You portray life and death aboard ships of war in the early 1800s, offer readers details of real shipboard conditions, and describe the configuration of those vessels. How did you research these scenes from two centuries ago?

CHERYL COOPER: I avoided the temptation to read any contemporary novels; instead, I put myself on a steady diet of Patrick O’Brian, Captain Frederick Marryat, Jane Austen, and literature set or written before 1813. I read a number of works on the War of 1812, naval warfare, the history of surgery, and so on, and relied particularly on such books as Brian Lavery’s Nelson’s Navy with its clear illustrations of the various parts of the ships.

Anything else? Your images are so vivid.

COOPER: I studied hundreds of old drawings and paintings depicting scenes of a sailor’s existence: working the sails, tossing the lead, raising the anchor, enjoying a meal or leisure time with his mates, being punished, or battling the enemy.

That must have been engrossing.

COOPER: Often, an afternoon of research would net nothing more than a few paragraphs of writing because the smallest of details might have taken me ages to research. But that was where so much of the enjoyment lay in writing this story—discovering the fascinating world of these old ships.

Emily, who is held hostage, is the centrepiece of this story. Did you set out to give readers a different perspective on war and the place of women in it?

COOPER: Yes, that is one perspective I wanted to offer. In researching, I discovered that, though there were restrictions on women being present aboard Royal Navy men-of-war, those rules were often not adhered to. Several ships carried women whose duties usually included helping with laundry, sewing, or cooking. When wives of the officers were on board, they often were assigned to assist the surgeon with the ill and injured. All these women would have been exposed to the same horrors and deprivations as the men. In a battle, they had to be prepared to wield a sword or a pistol, or risk perishing. There are several documented cases of women who joined the navy under the guise of a man. They learned the ropes and seamanship, just as the men did. How they kept their true identity a secret is beyond me. They must have been a brave lot. In imagining Emily, it was my hope to create a character who reflected the courage and spirit of these women.

In Come Looking for Me, some characters live and others die, not always in predictable ways. Do you think survival is merely a matter of fate?

COOPER: Sure, and a matter of luck. We’re always asking why some of us are taken early while others enjoy long lives. The men and women on warships during this period faced the prospect of death daily. The ones spared the splinters and grapeshot of battle were fortunate, blessed by fate.

The War of 1812 is known to Canadians and Americans mostly for its land battles, yet these do not figure at all in your novel’s action. Why did you take a different tack?

COOPER: When I was in school, the War of 1812 never seized my imagination. My teachers always breezed over its events and, perhaps naturally, concentrated on the Battle of Queenston Heights and the military victories of Sir Isaac Brock and Tecumseh. Had their history lessons also included the struggle at sea, I believe more students, including me, would have sat up straighter in our chairs. So my main intent is to shed much-deserved light on the men and women—old and young alike—who lived, dreamed, fought, and died in the crowded conditions upon those floating timbers.

As an author, you first came to public attention by winning a competition for writing a novel in seventy-two hours. How intense was that?

COOPER: Incredibly intense. It began at 8:00 p.m. on a Friday night and ran seventy-two hours straight. There were twenty-six of us, jammed into the old National Bank building on Main Street in Huntsville, pounding away on our laptop keys, completely high on caffeine and sugar. The camaraderie and energy around me was exhilarating. By Monday afternoon, my back was in knots—most likely from having slept two out of the three nights on the floor—and my brain was no longer functioning; but, in those hours, I had been able to complete seventy-five pages of my manuscript, and I had developed a clear idea of where I was going to take my story. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when we leave our lives behind to focus exclusively on writing.

Writing Come Looking for Me clearly took more than seventy-two hours.

COOPER: Oh, I needed at least one or two further weekends to complete it! Actually, all told, it was three and a half years in the making.

How did your interest in historical fiction first arise?

COOPER: When I was eight years old, my parents took me to Washington, D.C., and Virginia. I was completely smitten by such places as Mount Vernon, the Custis-Lee mansion, and Williamsburg. The next year, our family went to Europe. Touring museums, castles, and cathedrals further intensified my interest in history. I’ve been a reader of historical fiction ever since.

Do you think a similar story could unfold in our present day, or is this tale of captivity and Emily’s struggle to escape unique to the War of 1812?

COOPER: A story of captivity and escape could unfold in any century, in any country, but not one similar to Come Looking for Me. I like to think that my story goes beyond these themes, and is unique to the War of 1812, or at least to the period of the Napoleonic Wars. If you simply take into consideration the vast opportunities available to women in the western world today, and given our contemporary global communication networks, a character such as Emily would not have lived such a confined, unsatisfying life in England, nor been lost to her family, or to Trevelyan, for so long a time. Moreover, I cannot think of a present-day setting that has more scope for imagination than the sailing ships of yore.

Your decision to place virtually all the action at sea creates a closed universe. Did such a confined setting help you to dramatize the plights and possibilities more vividly?

COOPER: It did. I did not want the distractions of the outside world. I wanted to create a “closed universe” in order to heighten Emily’s sense of captivity and the men’s desperate realization that if they did not make the best of their circumstances, their only escape was death in battle or a watery grave. Making stops in various ports would have not only provided my characters with a potential means of escape, but also set before them pleasures and adventures that were not available on their ships.

While in captivity, Emily took comfort in reading Sense and Sensibility. If you were held in captivity and had only one book to read, what would you choose?

COOPER: Wuthering Heights. I’ve read a lot of good books—classics and contemporary novels—but there are soul-stirring passages in Emily Brontë’s book, and poignant images of isolation and graveyards and the windswept moors that have remained with me since I first read it at age fourteen.

If you were able to organize an afternoon of tea and literary conversation with any five novelists—dead or alive—whom would you invite?

COOPER: It would probably come as no surprise that I would invite Jane Austen and all three of the Brontë sisters. I would also invite my favourite Canadian author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. I adored Montgomery’s novels as a child, but her personal journals—edited for publication in recent years by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston—reveal an astonishing woman whom I’ve placed on a pedestal and would love to have known personally. Now if you were to ask me with whom I would like to have dinner and drinks, I’d say Leon Uris. I always hoped I’d meet him one day. I’ve admired his heroic characters, his universal themes, and the way he was able to brilliantly convey human emotions in his writing.