September Fiction Book Club Selection

A special thanks to Robina Williams, author of Jerome and the Seraph for sharing the following letter to our readers. Click here to read my Book Spotlight Author Interview with Robina Williams.

I am honored by the choice of Jerome and the Seraph as the September fiction read for the CatholicMom.com book club. It is a great privilege for me. I hope your readers find my book interesting and entertaining.

May I begin by explaining the title of the book? Brother Jerome is a Catholic friar—though, at first, ex-friar might seem a more apt description, as we meet Jerome when he unexpectedly finds himself in the afterworld following an unfortunate accident in the friary graveyard. The afterworld, he finds, is curiously lacking in cherubs, harps and fluffy white clouds. He’s rather disappointed with it, in fact, until his pet cat, Leo, turns up. Leo, however, isn’t the cat Jerome had thought he was. Leo’s real name is Quant, and he has some very special qualities, for he is a quantum cat.

Two cats—one theoretical, one real—contributed to the creation of Quant. I came across the concept of a quantum cat when I was writing an academic thesis and read about Schrödinger’s Cat that, because of the uncertain world of quantum physics, was both alive and dead at the same time. What a useful character for a book, I thought. Then, when I was living in an old stone house on a Welsh hillside, I was visited occasionally by a cat who came and went as he pleased, and was quite a mystery as, though he clearly wasn’t a stray, I never discovered where he lived. Schrödinger’s Cat and my mysterious Welsh cat combined to form my quantum cat, Quant—companion to Jerome (and looking suspiciously like a smaller version of the lion who had kept Saint Jerome company all those centuries ago). We see Quant in his true seraphic form at the end of Angelos, the sequel to Jerome and the Seraph. Angelos will be published in paperback in November 2005 by Twilight Times Books.

My M.Phil. thesis gave me the idea, too, of bringing paintings into the plots of my books. I was writing about the nineteenth-century English novelist Wilkie Collins, author of The Woman in White and The Moonstone, among many other works. Collins was a painter before he became a writer and was closely involved with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. I was struck by the painterly elements in his writings. When I began to plan my Quantum Cat series, it occurred to me that I might bring some paintings into my stories. Jerome and the Seraph is centered around Spencer Stanhope's Thoughts of the Past and Angelos around Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat; and other paintings play peripheral parts in the plots. I hope you’ll spare a moment to visit my website www.robinawilliams.com and read the illustrated articles on it about the paintings in the books.

Both books take a look at the nature of time, and Jerome finds that, despite his unexpected and initially unwelcome demise, he is still a member of his religious order—he has simply been transferred to the beyond-the-grave branch. Time, he finds, isn’t as linear as he had supposed, and is less a case of experiencing a sequence of events than of moving from one dimension to another—which is a comforting thought to those of us who have lost loved ones.

I am grateful to you, Lisa, for offering me this opportunity to talk to your readers. If anyone would like to contact me about my books, you’re welcome to do so at robina@robinawilliams.com .

For more information on Jerome and the Seraph click here.