A Q&A with Brigitte Knightley, Author of July Indie Next List Top Pick “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy”

Bookselling This Week: A lot of readers will recognize you for your previous fanfic work. How has the transition to traditional publishing been for you? 

Brigitte Knightley: It has been both surreal and fabulous. I feel so spoiled to have a whole team of industry professionals supporting me (shoutout to the teams at Berkley on the US side and Orbit in the UK); it’s been brilliant to be able to pick their brains on All The Things, from developmental edits to opinions on worldbuilding dilemmas to finicky grammatical questions.

BTW: What did your writing process look like for this title? Our Dearly Beloathed protagonists are enemies based on the roles they play in society, so I’d love to hear more about building out this world and the character’s roles in it.

BK: Well, they say to write what you want to read, and Irresistible is just that — the slow-burn fantasy romance I’ve been yearning for, with a STEM twist.

You are so right to point out the antagonism between the leads stemming from their roles in society: Osric is an assassin, Aurienne is a healer. He thinks she’s an uptight, insufferable do-gooder, she thinks he’s the scum of the earth.  This healer/killer dichotomy and its built-in animosity was the principal driver of the story. It set Osric and Aurienne up to be one another’s antithesis on basically every plane possible (professionally, ethically, systemically) and prepared the terrain for some delicious slow burn yearning and angst for when feelings (forbidden!) start to develop.

Funnily, I set Osric and Aurienne up to be polar opposites, but as the story progressed, I discovered that they were also very similar: highly competent in their respective fields, and consequently arrogant and self-important. It was fun to have them navigate this realization at the same time as I did!

BTW: If you could bring use/bring one power from this world into ours, which would it be? (I personally think shadow-walking is cool as heck, but I couldn’t argue with the convenience of the waystones.)

BK: Ooh, the waystones are a good shout! Who doesn’t want real-world fast travel?

If I had to choose only one thing… In the world of Irresistible everyone has a deofol, a (usually rather chatty) animal familiar. Conjuring them takes up magical energy, but they are worth it for the cheeky remarks.

BTW: The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy is the first in a duology! And I already can’t wait for the sequel. Do you know what you’ll be working on after this series?

BK: I would love to stay in the Tīendoms (the alternate UK in which the duology is set) but focus on some of the other Orders in that world (Magical engineers! Hedgewitches! Mind-controlling weirdos!)

BTW: Can you tell us a little bit about the role of books and indie bookstores in your life?

BK: As a kid, I loved nothing more than my mum running errands on a Saturday, because she would drop me off at the local bookshop while she did so. It was a glorious moment, to enter that bookshop: the door jangled, the smell of the books hit, the bookseller called a greeting from behind shelves, and I went off to find them for recommendations for my next adventure. And then, for two to three hours, I was gone, deeply absorbed in some new series (I had an intense The Famous Five phase, a hardcore Tintin phase, a Redwall era).

I was always late being picked up afterwards. Mum had to toot the horn to bring me back to earth. I never understood — and still don’t understand — quite what happens to time, when plunged in a book’s pages. (Are they books or are they spells?)