C.L. Clark tells us about her new fantasy book, The Unbroken

Action, politics, magic, and a heart-wrenching romance: The Unbroken is one of the year’s first major fantasy novels. Author C.L. Clark tells us about it.

The Unbroken is C.L. Clark’s debut novel, and the first in her Magic of the Lost trilogy. It’s a gritty fantasy that tells the story of a soldier caught between two worlds. Touraine Sand is a conscript of the Balladairan Empire, taken from her ancestral homeland of Qazāl as a child to serve in the imperial army. The story begins with Touraine returning to Qazāl as an adult, a cog in the imperial machine meant to enforce the colony’s subservience. She is constantly forced to walk the knife’s edge between loyalty to the two nations, all while trying to keep her fellow conscripts safe from both the Qazāli rebels and Balladairan officers who view them as expendable second class citizens. Things are further complicated when she has a run-in with Luca Ancier, the princess of Balladaire, who has come to Qazāl in order to prove her worth as a ruler by creating a lasting peace there.

Of course, things are rarely so simple in The Unbroken. This story was unpredictable right down to the bitter end.

To celebrate the novel’s release, C.L. Clark stopped by to talk about writing, the publishing industry, and how she created the vivid world of The Unbroken. Interview following this gorgeous cover art:

DANIEL ROMAN: For the readers who might not be familiar with your work yet, can you talk a little bit about how Magic of the Lost came to be? What was the genesis of this series?

C.L. CLARK: Sure! So the Magic of the Lost series came out of the melding of a few classes I was in during college, a Francophone African literature course, a literary theory English course where we talked about more post-colonial literature, and an independent study where I looked at the ways in which women are allowed to be violent, specifically causing harm to others. (Overwhelmingly, the answer was, in defense of themselves and of children, but rarely were they allowed to be warriors for the sake of glory as men so often were in fantasy.) With all of these thoughts in my head, I just had this scene that kept popping up, of a colonial conscript executing her countryfolk and not being all that torn up about it. Not at first, anyway…

DR: I read on your blog that you met your literary agent through the Twitter pitch event PitMad. What has the journey been like to go from that event through to releasing The Unbroken? Has there been anything in particular that surprised you about the process?

CLC: I did! It’s been pretty awesome, honestly, Mary is amazing. I actually didn’t sign with her for two years after I first queried. She liked the partial that I sent her, but it was fire season in California so she was holding off on requests. We didn’t actually connect until a couple of years later when I had taken the book through one last round of revisions. I’m learning new things all the time through this process, but I honestly don’t know if anything surprises me — wait, no, I was (and am) surprised by just how quickly publishing can move. We all hear so much about the glacial pace of publishing, but in reality, sometimes it’s only slow on the outside. Sometimes, only a year may pass from contract to publication, which means that year is crammed full. So though it feels torturously slow because I want to see my book on shelves, if it were any faster…oof.

DR: I’d imagine that releasing a debut novel has its own set of challenges even in the most normal of times, which obviously these are not. Has the pandemic affected your release in any particular ways? 

CLC: Honestly, if it has, it’s been in ways unknown to me from the writing side. The primary thing is how much of book promotion is digital events. I don’t think they were quite as prevalent until the past year, but now it’s become a bit of a welcome equalizer — anyone can do a reading at a bookstore because you don’t have to be near them and so don’t have to pay to travel. That said, it does mean it’s hard to do book signings, so it also looks like there’s a rise of book swag and bookplates.

Now how it’s affected my writing process…heh. Heheh. We don’t have to talk about that.

DR: Something that really sets The Unbroken apart from other fantasy stories is how richly realized the city of El-Wast and the various cultures clashing there are. I read on your website that you do quite a bit of traveling, so I was curious: how much have your own travels informed your worldbuilding? And are there any real world places (either that you’ve been to or not) which particularly inspired you?

CLC: My travels do inform my worldbuilding a lot, yeah. I have stories rattling around in my head with rainy seasons like India, crunchy anchovy snacks like Taiwan, tea habits like Morocco…travel is a great way to remind yourself that the Anglo/European world of manners and customs isn’t ubiquitous and encourages creativity in worldbuilding. And as The Unbroken is inspired by the colonial relationship between France and North Africa, I did go to Morocco to study Arabic and learn a bit more about how legacies of colonialism shape a place. Where the colonial power’s sort of…carcass remains, how people reclaim a city. What remains or blooms again of the original cultures. It’s really interesting because technically the US is also a colonial state, but in the absence of a revolution against the settlers, it’s a little harder to find these abutments. It just kind of consumes whatever new comes out. Sorry, that’s a little bit of a tangent.

DR: Let’s talk about Touraine and Luca for a minute. Their relationship has such a complex give and take. Can you talk a little about how you developed their complicated relationship, and how you managed to keep it unpredictable right through to the very last page?

CLC: I’m glad you found it to be unpredictable. I don’t think they are pleased about it, though. It’s hard, though, because Luca is not an excellent person, though she thinks she is, and compared to other Balladairans, she’s sterling — but that’s not always enough, especially when the power within a couple is so unbalanced. One of my favorite tropes is “enemies-to-lovers.” Love it, don’t know why, but I think it’s the idea of hatred being so close to love — to hate someone properly, you have to be so intimate with them. So I’ve always talked about Luca and Touraine as “enemies-to-lo-ene–???” because…if Luca wants to convince Touraine that she’s not full of shit, she’s gonna have to do something miraculous. And honestly, even I’m not sure if she’s capable of it… Add in Touraine’s own very complicated feelings about Balladaire, and you get a relationship that’s not really going to be a seamless matter of chemistry. Love itself would be a political choice, and it’s also a choice about agency — I think it would be very hard to love someone unguardedly if you lacked agency in the relationship and were aware of that power differential. It could be tinged with all sorts of things — avoidance, denial, resentment…

DR: Was there any one scene of The Unbroken which was your favorite to write, and why? Conversely, was there any scene or plot/character element that was especially difficult to get down?  (Speaking cryptically to avoid spoilers, of course)

CLC: YES. My favorite scenes are the ones with Touraine and a certain rebel. Coincidentally, this was also the hardest to nail down, because originally this character was…someone else. The draft didn’t really come together until I made this change, though, and then I knew. One of my favorite throughlines in the whole book. Mmmm.

DR: One of the many things I loved about The Unbroken was how you play with the idea of who “belongs” to a culture (ie. Qazāli who were abducted and raised in the Balladairan empire, Balladairan nobles who have only ever lived in Qazāl). Can you talk a little about how you approached this idea?

CLC: It’s a very common topic among diaspora and immigrant folks, actually. It’s complicated to be an emigrant from a place if you still have ties to it, and complicated to not have ties to ancestral homes — or to not even know what those homes might be. And then complicated relationships with family who remained in the homeland, all of that. It comes up in a lot of what I read, and I talk about it among my friends, too. There are a lot of power dynamics at play in this, too, though; I think about the power of an American or European passport or accent, and how that opens doors in other countries because of the assumption of money, for example, or diplomatic protection. And if that’s in a place you almost want to call home, but you’re set apart from it…a lot of complicated feelings live in that space. And this isn’t even touching on actual language barriers.

DR: Can you give us any hints about what lies ahead in the series?

CLC: [insert smiling face with single tear]

There will probably be a couple of new POVs from some characters you know — or at least, have heard of. Well, I’ll also add that I intend to make good on some of those promises I made in those last chapters. I hope.

DR: Before publishing The Unbroken, you were already a pretty well-established short story author. Where can readers go to check out some of those stories?

CLC: I’ve got stories at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, and at PodCastle! And a new one will drop at BCS the same week as the novel! They’re very much in my brand of bitter/sweet complicated queer love.

DR: To end on a lighter note…what are the three most recent stories you’ve immersed yourself in and really enjoyed? 

CLC: I’ve been lucky enough to get a few ARCs, actually, and so two stories that I still can’t get out of my mind are She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker Chan and The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri. Both some good complicated queer romance that will probably end in no small amount of heartache — I think I mentioned earlier that that’s my jam? BUT, in the interests of variety, I am looking forward to sinking properly into Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell, which promises something a bit warmer.

DR: Thanks so much for joining us to talk about The Unbroken! The book is fantastic, and we can’t wait to see where you take the series from here!

CLC: Thank you so much for having me! It was a pleasure.

The Unbroken is out on March 23. Watch out for our review of the novel next week!

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels