Alan Bray

When I was in my early forties, I moved with my family from Chicago to rural New Hampshire. I had recently concluded a twelve year career as a psychotherapist, and The Hour of Parade Front Cover Alan Bray İmy father had just died. It was, in short, a time of transition. I began to think about writing a novel.

I’m not sure when I developed a fascination with the Napoleonic Era. I do remember being interested in it as a child, in the battles, the colorful uniforms, and, as I got older, in stories of bravery and honor.

Perhaps historical distance helped me to idealize a time which was also rather brutal and pitiless.

I enjoyed reading fiction about those times—Patrick O’Brien and Bernard Cornwell, as well as Tolstoy and Stendahl—and I decided I wanted to write a novel set in the early 1800s, a novel about ordinary men and women struggling to live their everyday lives while caught up in large, impersonal forces. The Hour of Parade is the result.

The story has gone through many changes. The plot has shifted, particularly the ending. Characters have come and almost gone, some have had their parts wind up on the cutting room floor. Others have endured having their names changed; one had to accept that his death was necessary for the sake of the story. But the three central characters—Alexi Ruzhensky, Anne-Marie Froelich, and Louis Valsin—have been on board since the beginning. Even though they exist elsewhere, they’ve become very close to me, and there have been many times when what has kept me going through the challenges of writing was the idea of being true to them and to their story.