A Love Letter to All Things Dapper: A Guest Post from Hafsah Faizal

From the B&N Book Club pick We Hunt the Flame to her latest release, Hafsah Faizal has solidified herself as a fantasy author to keep an eye on. Here, Hafsah writes about the process behind building her brand new world and the motivations behind it.

It’s Peaky Blinders meets a dash of King Arthur, with vampires and a heist; and so goes the phrase with which I describe my new release, A Tempest of Tea. Don’t get me wrong, those words hold true, but they’re more the shiny bits and baubles that I know will appeal to many readers. At its core, however, deep down where it hurts, I dare say, is colonialism.  

Arthie Casimir is a thorn in Ettenia’s side, an empire much like England, but more than that, she’s a monster of their own making, a consequence of their actions, the lone rose that weathers the storm. They ruined her homeland, killed her parents, altered her future in every way possible, and now she does everything she can to get back at them. For instance, opening a tearoom that caters to the rich, where they gossip and spill their secrets that she and crew exploit in turn. Having that tearoom double as an illegal bloodhouse by night for the local vampire-folk. Or claiming the legendary pistol that’s about as, well, legendary as King Arthur’s Excalibur. 

I reached this amalgamation of ideas by chance. 

I didn’t plan to write vampires or King Arthur parallels. I certainly didn’t think I was going to explore colonization. It’s a wound for people like me, one carried on generation after generation, never healed and almost always bleeding out yet again. 

A Tempest of Tea began as a love letter to all things dapper. I was excited to explore the criminal underworld of entirely made-up streets and cities, but it quickly became clear that I couldn’t. Not without ignoring Arthie’s rage and the deep-seated pain that drives her, even if she isn’t fully ready to explore why. 

Like Arthie, my roots are Sri Lankan, but Arthie is a refugee. I knew why the English sailed to then-Ceylon and, to some degree, I knew how it affected the island and surrounding countries, but it wasn’t until I began my research that I realized just how horrible and long-lasting their endeavors truly were. Just how much we don’t know because the truth was erased and rewritten. The more I uncovered, the angrier Arthie became. The more real she became as I finally put my finger on the reason for her rage. 

She’s smart and cunning and, like the found family of my debut duology, her crew of five thinks themselves unstoppable. Arthie will say she doesn’t give in to emotion, but when one of her own is threatened—in this case, her tearoom—her wrath knows no bounds. Which is fine by me, because A Tempest of Tea wouldn’t exist without her.