, Hollywood starlets, Holocaust survivors, Princess Diana impersonators on the Las Vegas strip, and 17th-century women accused of witchcraft. Your books have explored the Armenian Genocide, Puritan theology, the rise of cryptocurrency, climate change, the Vietnam War, the foster care system, and a safari in the Serengeti. Do you find it challenging to swing so wildly between genres, time periods, and character types? How do you determine where you want to go next?
I write about whatever has me passionately interested at the moment. If I find myself bored at my desk in the morning, that’s a pretty good sign I should abort mission and try something new — because if it’s not exciting me as I write it, it sure won’t excite others as they read it.
And, yes, I do hope never to write the same book twice.
On that note, can you tell us what’s coming next from you?
Look for THE AMATEUR in August of 2026. In 1978, a young golfer with the LPGA firmly within her sights, has her life completely derailed when she accidentally drives a golf ball into a caddy’s head, killing him instantly. It has punk clubs, college doxing, horrible older men (imagine), and some perilous courtroom drama.
How can our community connect with you online and in-person on book tour?
Oh, gosh, you can find me on all the socials ( @chrisbohjalian ), or my website ( www.chrisbohjalian.com ), or in the flesh at all these venues on the book tour: https://chrisbohjalian.com/meet-chris/
About the Author
CHRIS BOHJALIAN is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five books, including The Princess of Las Vegas, The Lioness, Hour of the Witch, Midwives, and The Flight Attendant, which has been made into a Max limited series starring Kaley Cuoco. His other books include The Red Lotus; The Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; and The Double Bind. His novels Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers were made into movies, and his work has been translated into more than thirty- five languages. He is also a playwright (The Club, Wingspan, and Midwives). He lives in Vermont and can be found at chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Litsy, and Goodreads.
About the Book
In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she’s willing to risk for the life of a stranger, from the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls.
Virginia, 1864—Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield.
And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy—but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible decision: Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband?
A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal’s Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.
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