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Going into writing The Stars of Heaven, I knew I would be doing a lot of research. Any work of historical fiction means hitting the books. However, this novel required a special level of digging, mostly because when I started writing it, I knew next to nothing about Portuguese history. In fact, the idea for the book itself came from an unlikely source—a video game. While playing Assassin’s Creed: Rogue one Saturday, my husband and I came to a scene where the player causes a massive earthquake in Lisbon. While the cause in the game was obviously fictional, we knew the creators of that series used real historical events as a backing, and we doubted they would entirely invent something as large as a city being destroyed for a plot point. As both my husband and I are history nerds, this sent us down the rabbit hole of trying to find out about this event we’d never heard about. What we found was one of the most important historical events that seemingly no one—at least no one who hasn’t read Voltaire’s Candide—has ever heard about. Yet, as I read more about this devastating event and how much it altered an already quickly changing Europe, I knew there had to be a story there.
As my knowledge of Portuguese history ended with the few paragraphs about fifteenth-century explorers in my high school curriculum, I quickly threw myself into research... and found books about the Lisbon earthquake, at least in English, to be few and far between. As I don’t actually speak Portuguese, I was very, very lucky that around the time I was struggling to find what I needed to write this novel, Mark Molesky’s book This Gulf of Fire: the destruction of Lisbon or apocalypse in the age of science and reason was released. For anyone interested in learning about the actual history of the quake along with a quick rundown of all the Portuguese history you likely missed in high school, I highly suggest this book.
Now, after four years, hours and hours of research, and dozens of rewrites, The Stars of Heaven sits before you in its final form. As it is a work of fiction, I admit to taking a few liberties, such as inventing characters, filling in gaps where the actual historical record is lacking, and even transposing Father Malagrida’s 1756 pamphlet, “An Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake,” to a live sermon—but I have done my best to accurately represent all the ups and downs people living at the time may have experienced after such a world-changing event. I hope, beyond being an enjoyable read, this work brings an amazingly important but often forgotten piece of history to life.