Home is a gloriously nebulous word, from bricks and mortar – as wonderfully described in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a dwelling place; a person’s house or abode’1 – to a place of sanctuary, to a place, perhaps, where we go in our minds which may no longer exist. Home can coexist in so many places: new homes, found homes, homes even in the people we love the most. However we define it, home is deep rooted within us all and is intrinsically personal.

Here, I’m referring to home as the place to come back to, the place I gravitate to when I think of my childhood – those formative years that shaped who I am. I grew up in south Birmingham (Acocks Green) and my parents still live in the same house. Sometimes I slip and call it home, despite having lived in many places over the years, and it being over a decade since I lived there permanently.

There’s an interesting school of thought that your first novel is the most autobiographical. Although perhaps true for many writers, I’m not sure I used to agree: my debut historical novel, The Marriage Contract, is nothing like the world I grew up in – its setting in Elizabethan England, five hundred years outside of my lived experience, definitely helped – nor are the protagonist’s relationships or experiences my own. Yet somehow whilst writing, I was drawn back home, even if home in the book isn’t recognisable. 

When I started drafting the novel, I was living in Hertfordshire, and prior to that had lived in London for almost five years. My life at that point had become London-centric. I tried, desperately at times, to distance myself from where I’d been born, to fit into that twenty-something-migrated-to-London subsect, where the South is King and anything above Watford is the Unknowable North. I’d revel in the fact that colleagues couldn’t detect my Birmingham accent, which at that point only came out after a few drinks or phone calls with school friends. (Now, catch me over coffee and you’ll hear it, the accent of my home sneaking out of me. I like it. I don’t care anymore if other people don’t.) 

It was in this context that the rough story arc and characters of The Marriage Contract began emerging, but I still needed a setting for my protagonist’s home in the book, even if it wasn’t explicitly named. I made a rule for myself: I could make up the place, but it needed to be placeable on a map of Elizabethan England. I didn’t want to be tied to a real town, as I didn’t want to feel constrained. Writing historical fiction is a fine balance of research and world building – in some ways not too dissimilar from writing fantasy or sci-fi.

The scope then, was broad: pick a location where a small town could exist in the English countryside. This, incidentally, in the 16th Century wasn’t hard to imagine: estimates vary, but it’s believed approximately 90% of the population lived in the countryside. This population, often footnotes in the historical record, worked the land, which being pre the agricultural revolution was a place different from the landscapes we now know. Think: great stretches of uninhabited areas without roads; the quiet of a pre-industrial age – forget the roar of transport, remember the furore of birdsong and animals; bulging streams and rivers; old oaks and untouched forests. 

Take for example, the Forest of Arden. Once a vast woodland that covered an area between Tamworth and Stratford-Upon-Avon2, which now exists only in pockets, the remains of ancient woodland crammed alongside an explosion of industry and populace. 

However fictional, I needed to pinpoint a location on a map to be able to determine, for example, how many days on horseback it would take (imagine!) to ride to London and Plymouth (both places necessary for the plot).3 Without many limitations, I could’ve ostensibly set the novel in any location in England. 

And yet there wasn’t much conscious deliberation at all. It made sense, in a way that I didn’t even examine until years later – once the book was finished – that I’d write about home. Where else could my characters belong but in the place where I belonged?

Of course, I’d set it in the Midlands, the place that made me. Of course, I’d choose the area where I grew up. I started with Acocks Green, which after further research I learnt didn’t exist – it was an area that belonged to the parish of Yardley – and neither did the West Midlands as a county, which was then part of Worcestershire, a county that has morphed through the centuries. Not being in existence as we know it today proved a fertile backdrop for me to create an imagined place.

This isn’t to say that the novel is an historical excavation of Birmingham and its surrounding regions in the 16th Century – for topographical examinations, I’d encourage readers to look elsewhere. I did, however, spend an inordinate amount of time examining old maps of Warwickshire and Worcestershire. ‘X’ quite literally marked the spot of various locations in the novel, which I drew using Paint on my laptop (my career as an historian, imminent). But Birmingham does receive a nod as a small town with little over two thousand people known for its leather and metal industries. I couldn’t resist acknowledging our beating city, whose history 500 years ago was integral for it to become the place it is now.

It’s notable that my protagonist’s home, with its half-timber and still room (a sort of larder) and expanses of green open space on which her tyrannical father farms the land to sustain his family, is nothing like the home I grew up in. My childhood was coloured with suburban Birmingham – rows of Victorian terraces and creaky trains trundling into the heart of the city and the infamous local chippy and curry house. And yet, in my mind when writing The Marriage Contract, the location of my protagonist’s home and my home were the same. 

However much we might try to distance ourselves from our earlier selves, or childhood selves, the home of our childhoods seems to be with us and leak out of us, as it did unwittingly for me onto the page. Maybe, when we make things, we are all drawn home, even when we’re not aware of it – it’s not rocket science to acknowledge that our experiences inform art. Having since moved back to Birmingham, and now awaiting publication of the novel five years later, I’m so glad the Midlands is part of the book. It makes sense to me; retrospectively, it feels inevitable. And perhaps in order to create, we need to embrace where we came from. Perhaps home is indeed the place we need to look back to, in order to discover where we’re going next.

Sasha Butler’s book, The Marriage Contract, releases on Monday 6th October 2025.

In celebration of the launch, Butler will be at The Heath Bookshop on Thursday 9th October for a writer’s talk.