Bryn Turnbull Turns to WWII Fiction in 'The Paris Deception'

Internationally bestselling author, Bryn Turbull, visits Writer’s Voices to share her latest historical fiction, The Paris Deception. Set in Nazi-occupied Paris, her novel follows two women, Sophie, an art conservator, and her estranged sister-in-law, Fabienne, a bohemian artist, as they work together to replace stolen “Degenerate” art, a collection of modern art specifically hated by Hitler and the Nazis, with very skillful forgeries. While the forgeries in the book are fictional, the stolen artwork from Jewish families by the Nazis was real. According to Turnbull, “There are always cases that still come up today of this Nazi-looted art, these art collections that belong to families that they were taken from all across Europe, Jewish families predominantly, and to this day we are still having cases where this art is being found… This artwork occasionally comes up in museum collections and we learned that it was looted from Jewish families, and so that really interested me and it’s a historical injustice that still has yet to be put right. To this day, I think there’s 100,000 works of art that are still unaccounted for that rightfully belong to these Jewish families that they were stolen from.”

For as long as she could remember, Turnbull was always a writer and storyteller. She recalled, “My parents would tell you that I was making up stories from the time I knew what stories were.” Never thinking writing was a career option, she resisted pursuing the craft for a long time and worked at a desk job instead. Eventually, with the encouragement of her parents, she finally decided to start her first book. “… I worked really hard and I was incredibly fortunate in that this book, my first book, got picked up and I’ve been writing ever since and I’m onto number four now that I’m working on it and I am so, so conscious of how incredibly fortunate that I am to be able to tell these stories of these characters that fascinate me…” Regarding her preferred genre, historical fiction, “one of the things that really draws me in… is the stories of women caught in the cracks of history… I really find myself drawn to that, drawn to being able to tell women’s stories and tell these stories of a historical time that we might think we know but from that different perspective.”