Ruta Sepetys’ A Fortune of Sand: A Journey Through History

Ruta Sepetys has made a career out of unearthing forgotten corners of history, but her latest novel took a particularly long route to the page. Set in Prohibition-era Detroit, A Fortune of Sand is a 320-page gothic story following the youngest daughter of a wealthy family as she tries to carve out her own identity. While the book spent ten years in dedicated research, the core idea first took root nearly five decades ago.

When Sepetys was nine years old, her family visited a 1920s mansion in Detroit belonging to a fashion writer for The Detroit News. It was during that childhood visit that she learned many Prohibition-era homes in the city had hidden underground tunnels and secret passageways. That impression lingered for years, eventually drawing her back to explore Detroit in the 1920s, a city then known as “The Paris of the Midwest.”

Glamour, Grit, and Hidden Autonomy

The novel follows Marjorie Lennox, the youngest daughter of a powerful tycoon, who seizes on an acceptance to a prestigious arts program as her ticket away from her chaotic family. Though the Lennox family is filled with sharp-tongued characters consorting with gangsters and plotting against one another, Marjorie’s journey reflects a broader historical reality Sepetys wanted to examine.

While popular history often reduces 1920s women to the image of the flapper, Sepetys found that the reality involved a delicate tension between expanding opportunities and rigid social boundaries. The narrative explores how women achieved personal autonomy and creative freedom inside systems designed to restrict where they could go and what choices they could make.

For readers who appreciate deep archival detail alongside atmospheric storytelling, much like the history surrounding a rare Tolkien manuscript discovery, Sepetys’ craft process is particularly striking. She spent years immersing herself in period archives to capture the exact cadence of the era.

Grounding Fiction in Archival Fact

To bring 1927 Detroit to life, Sepetys built a daily habit around her historical research. Every morning over coffee, she read Detroit newspapers published on that exact date between 1925 and 1928. The stories and headlines she uncovered were so arresting that she eventually cleared the rights to include them directly in the finished book.

The novel ends with collages of actual newspaper clippings from the period. As Sepetys explained during an interview about her creative process:

“I wanted readers to leave the fictional narrative and step directly into the news clips as a reminder that while the Lennox family is fictional, the world surrounding them was very real.”

Capturing the dialogue required a similar level of historical immersion. To give the characters their distinct conversational rhythm, Sepetys studied the time signatures of ragtime and jazz from the 1920s, attempting to weave those musical cadences directly into how the characters speak and spar with one another.

For emerging authors interested in historical fiction, Sepetys offers a simple piece of advice: swap the word “research” for “investigation,” and choose a subject that haunts the attic of your mind. If you ask me, that persistence shows on every page of a story fifty years in the making.

The book’s focus on historical voice and character dynamics arrives at a time when major literary works continue to find fresh life across mediums, from Taika Waititi directing an adaptation of ‘James’ to Tom Hanks starring in ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’. Published by Penguin Random House, A Fortune of Sand stands as a detailed portrait of an era shaped by dazzle, secrecy, and rapid change.