Nerdette Book Club: Shannon Chakraborty on ‘The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi’
Happy To Be Here
Greta Johnsen
4.6 • 924 Ratings
🗓️ 6 June 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
June’s Nerdette Book Club pick is The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty! It is the first of a new trilogy about pirates, magic, and mystical artifacts. While the book is technically fantasy, it is also deeply grounded in the history of the Crusades.
Author Shannon Chakraborty joined us for this spoiler-free conversation about mixing fantasy and history, middle-aged protagonists, and her pandemic writing process.
We will be back for a panel discussion on the last Tuesday of June! Read along with us, then send us a voice memo with your thoughts. You can send the file to NerdettePodcast@gmail.com. We can’t wait to hear from you!
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Transcript
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| 0:28.3 | Listen, wherever you get your podcast. |
| 0:39.0 | From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerdat Book Club. |
| 0:42.6 | It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by. |
| 0:49.8 | This month, our book is the rollicking historical fantasy novel, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sarrafi, by Shannon Chakraborty. |
| 0:56.4 | Our protagonist is Amina, a former pirate who had settled down to live a quiet life with her mother and daughter. |
| 1:01.4 | But when a wealthy older woman makes Amina an offer, she cannot refuse. |
| 1:05.4 | She finds herself right back on the treacherous seas with her old crew. |
| 1:11.7 | She embarks on a treasure hunt of a lifetime encountering all kinds of creatures and devious characters along the way. |
| 1:16.5 | That's all I'm going to say for now, since this is a spoiler-free conversation. Shannon, welcome to Nuredat. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This book is so much fun. I would love to start with the |
| 1:23.6 | like one last job trope because, you know, it comes up in stuff like oceans 11 but it's so |
| 1:28.6 | much fun to see in like a historical fantasy lady pirate novel yeah i mean that was a part of the |
| 1:35.5 | book from the very beginning because i knew i wanted it to be a book that talked about older |
| 1:40.8 | characters as we're called um and it felt like so much of fantasy has the stories of the |
| 1:49.0 | young things going out, finding themselves, having their adventures. And I wanted to have |
| 1:53.8 | something that was, you had all of your, you know, your adventures, your regrets, your terrible |
| 1:59.1 | things that you did, retired, and then came back. But really looked at the idea of one less job and what a bit |
| 2:07.5 | deeper about talking about what it really does mean to return to something, how your feelings |
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