At Pontas we love fiction that is a pleasure to read, that tells a good story, and that informs the reader, as if effortlessly, about something she or he did not know, that brings the reader into another world. Several of us at Pontas were thoroughly delighted and captivated when we read the manuscript The Samurai of Seville, and we have signed up the author John J. Healey as one of our newest clients. His novel, a tragic love story, stands out as one of the most surprising, graceful, romantic, charming, intelligent, entertaining historical novels we've read in a long time.
Jessica Craig recently started submitting The Samurai of Seville simultaneously to publishers in the US, UK, and Spain. We already have received enthusiastic feedback from editors in New York and London, and are getting very positive responses from scouts who are recommending the novel to their international publisher clients.
The Samurai of Seville is based on an extremely colourful yet largely unknown real historical event: in 1613 a delegation including forty Samurai warriors was authorized by the Emperor Tokugawa Ieyasu and sailed from Sendai, Japan, arriving in Seville, Spain one year later. They were the first Japanese to visit Europe and they caused a sensation. They remained for two years and six of the Samurai stayed behind, settling in a small fishing village south of Seville where their descendants live to this day. This is the frame and the setting for what is a powerful love story, a Romeo & Juliet saga, between one of the Samurai and a young Spanish noblewoman. The story told is one immune to history ─the essential conflicts that arise when love is shared between two people from different worlds, and the toll those worlds take upon them.
The Samurai of Seville stands beautifully on its own yet also hints at a sequel which John J. Healey is already beginning to write.
