Background
Jacqueline Park was born in 1925 in Winnipeg, Canada.
https://www.amazon.com/Son-Two-Fathers-Grazia-Trilogy/dp/148700396X/?tag=2022091-20
https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Book-Grazia-dei-Rossi/dp/1770898891/?tag=2022091-20
(Set in 16th-century Istanbul during the illustrious Ottom...)
Set in 16th-century Istanbul during the illustrious Ottoman Empire, The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi chronicles the fate of Grazia’s son, Danilo, and his forbidden love affair with Princess Saida, the Sultan’s beloved daughter. Judah del Medigo, Jewish physician to the Sultan at the Ottoman court and husband of Grazia dei Rossi, has been misinformed that his son, Danilo, perished at sea on the way to Istanbul. When the two are eventually reunited, Judah’s first thought is to resign from the Sultan’s service to devote himself to his son’s recovery. But the Great Suleiman is not about to give up his valued Chief Body Physician. A ruler accustomed to getting his way, the Sultan proposes a bargain: he offers the boy a place in the harem school for royal children, plus the services of his own mother as guardian while the doctor is absent during campaign season in Baghdad. It is an opportunity that Judah cannot deny his son. A tantalizing look at life in the Ottoman court, The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi is a sweeping historical romance and the long-awaited follow-up to the international sensation The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi.
https://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Grazia-dei-Rossi/dp/1770898921/?tag=2022091-20
Jacqueline Park was born in 1925 in Winnipeg, Canada.
Park earned degrees in economics.
Park liked to write as a child and had her first short story published in the Winnipeg Free Press when she was only eleven. But immediately after this, Park stopped writing fiction. She began a teaching career, and also began writing for film and television. Park joined the Dramatic Writing Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she became professor emerita. Fifty years after the appearance of her first story, however, Park turned her attention back to fiction and wrote the novel The Secret Book of Grazia Dei Rossi.
The novel, based on extensive research, is set in Renaissance Italy and purports to be the “secret book” that the heroine, Grazia dei Rossi, addresses to her son. Though she had written for television and film before attempting a novel, Park did a detective story “as a writing exercise” before starting The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi - “just to see if I could sustain over three hundred pages.” Adapted from one of Park’s TV scripts, Charlie’s Back in Town, published as a crime paperback, was hailed by New York Times Book Review crime columnist Newgate Callendar as a “fast-moving and competently written” genre piece.
Park is also the founding chairman of the Dramatic Writing Program and professor emerita at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Park is an acclaimed novelist, currently working on the third installment of a three-part literary saga that began with The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi, a remarkable 15th-century Italian Jewish woman, and continues with newly published The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi, about the travails of Grazia’s son in the court of the Ottoman ruler, Suleiman the Great.
(Set in 16th-century Istanbul during the illustrious Ottom...)
Quotations:
“I came from television, where the motto is: Always leave room for a sequel.”
“But what do I know of the minds of these high Christians who say one thing and do another and then refer to their religion as the justification?”
In an Amazon interview, Park admitted that she enjoys reading diaries, letters, and autobiographies. She also noted a taste for nineteenth-century novels, especially the books of Jane Austen. But she said she relied on the works of Charles Dickens as a model in her own fiction because “He’s much easier to learn from.”
