The books shown on the left are by Maxime Trencavel.  Click on the cover to order.

Diana Coyle conducted this interview on July 6, 2026.

Maxime Trencavel:  I have been scribbling stories since grade school, from adventure epics to morality plays. I knew very young that I loved creating worlds and characters, but like many people, I took the practical road first. I earned degrees in science and marketing, built a career in business and sports, and let writing wait in the background until I finally had the chance to return to that childhood passion.

That path turned out to be useful. My books are shaped by science, history, mythology, faith, marketing, travel, and the many cultures I have been fortunate to encounter. I have lived and worked in multicultural settings and traveled across five continents, and those experiences taught me how easily people misunderstand one another when they see only the surface of a culture, religion, gender, or history.

The Mystery of the Matriarchs series grew out of that fascination. The first spark came from questions surrounding Göbekli Tepe, the 12,000-year-old monolithic site in southeastern Turkey: who built it, what did they believe, and what happened to those people? But the story changed when Zara Khatum, a Kurdish woman who was originally meant to guide other characters, took over the heart of the novel. Once I began researching Kurdish history, the oppression of the Kurds, and especially the suffering and resilience of Kurdish women, I knew the story had to become much larger than a conventional science-fiction adventure.

Since then, the series has become my way of exploring how myths are passed down, who controls the story, and what happens when the forgotten half of a legend finally speaks. The Matriarch Matrix told the patriarchal version of an ancient prophecy. The Matriarch Messiah gave voice to the matriarchal side of that legend. And The Matriarch Mission goes deeper into the origins of that hidden history.

At the core, I write speculative literary fiction because the story demands more than one genre. Sometimes it needs science fiction, sometimes historical fiction, sometimes thriller, romance, mythology, or spiritual mystery. I let the story choose the tools. What matters most to me is that readers come away questioning their assumptions — about history, gender, faith, war, and the people we are too quick to judge.

Diana Coyle: Can you please provide a brief synopsis of your novel “The Matriarch Mission” to familiarize our readers with your book?

Maxime Trencavel:  Meet Oksana. Your friendly coming-of-age young teen girl. Well, not like the ones most of you may have known.

For Oksana comes from the almost-erased Krymchaks of Crimea. She is the family inheritor of duty, honor, and obedience—obligations that bring her in front of a divine figure in a legendary cavern. A forgotten goddess who charges her with a mission. A mission to understand what is love.

Her journey takes her from failed marriage proposals into the world of Romanov exiles, where a Grand Duchess teaches her that love may have less to do with obedience than sacrifice. As well, she is challenged by a malicious, monstrous man who will teach her the mythic lore her family seeks to solve.

But the Romanovs are not simply hiding in Crimea. They are trying to return to power. And they believe Oksana may be the key.

Soon, this “simple, humble, Krymchak girl” is pulled into secret libraries, occult theories, ancient legends, military training, and the search for a mysterious black object men believe can save Russia—or control it. And as she secretly wished, she falls for Mirko, the soldier assigned to protect her, even as every man around her seems to have a different plan for her body, her future, and her destiny.

Her mission carries her north with Soviet researchers chasing Agarttha, telepathy, giants, and the tail of the bird star. In the frozen lands of the Sami, Oksana discovers that the blue light, the black object, and the forgotten goddess are not childhood dreams or family superstitions. They are real. And they are dangerous.

Then history closes in.

The Bolsheviks tighten their grip. The Cheka rises. People disappear. Lovers betray. Mothers lose children. And Oksana, who once only wanted to read books and avoid a bad husband, must decide what love actually demands when every choice costs someone she loves.

By the time she returns to Crimea, she is no longer the girl who entered the cavern. She is a woman carrying the burden of a goddess, a daughter, a people, and a question no empire can answer.

What is love?

For Oksana, the answer will not be spoken. It will be sacrificed.

Diana Coyle: I read that you are an experienced traveler across more than twenty countries on five continents. Can you please tell us a bit about those travels and what made you want to use that experience to create the Mystery of the Matriarchs series?

Maxime Trencavel:  I’ve been blessed with a multi-cultural family. Part in the USA. Part in Belgium. From those two geographic platforms, I been able to travel and meet folks from all parts of the world – nearly.

Our home in Belgium is in a multicultural neighborhood. One side are the European Commission families. The other side an eclectic mix of African, South American, Middle Eastern communities including the much-maligned Kurds.

My sports and business travels have led me to many countries where I am not only a visitor, but on teams with locals sharing their lives, cultures, cuisines, and most importantly their stories.

Diana Coyle: What was the first idea that sparked you to write this series?

Maxime Trencavel:  The first spark was Göbekli Tepe.

I became fascinated by the mystery of that 12,000-year-old monolithic site in southeastern Turkey. Who built it? Was it a religious sanctuary? What did those people believe? And perhaps most intriguing to me, what happened to them?

Once I started asking those questions, I began imagining a story that reached back before written language, before the familiar faith traditions, into a time when myth, memory, and survival were all intertwined. My read of most of today’s established faiths is they all stem from oral traditions that date back before any recorded history existed. So what did that look like? Who were the originating founders of these oral legends?

At first, the story was much more of a science-fiction action adventure. The original working title was even *The Object*, because the plot centered on an ancient artifact and a patriarchal legend passed down through generations. But then the idea shifted. Profoundly so. A trusted associate challenged me on why the ancient faith and prophecy had to come through men. Why not a matriarchy? That question changed everything.

Once the story turned toward a hidden matriarchal tradition, Zara Khatum came alive. Originally, she was supposed to be a secondary Kurdish character who helped guide the heroes to Göbekli Tepe. But as I researched Kurdish history, the oppression of the Kurds, and especially the suffering and resilience of Kurdish women, Zara became impossible to leave in the background. She became the emotional and spiritual center of the book.

So the series began with an archaeological mystery, but it became something larger: a story about forgotten origins, women’s hidden power in ancient legend, and the idea that our customs and faiths may be more deeply connected than we realize. I wanted to write a story that linked

the modern world’s conflicts and prejudices back to the ancient days before written words, when perhaps humanity’s stories were not as separate as we think.

That became the foundation of *The Mystery of the Matriarchs*: ancient memory, faith, gender, love, prophecy, and the possibility that the lost half of the legend may be the part we most need to recover.

Diana Coyle: Besides your travels, where do you look upon for inspiration for each book you write?

Maxime Trencavel:  I’m a prolific ponderer. Every little tidbit that’s odd I noodle on – trying to fit it into a macro model of how everything fits and works together. Usually, I start with a historic area of controversy. Then expand it out to who might be the people who were around the genesis of such event or place and then how it would impact folks later on in time. For The Matriarch Messiah, that was an article titled “Did God have a wife”. That was provocative enough. And the female foil to Zara Khatum arose. An Israeli Torah archaeologist whose matriarchal mission was to prove to “man”kind that Asherah did exist. And she was written out of history by male scribes and scholars.

Diana Coyle: When can readers look forward to another release of yours and what is that book about?

Maxime Trencavel:  The next books will continue expanding the deeper architecture of The Mystery of the Matriarchs series.

One of the ideas introduced in The Matriarch Mission is that there is not one ancient legend, but two: a masculine legend and a hidden feminine legend. That mirrors what has happened throughout history, where the feminine side of memory, faith, and power has often been erased, hidden, or rewritten.

The patriarchal legend of Murometz drives much of The Matriarch Matrix. The matriarchal legend of Zara Khatum — and later Oksana’s great-great-granddaughter Rachel — becomes the opposing force in The Matriarch Messiah. But what connects all the books is something larger: the spherical nature of time and logic in this series.

Linear time — the way we are trained to think from point A to point B — is only one dimension of what time actually is. Oksana first encounters this idea in her meeting with Asherah. And book by book, the series begins to reveal that the women carrying the matriarchal legend are not simply moving through history in sequence. They are part of something that bends back on itself in ways that will only become fully visible in the final books.

The epilogue of The Matriarch Mission also establishes that Oksana has two daughters, and their diverging destinies will drive the fourth and fifth books in directions readers may not expect.

In The Matriarch Miracle, the fourth book, now in draft, Zara and Rachel return. But this time they are middle-aged mothers of Gen Alpha teenagers preparing to leave the nest. So while they are once again fighting to save humanity, they are also fighting to save their own families. I think that is a theme many readers will recognize.

So what begins as a hidden feminine legend becomes something far larger: a reckoning with what history chose to bury, and what refuses to stay buried.

Diana Coyle: What did you find to be the most difficult part about writing this book?

Maxime Trencavel:  First, I think for most authors the hardest part is the solitude — the loneliness of sitting somewhere, typing away, and not knowing if what is coming out of your fingers is any good.

Second, and more specifically to this book, I came back to serious finger-to-keyboard writing seven years after The Matriarch Messiah had first been written. At that point, I had only three chapters of The Matriarch Mission drafted, and those were written while I was waiting for my copy editor’s marked-up manuscript of Messiah to come back.

When I finally read through her comments — and she had very real, industry-tenured wisdom — I just sat back in my chair and stopped typing. I honestly did not know how to do what she was suggesting I should do. So The Matriarch Messiah manuscript sat in the proverbial freezer for nearly seven years.

Not a great strategy for a budding author.

Eventually, I made a 2024 end-of-year resolution to publish it. I went back to the manuscript and, for better or worse, set aside most of the structural, non-line-edit recommendations and trusted my instincts about the story. That is not necessarily a strategy I would recommend anyone else follow, but in this case my instincts turned out to be right. The Matriarch Messiah went on to win seven awards and become a finalist in three major award programs.

So what did that mean for writing The Matriarch Mission?

It meant I was writing prose for the first time in seven years. And this time, I had also decided to move from a third-person omniscient voice to a deeply personal first-person voice — a much

more daunting craft challenge, but the one Oksana’s story needed. Her story demanded intimacy. Even with alpha and beta readers, I never really knew if what I had written was resonating until the editorial reviews started coming in — including this one from BestSellers World.

Diana Coyle: What was the most enjoyable thing you experienced while writing this book?

Maxime Trencavel:  The most enjoyable thing was experiencing firsthand how the first-person point of view of a coming-of-age girl grew with each chapter, and with each passage of her life.

As does the reader, as the author you are truly inside her head — for better or worse. That was the joy of it, and also the challenge. But choosing that more demanding craft path made this book so different in tone and flavor from the first two.

The series is linked by the same world-building and the same mythic elements, but each book has its own voice. The Matriarch Matrix needed one kind of storytelling. The Matriarch Messiah needed another. The Matriarch Mission needed Oksana’s immediacy and intimacy.

That was what I enjoyed most: discovering that the writing style of each book could be uniquely suited to what that book was trying to portray and say.

Diana Coyle: How long did it take you to write “The Matriarch Mission?”

Maxime Trencavel:  The actual writing only took about two and a half months.

I did have three chapters written back in 2019, but once the rest of the book took shape, those chapters had to be significantly re-edited. So while there was a small foundation already there, the book as readers experience it was really written in one concentrated burst.

Ironically, the writing took less time than the editorial process.

For this book, I initially decided to work with a younger developmental editor. I thought someone closer to Oksana’s age might bring the right perspective to a coming-of-age story told in first person. But when the developmental edits came back, I had that same experience I had years earlier with The Matriarch Messiah: I just sat back in my chair and realized my instincts did not agree with the direction being suggested.

By then, though, the awards for The Matriarch Messiah kept arriving month after month, and that gave me more confidence that my instincts were reasonably well tuned to what industry reviewers were responding to. So I moved to a top-level editor who was a much better cultural and historical fit for Oksana’s world.

She did really lovely work on the manuscript readers have today. But by the time that process was complete, it was almost a full year after the book itself had been written.

Diana Coyle: To wrap up our interview, is there anything you would like to add that you would love your readers to know?

Maxime Trencavel:  I would say that I write in a style that is probably more akin to books from another era — more Western European in nature, and poetic at times.

That is why some reviews describe the series as a “slow burner.” I do not take that as a criticism. To me, it means the story is asking the reader to enter the world, settle into the atmosphere, and let the characters and mythology build around them. That kind of storytelling used to be more common before Kindle pages, streaming queues, and the habit of giving something two minutes before swiping to the next thing.

But if readers have the patience to give these books a couple of chapters, something magical tends to happen. The world opens. The mythic layers begin to connect. The emotional stakes deepen.

With my first book, my first editor told me she was not fully enchanted until the end of the first chapter, after the prologue — and then she was hooked. I have always thought that captured the style perfectly. The books do not always grab you by the collar on page one. They invite you in. And once you step inside, the spell begins to work.

Diana Coyle: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview with me!

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