But to contradict known history to make that love story more dramatic is irresponsible. The possibility of a romance involving Jahanara and the architect who built the Taj is the kind of thing that, even if unlikely, would probably be difficult to contradict absolutely, so building a story around that possibility seems like a fine choice for Shors. There’s plenty of potential for drama and no doubt enough holes in the history for Shors to find plenty of scope for the imagination. The novel tells of the construction of the Taj as well as Jahanara’s brothers’ fight for control of the empire.

Jahanara’s father built the Taj Mahal in honor of his beloved wife, Jahanara’s mother. The narrator of Beneath a Marble Sky is Jahanara Begum Sahib, daughter of the emperor of Hindustan.

To give Shors credit, he does state in the Author’s Note that he took some liberties with the characters and events, but these liberties turn what appears to be a fascinating, complex story into a tired, predictable romance. Now I don’t mind the occasional speculative historical fiction that goes against the usual interpretation of events, but in order for that kind of thing to work, the author has to write about something that historians are not 100-percent sure about (the virginity of Elizabeth I, for example). In Beneath a Marble Sky, Shors abandons what appear to be undisputed facts in order to tell the kind of story he wants to tell. I know next to nothing about Mughal India, but a quick visit to Wikipedia gives me the sense that Shors doesn’t know much more than I do, or if he does, he chose to ignore the true story in writing his novel. Upon realizing that no one in the West had written a historical fiction account of the building of the Taj, he decided that this was a story that needed to be told. In the Readers Guide in the back of Beneath a Marble Sky, author John Shors writes that he visited in Taj Mahal in 1999 and became interested in the story behind the building’s construction.

Beneath a marble sky by john shors