What is your book A String of Silver Beads about?
It follows the story of a young Moroccan woman in medieval Morocco who craves freedom and adventure. She is forbidden to race her camel or to travel the trade routes, so instead she marries a warrior who is creating a new empire across North Africa and most of Spain, thinking that this will lead to a life of adventure. But he has a powerful queen, which leads to a bitter rivalry and difficult choices ahead.
How did you come up with the idea for this book?
I was in Morocco on holiday and the guidebook I had talked about Berber jewellery, which is very beautiful and highly symbolic, for example it is given at certain stages of your life. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a novel where each chapter is one item of jewellery given to a woman as she moves through her life - and then I found a moment in Morocco’s history where a Muslim warrior named Yusuf bin Tashfin united the whole of North Africa and a large part of Spain under his rule, creating a new empire. He was an interesting man and had a very powerful queen, Zaynab, at his side, who bore him many children. But he gave his empire to his son with a Christian slave girl which I found an odd choice, so I started weaving a story around these facts and ended up creating a series told through the eyes of four different women which tells what happened.
