Ann Brashares and Ben Brashares ask, 'What if the Nazis had won the war?'
About Author
Ann Brashares is a writer and mother of four living in New York City. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants series as well as several other novels. She helped her youngest brother, Ben, with his shoes every morning before school until he learned to tie his own shoes … around eighth grade.
Ben Brashares lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and three children. He's the author of Being Edie Is Hard Today and The Great Whipplethorp Bug Collection. He holds an MFA in creative writing and has written for magazines including Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. As an adult, Ben gets no help whatsoever tying his shoes. But he still has weird pets.
Interview
Ann Barshares and Ben Brashares introduce their time-travel adventure, Westfallen (Bloomsbury YA)
March 2025
In time-travel adventure Westfallen, two groups of friends speak to each other across time, one in 1944, the other in the present day. What they say to each other will change the course of World War II, and deliver a very different contemporary America, one where the German Nazis are in control....
Read a chapter from Westfallen
Review: "Westfallen is a compelling and addictive read which I could not put down."
Q&A with Ann Barshares and Ben Brashares: What if the Nazis had won the war?
Ann Brashares and Ben Brashares talk about their new time-travel adventure, Westfallen.
1. Thank you for joining us on ReadingZone to talk about your new book, Westfallen. Can you first tell us a little about yourselves - and your writing careers to date?
Ann: I started my career as an editor (well, as a receptionist and editorial assistant, more accurately), so I think a lot about the art and craft of storytelling. I had already reached my 30s when I got up the courage to write a book of my own, which was called The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. I kept on writing about the sisterhood for four more books and also wrote several other novels.
Most of my books are fairly realistic (if you'll allow that to include a somewhat magical pair of pants) with the exception of a novel I wrote called My Name is Memory, about a young man whose memory goes back a thousand years. I loved the combination of historical and present-day fiction and playing tricks with time and memory. Knowing my brother Ben also loves a story with time-twisty action, we started plotting together. That's how Westfallen started.
Ben: It's always a tough one, that "a little bit about yourself"… I suppose I could start (and end) with this: I'm the youngest of four. It's all basically packed in there. I'm a little spoiled, a bit passive, very family-oriented, crave attention and use humor to defuse awkward moments…
As for my writing career…it started HOT with an unauthorized, unofficial biography of Ben Affleck just after college, and it never looked back. I'm kidding. It looked back a lot: Five years in magazines, two years at a literary agency, two more in an MFA program in California, and a lot of time in between wondering if I'd be better off as a carpenter or zookeeper. After I got married and we had three children, I began working on a children's book. I met Elizabeth Bergeland, an artist, and we decided to write a children's book together. We published Being Edie is Hard Today in 2019. Two years later, we published The Great Whipplethorp Bug Collection and I declared myself a real writer. Then Elizabeth ditched me for a career in fine art and I settled back where I always settle…with Ann. Ann and I started writing Westfallen in the summer of 2021.
2. What readers can expect to find in your new novel, Westfallen, and can you tell us why you chose this title?
Ann: Westfallen is a novel, the first in a trilogy, about two groups of kids growing up in the same town, who find each other over a radio they dig up in the backyard. They try to meet up in person, but they can't find each other at the local park. Why? Because it turns out they are living in the same town, but 79 years apart. Half the kids are living in May of the year 1944 and half in May of 2023.
May of 1944 is not a random time, as you are probably guessing. It's the eve of D-Day, a turning point in World War II, and a moment when a bunch of well-intentioned kids mistakenly pass critical information from the future to the past. They set off a sequence of events which change the outcome of D-Day and ultimately the outcome of the war. So the 2023 kids wake up one morning to discover that the U.S.A, is no longer the U.S.A., but a colony of Nazi Germany called Westfallen. That's where the title comes from.
3. Why did you decide to write this particular novel together, and what was the spark of the idea for it? Why did you decide to use a radio as your time travel tool, and to focus it on a garden shed?
Ben: There wasn't really a single spark, it was more like a steady simmer that went on a while. We were making a stew and we had our stock - a friendship story with a fantastical hook - but it took a while for the rest to fall into place. We went through all sorts of ingredients - monsters, aliens, demons, natural disasters, sinkholes, portals, amazing fitting jeans (I tried) but somehow we kept coming back to time travel. Which was a little annoying because it's really hard to do time travel well and it's also not exactly original. (and if you're wondering, no, neither of us had read or watched The Man in the High Castle so there wasn't a "Hey, I know, Man in the High Castle . . .for kids!" moment as some people have proposed).
Ann had recently gotten back from a WWII-inspired trip to France with our dad so that was fresh in her head. I had recently binged Stranger Things so that was fresh in mine. Battling Nazis in the Upside Down world? It started to feel like we were onto something. Two time periods, two groups of friends. . . in the same town, the same house, the same shed out back . . .but 80 years apart. (Then Ann discovered that the days of the week matched up perfectly between 1944 and 2023 and 80 years, annoyingly, became 79. She's a stickler for these types of things).
But we still needed our creepy "Upside Down" world. We considered an alternate world but then thought it'd be a lot creepier if there was only one world, one timeline, and it was these kids who ruined it. That's where the radio came in. Critical information about the future had to be shared, had to get into the wrong hands…or ears. But how did the radio operate across time like that? The shed. The shed sits above a stream . . .the stream is like something out of Greek mythology, the River Styx maybe. And the shed holds that magic, is impervious to the changes taking place outside of it, like Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and they need it to restore fading memories of their "real" lives and . . . It went on like that. There were a lot of phone calls that summer that started with, "Hey, okay, what if. . ." It was fun.
4. How did you go about co-writing Westfallen; who plans and writes what? And what did you argue about?
Ben: After we decided we wanted two sets of friends separated across 80, sorry, 79, years, the divvying up of duties seemed easy. I'd write one friend group, Ann would write the other. And who would write which came just as easy. Ann was old, almost old enough to remember 1944 (I kid) and I was young, or, stunted, as she might say; mildly illiterate, always choosing a bad 80's movie over her Flaubert. Of course, I'd write the 2023 kids and she'd write the 1944 kids. It all made good sense.
Until it didn't. And then we argued. I'd call her a poopoo head and she'd threaten to tell our mom. I wish it went like that. With maturity comes complexity and it can be a little less fun. Silences and sighs take the place of the much easier name-calling. But, honestly, we don't argue a ton over the creative stuff. We generally trust each other to do what's best for the story and leave egos out of it. The trouble we get into revolves more around all the mini, self-imposed deadlines required to get a book written. Ann is quite small but she's a very fast writer. And she can also be very mean when someone maybe isn't able to keep up. . . even though that person had only published a Ben Affleck pamphlet-sized biography and two children's books which combined for all of about 300 words.
Beyond that injustice, we really do quite well together. Maybe it's because we know we're stuck with each other. So, I guess, for all the good reasons, we're always putting our siblingness first. And it's a dang shame I'm not a girl* so I could've used "sisterhood" there instead of "siblingness", which isn't even a word.
*Ann tried for years but, sadly, I never took to the dresses she put me in. I tell her there's still time, who knows.
Ann: I let Ben take this question and now I regret it.
5. Westfallen is a novel about what might have happened if Nazi Germany had won the war; how did you go about visualising this alternate America? Is Westfallen also a reflection on what could happen if current political trends are taken to the extreme?
Ann: We did a lot of research and also a lot of counter-factual imagining. We created an alternate history spanning from 1944 to the present, relying heavily on real history, and we tried to follow threads big and small. How would technology have developed if the Nazis had won? Food? Music? Sports? What would have happened to the rest of Europe? The rest of the world?
And yes, it's natural to relate Westfallen to political trends we see unfolding right now--unavoidable, in fact. For us it's given the story a deeper significance. We care most about telling a great, absorbing story, but the relevance to our times is meaningful, too.
6. How do you use the children's friendships - three children in the past, three in the contemporary time - to explore life in the past and present, and to compare attitudes in the 1940s with now?
Ben: One of the things we really loved about the series concept was connecting two vastly different eras in American culture. We relished the opportunity, especially, to put these two sets of kids in contact with each other so 1944 kids could be like, "Google what?" or "you spend all day staring at a telephone?" and the 2023 kids could be like, "how the heck am I supposed to know which way is East?"
It was hard at times not to be didactic about it - we both have middle schoolers with screen addiction issues - and make sweeping generalisations about kids' lives being better, or at least more wholesome, back then. We certainly rubbed our modern-day kids' noses in some of it, like the industriousness and general know-how kids seemed to possess back then. But parents, arguably, had bigger worries about then. And kids didn't exactly have it easy.
The backdrop of this series for the 1940's kids is the war. It wasn't as all-consuming in the States as it was in England, of course, but life was certainly different during the war. Our character, Lawrence, a highly patriotic Black kid, collects scrap metal for the war effort but gets shunned at the grocery store. It was important to us to show that America, as wonderful as it is in many ways, wasn't some perfect utopia for the Westfallen-trapped kids to get back to. We always imagined Westfallen as a mirror held up to the darker aspects of our world now. Or, if things keep going the way they seem to be going, maybe more of a crystal ball. We certainly hope not.
7. The friends also have to make a number of ethical decisions and choices; what kinds of discussions do you hope these will raise among readers?
Ben: Yes, this is another thing that really drew us to the material. There are a lot of weighty concepts and the kids have to make some big decisions, more than what's fair for any kid to have to make. The best stories give more to their characters than what's fair. It's not great for the characters but it's fun for the readers. And, yes, our great hope is that these big dilemmas will spark discussion, maybe even spark an interest in moral philosophy. Our world could certainly use more of it.
I remember as a kid spending a lot of time on the famous question, "If you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?" A bit older, I remember latching onto: "Would you actively change the course of a speeding train to kill one person or do nothing and let it kill five people?" All rather dark but the most engaging conundrums tend to involve death. The set piece we chose for our big moral quandary in book one is saving a candy store. Sounds easy, right? Fortunately, there is a death involved.
8. If you could connect with someone at a particular point in the past, when would you choose? Or would you prefer to glimpse the future, like the children from 1944 do in this story?
Ann: As a lover of history, I think I'd choose the past over the future. In the spirit of our story, I'd try to do something productive. Maybe I'd go back to Sarajevo in 1914 to try to stop the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and hope to head off the First World War. Imagine if you could avert all that suffering, and maybe even the Second World War. But what would happen instead? What unintended consequences would unfurl? Those questions represent the real spirit of our story.
Ben: I'd love to meet my grandmother (our dad's mother). She died when he was only 16 and she sounded pretty cool. So maybe I'd go back to 1953, a couple years before she died. I could hang out with my 14-year-old dad, tell him he's going to have four kids one day and it's okay to love the fourth one the most, he doesn't have to feel so guilty about it. And I'd hang out with his mom, get to know her. As for the reversal, I have zero interest in glimpsing the future. Four minutes from now scares me enough.
9. Westfallen ends on a cliffhanger; can you give us a glimpse into what you have planned for the follow-up book? How many Westfallen books do you have planned?
Ann: Westfallen is a trilogy. We're just finishing the second book, Into the Fire, and embarking upon the third and final installment. We don't want to give anything away, or box ourselves in, but we've got big plans!
10. What brings you most joy when you're not writing, and where do you go to find inspiration for your next novel?
Ben: I'm very fortunate to have a forest Reserve with lovely trails only a few minutes walk from my house. When my kids were little, I'd take them up there all the time to look for salamanders. Nowadays, I go up with my dog, Remy, let him loose and either go for a jog or walk and think about all the mean things Ann said about my genius ideas and make a mental list of the things she can do to improve our book and her attitude. I still look for salamanders but it's more lonesome now.
Ann: My immediate family, my husband and four kids bring me great joy. My extended family, my parents, brothers (even Ben!), sisters-in-law, nieces and nephews, bring me joy too. I love reading and walking around my city--or almost any city--talking to people and observing the world. I like to think that inspires new book ideas, and in some ways it does. But inspiration is most likely to alight while I'm sitting at my desk working.
Creative Challenge: How would you encourage today's young writers to consider what people from the past might think about our contemporary world?
Ann and Ben: Technology is probably the easiest (and most fun). What were the expectations for 2025 in 1944? What were the comic books from the '40's imagining about the future? Or the science fiction stories? What's met expectations? What's surpassed them? What hasn't come close?
One of the more enjoyable parts of the first book for us was thinking and writing about this disconnect between our two sets of friends. The ‘44 kids' disappointment, for instance, in the lack of flying cars and jet packs in the future. And then to be given something called "Google" to try to make them feel better about it. . . there's so much fun stuff here it was hard not to go on and on with it.
But some deeper thinking could certainly be done with the social and political state of our world now as compared to 1944. Are we where we thought we'd be with social issues like racism, homophobia, income inequality, or freedom of speech? Have we maybe done better in certain areas than we might've thought? Are we still even asking the same questions? And, politically, would the 1944 kids be surprised to learn where we are with immigration, or which countries are at war and why? Newer hot-button issues like climate change and AI would certainly be fascinating to someone in the '40's. There's so much!
Westfallen: What if you had to stop Germany winning WWII? A thrilling race-against-time adventure
