All Behind the Book essays

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

It was “a benign, elective haunting.”

Behind the Book by Nick Harkaway

I don’t mean this to sound melancholy, but I haven’t spoken to my father since he died. I know a lot of people do that with their dead, but it’s not in me. He’s not there anymore—definitionally—and it feels like cheating to make him up as I would a fictional character. Too easy, too narcissistic, too small, and that last in particular. However well I knew him, the homunculus version I still carry around in memory is barely a single leaf from the text. I’m left with myself: the person created by my parents and by my own continuing encounter with the world, first with them and now without. I am the only ghost of them I will ever know.  

Which made this book something like a benign, elective haunting. I stood over George Smiley’s world and built it anew: his friendships, his conviction, his disastrous yet loving marriage. I let the differences between myself and my dad—which sons and fathers insist upon, but which, despite very real variations and radically different lives and choices, are only ever part of the story—fade away. I know the rhythm of his voice. I know he distrusted Latin and favored German; that he admired Conan Doyle, as I do, and Wodehouse and Dickens. I can quote his occasional misquotations from his favorite stories. I know him, to the extent that any human being knows another. 

Read our review of ‘Karla’s Choice’ by Nick Harkaway.

That said, I’ve spent my professional life, for good and sufficient reason, drawing a clear line between his work and mine, and been so successful in doing so that people are still startled to find out we’re related. In writing Karla’s Choice, I let that piece of self-protection go and turned my face toward the Smiley novels as I might toward any other fictional universe I was working with. Writing is instinct, not cognition. You take an idea and make it into words, but first you have to taste it. In Gnomon, the flavor was layered mystery, every line a puzzle of itself; in Titanium Noir, the stark, bone-dry irony of crime in a city where billionaires grow physically immense in a mirror of their consumption. In Smiley’s world, you have to drink deep to know what you’re getting, because even as every character springs to life from a cursory sketch, almost everything is left intentionally blank: People only say what they mean when they’re confident they will be misunderstood; truth is what they all want and dare not give. The core of my father’s writing is the lie—not that everything is deceptive, but that anything could be, and yet we believe in one round, unhappy fellow in glasses to show us that it is possible to know the truth, and even to do something worth doing with it. 

The trick, I think, to my father’s complex, shadowy novels, is very simple. You have to let the writer be exposed, and give voice to your fear, your grief, your love—and, in the end, to the thing every writer has and doesn’t dare admit: your hope.

Photo of Nick Harkaway by Nadav Kander.

How Nick Harkaway, son of the late John le Carré, channeled his father’s voice to write a new George Smiley novel.
FictionHistorical Fiction

A lost New York City tradition

Behind the Book by Daniel M. Lavery

Like most people, I hate moving house. Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there, no matter how cramped the apartment or inconvenient the neighborhood. I never want to have to pack up my things, or unpack my things, or measure the width of a door frame to see if the couch is going to fit through it.

“Of course the couch is going to fit through it,” I say, every time. “The very fact that the couch is here now is evidence that the couch fits through the door.” Nevertheless, on every moving day it transpires that I was somehow wrong, that the couch must have been transported through the door and into the living room by acts of contortion or wizardcraft, or it has gained weight in the interim, because it certainly doesn’t fit through the door now.

“Wherever I’m living at any given moment, I want to die there.”

“Leave it, then,” is my only moving strategy. “I don’t want it now.” No matter how attached I might have formerly been to an object, be it my own bed, a box of books, an antique, or half my wardrobe, if it causes me even a minute’s extra work or mental calculation on moving day, all I want to do is get rid of it. Once I am moved into my new place, of course, the old spirits of avarice and acquisitiveness return to me in greater strength. I begin to meditate again on the pleasures of the getting of things. But ownership in all its forms is hateful to me on moving day; there is no possession I treasure more highly than lightness.

I didn’t realize just how good I had it. During my research for Women’s Hotel at the New York Public Library, I came across some old newspaper columns about the local tradition of Moving Day. For hundreds of years, well into the middle of the 20th century, all New York City leases expired at the same time on May 1st, which meant that everybody moving house in a given year did so not only on the same day, but at the same hour, as this column, “May Day,” from the April 30th 1873 New York Times describes:

“When New Yorkers celebrate the day, as they do invariably, it is, if not in sack-cloth and ashes, amid dust and piles of carpets and confused heaps of furniture. . . . The annual spectacle of a whole drove of Gothamites struggling amid pots and pans, and pictures, and rolls of carpet, to break away from the ties of place and friendship just as they are warming in their old nest, to find a new and cold home and cultivate fresh friendships, is not the kind of picture to gaze on with poetic rapture.”

The heyday of the women’s residential hotel was very short-lived; it really only existed in a handful of major cities for a relatively small portion of the population. I knew I was trying to capture a brief phenomenon that never much resembled how most people lived most of the time. Part of the pleasure of writing historical fiction, for me, has to do with attempting to re-create the experience of an extinguished tradition, to capture a kind of urgency that no longer exists. Women’s Hotel takes place over a period of several years in the early-to-mid 1960s, and I knew I wanted to open the action with a small-scale, vestigial remnant of Moving Day at the Biedermeier Hotel.

“I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats.”

There’s a temporal lag at the Biedermeier, although not from any active attachment to the past. It’s a few years out of step, more by default than by accident, although there’s plenty of the accidental there too. The height of popularity for women’s hotels came during the 1920s and ’30s; the Biedermeier is the sort of place women are more likely to land in without meaning to than to aim for directly. Most of the hotel residents have no plans for the future, only anxieties, and half of them aren’t even able to join in with the present. They are formally unattached people; everyone who lives at the Biedermeier, lives alone.

Few of them have ever been married, but none of them is married at the time of their residence. Even fewer of them have children, but those who do either cannot or will not live with them. They are not allowed to cook in their rooms (although at least one of them secretly owns a hot plate for drinking midnight cups of cocoa in bed), and the hotel has recently stopped providing breakfast. I like to start a book by considering what, and when, everybody eats, and so Women’s Hotel begins with “It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else.”

It’s always the same way with me, whenever I have to move. Come to think of it, it’s the same way with me before I’ve had breakfast. I can never see past it and into the afternoon.

Read our starred review of Women’s Hotel.

Daniel M. Lavery author photo by Eustache Boch.

Daniel M. Lavery reveals the research that went into his delightful slice-of-life historical novel, Women’s Hotel, and discusses the universally torturous experience of moving house.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Sacha Lamb weaves Jewish folklore into a murder mystery

Behind the Book by Sacha Lamb

My first novel, When Angels Left the Old Country, takes a historical story that’s familiar to many Americans—immigration through Ellis Island around the turn of the 20th century—and casts it as a fairy tale inspired by Jewish folklore. I knew I couldn’t repeat the same setting for my next work. A second book is always challenging, and there was a lot of pressure in following a debut that received six(!) awards and honors. For a fresh start I chose a story that still draws on Jewish folklore and history, but was constrained within a single invented town, at a less familiar moment in history.

The Forbidden Book is a supernatural murder mystery set in the 1870s, before the great wave of migration that began circa 1880 out of the Pale of Settlement, the region where Jews were allowed permanent residency under the restrictions of the Russian Empire. At this time Jewish books were highly censored, but there was a growing political consciousness, and a growing desire for education among Jewish women. The communities of Eastern Europe were subject to a whirlwind of forces on the sides of both tradition and change. I researched the period using historical works such as Michael Stanislawski’s Murder in Lemberg, which explores the attempted poisoning of a Reform rabbi by another Jew in the mid-1800s. Working within this setting allowed me to emphasize Jewish agency with a story whose actors are nearly all Jewish, and are all acting in the interests of their community—but are in conflict about what those interests are.

The Forbidden Book is also a dybbuk story. The dybbuk is usually described as the spirit of a deceased person that can possess the living and speak through them. As in the case of S. An-sky’s 1920 play The Dybbuk (perhaps the most famous work of Yiddish theater), traditional dybbuk stories have a gendered aspect. Many of them describe young women possessed by male spirits, sometimes male Torah scholars, which allowed young women constrained by patriarchy to access male authority while speaking in the voice of the possessor. My protagonist, Sorel, is a young girl who escapes her unwanted marriage under a male identity, only to discover the name she’s using belongs to a real boy—and using his name has plunged her into the midst of a complex web of intrigues.

Sorel and her dybbuk, Isser, have to work together to solve the mystery of his death and prevent a supernatural calamity. At the same time, each is negotiating their relationship with Kalman Senderovitch (who is Sorel’s father and Isser’s father figure), and Isser helps Sorel learn what she truly wants from her life. The personal narrative, augmented by spooky encounters with Angels of Death and sinister black dogs, is intended to help draw my teen audience through the story of censorship, feminism and social activism. I hope that the universal themes of friendship, family and self-expression will introduce readers to a new chapter in history and a very human view of the Jewish past.

Set in the Pale of Settlement, The Forbidden Book is a dybbuk story that explores gender and censorship towards the end of the 19th century.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Jesse Q. Sutanto considers the mom-fluencer

Behind the Book by Jesse Q. Sutanto

The idea for You Will Never Be Me came in two parts: The first was that I knew I wanted to write this big twist ever since I watched a certain sci-fi show on HBO years ago. Seeing a similar twist implemented so beautifully in that show completely blew my mind and I knew I had to do something with a similar format. It had to be used differently, and it couldn’t possibly be sci-fi since I am not very scientifically inclined, so I let the idea percolate in the back of my mind for the next three years or so, while I worked on other books. 

“One day, there is nothing left of you that you haven’t already posted to TikTok.”

Then I read an article about a husband who was leaving his wife because of “aesthetics.” At first, it sounded so callous; what a reason to leave your spouse! But then I read the article. The wife in question was a mom-fluencer, and due to the demands of her job, everything in their lives had to fit a certain aesthetic. By now, we all know the aesthetic I speak of: A beautiful, bright, airy house that is decorated in all neutral shades; a perfectly photogenic family that wears matchy-matchy outfits; and none of the usual clutter that one would expect from a family with small children. 

This husband spoke of how he bought a plastic pink castle because their young daughter had been begging for one, and it upset his wife so much because it “ruined” the aesthetic of the neutral tones of their house. Only wooden Nordic toys allowed, otherwise the colors would clash and the photos and videos would be ruined. 

Reading the article, I couldn’t help feeling bad for both the husband and the wife. I empathized with the husband, because it sounded like he was stuck in a nightmare he never asked for; when they got married, his wife wasn’t a mom-fluencer yet. But I also felt bad for the wife, who sounded extremely stressed out, trying to run what was basically a business that demanded her time 24/7. That’s the problem with being a social media influencer—unlike being a celebrity, there is no off switch, no clear boundaries. You gain followers by sharing bits and pieces of your life, and the drive for #authenticity is so fierce that you end up carving out more and more pieces to share online until you find that one day, there is nothing left of you that you haven’t already posted to TikTok. 

Read our starred review of ‘You Will Never Be Me’ by Jesse Q. Sutanto.

I knew then that I had to marry these two pieces of inspiration to each other. It was the perfect match, this twist I’d been saving paired up with a world of influencers who are really f*cking stressed out. My hope with this book is not only to show the ways that social media drives us to impossible lengths to curate our lives, but also to show that at the end of the day, we are products of capitalism. Oh, and of course, as always, I aim to entertain along the way.

Photo of Jesse Q. Sutanto by Michael Hart.

The author homes in on the anxiety beneath the aesthetics in her latest thriller, You Will Never Be Me.
NonfictionTrue Crime

How American journalist Rollo Romig tackled writing about Indian right-wing extremism

Behind the Book by Rollo Romig

Back in September 2019, I set aside a day to organize the piles of books I knew I’d have to read in order to write I Am on the Hit List. “It’s like wilting spinach,” a friend said. We take everything we’ve read and chop and blend and season and simmer, and if all goes well we end up with something new and nourishing.

Book jacket image for I Am on the Hit List by Rollo Romig

My book’s central subject is the 2017 murder of an incredibly brave and vibrant journalist named Gauri Lankesh, in Bangalore, India. Gauri had devoted her career to battling the rising right wing in India, so her story was a window into the climate of hate and the triumph of autocracy that had gripped the India she loved. There was so much I needed to explain—first to myself, then to my readers—and those piles of books grew taller and taller.

I started writing about India over a decade ago, partly because I’d married into an Indian family. But as an American, I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with writing about India as an outsider. That’s good—it should make me uncomfortable, and if I’ve ever written anything about India worth reading, that discomfort has been the catalyst. My top concern is always to get it right.

I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with writing about India as an outsider. That’s good—it should make me uncomfortable

I’m always aware of writing for multiple audiences: an American audience that might know absolutely nothing about what I’m writing, and will need everything explained from scratch, and an Indian audience that will know much of what I’m writing about far better than I do. The challenge is to make it work for both audiences at the same time: clear and engaging for a reader who comes in knowing little, and also, somehow, with enough fresh insight to make reading worthwhile even for someone who knows a lot.

I quickly found that it’s often those terms that seem the most obvious—for example, “Hinduism” or “caste”—that are the trickiest to explain. It turns out that this is one of my favorite jobs as a writer: stepping back from a concept or a word I’d previously taken for granted, finding that it’s actually so complex as to defy definition, and then slowly finding a definition anyway, triangulating everything I’d learned to arrive as close to a fact as I could, without sacrificing either complexity or clarity.

Read our review of ‘I Am on the Hit List’ by Rollo Romig.

This meant spending months in India talking to as many people as possible—dozens and dozens of interviews, often lasting hours. Then I had to read: hundreds of books, thousands of pages of police and court documents, uncountable newspaper and magazine articles. (I owe a huge debt to Indian journalists who’ve been closely following the Gauri Lankesh case, such as Johnson T.A. of the Indian Express and K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj of The Hindu.) Trying to exhaust the literature and reporting on subjects that are, in reality, inexhaustible is how I blew my deadline by three years.

Often these texts were in languages I don’t read—Kannada or Tamil or Malayalam—so I hired translators to unlock them for me and for my English-language readers. I commissioned one of these translators, Amulya Leona, to translate two memoirs written by Gauri’s parents. But the realities of what’s going on in India kept intruding. One day, Amulya messaged me to say she’d be delayed with some translations because she’d gotten so involved in the mass protest movement against the bigoted new citizenship laws that the Indian government had passed. The next thing I knew, she’d been arrested and jailed for sedition for something she’d said at a demonstration. Nineteen years old, she instantly became public enemy number one on India’s right-wing news channels, and her story became an important chapter in my book.

Photo of Rollo Romig by Eva Garmendia.

Seven new true crime books recount chilling stories, minus the sensationalism.

Romig's outsider status helped him tell the story of Gauri Lankesh, a fearless Indian journalist who was assassinated in 2017.
RomanceContemporary Romance

How Rainbow Rowell learned to stop worrying and love prom

Behind the Book by Rainbow Rowell

For someone who only went to one school dance, I can’t seem to stay away from them in my books. Almost all of my characters go to prom. (Or homecoming. Or, in the case of my British characters, a leavers’ ball.)

In my new novel, Slow Dance, a flashback to prom sets the stage for the grown-up love story at the heart of the book—seeing the main characters all dressed up at 18 tells you everything you need to know about them at 33. 

I love writing about prom.

I also love writing about weddings. And Christmas dinners. And first days of school.

“In a novel, prom is even better than a wedding.”

Shiloh, one of the main characters in Slow Dance, would be very disdainful of this. Prom is a false holiday, she’d say. (Holidays are false holidays, according to Shiloh. She’s a skeptic.) She refers to prom as a bundle of meaningless traditions that produce manufactured sentiments.

“It’s just a ritual,” Shiloh says in the book. And Cary, her best friend and the boy she’s secretly in love with, replies, “Rituals are all we have.”

I started out a Shiloh. But I’ve become a Cary.

As you get older, you realize that red-letter days are few and far between. Birthdays feel smaller every year—and almost nothing calls for ceremony. (There’s a real ceremonial dry spell between your wedding and your funeral, and the latter will be wasted on you.) As an adult, you almost never get really dressed up to commemorate the beginning or end of something. You almost never have an excuse to wear flowers. The days start to run together. . . . Without any rites, time is just passage. 

Prom, even more than graduation, is the American coming-of-age ritual. And I say this, knowing that many, if not most, prom experiences suck! Prom has everything: music, costumes, girls holding hands and crying. Prom is one of the only production numbers you get in life. It’s no wonder that adults organize second-chance proms, and that countries that never had proms have adopted the tradition.

It’s no wonder that authors like me can’t resist them.

Read our review of ‘Slow Dance’ by Rainbow Rowell.

In a novel, prom is even better than a wedding. (Slow Dance has both, by the way; I went all in.) It’s pageantry plus adolescence. You get to dress your characters up and dim the lights. You get to layer drama on top of drama on top of revelation. Who will they go with? Who will they dance with? What disco ball epiphanies await them? (Alternately: Who will stay home? Who’ll stand by the wall? Who will feel empty at the end of the night?)

Prom is a way to bring a story to a fizzy peak or a dizzy low. Shakespeare ended so many of his lighter plays with weddings only because he didn’t have prom at his disposal. 

Shiloh is right: Prom is about manufacturing sentiment. Especially in a work of fiction.

But Cary is more right, I think. Rituals like prom “allow us an outlet for actual sentiment.” They set the stage for us to feel something.

Picture of Rainbow Rowell courtesy of the author.

“Shakespeare ended so many of his lighter plays with weddings only because he didn't have prom at his disposal.”
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

“I’m used to being haunted by characters”

Behind the Book by Flynn Berry

A woman is standing beside me at the swings. I can see the exact expression on her face; I can hear her voice as she chats with her son. Her name is Tessa, and she isn’t real.

Like all readers, I’m familiar with the way reality and fiction can blur together. I remember visiting Edinburgh, Scotland, and walking around feeling absolutely giddy at being surrounded by, basically, characters from Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series. I sometimes find myself wondering about Rachel, from Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, the way I might if we’d been friends in college. And I find it easy to forget that Karamat Lone, from Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, is not an actual British politician. I’m used to being haunted by characters, and Tessa has been a very stubborn ghost. 

“It’s still hard for me to believe that Tessa doesn’t exist, in some corner of Dublin, just out of sight.”

I first wrote about Tessa and her sister, Marian, in Northern Spy. After turning in the book, I noticed that Tessa’s story kept spinning in my head. Her relationships with her family, her former handler and the IRA kept shifting with new complications and revelations. I wanted to write them all down, and I loved returning to her voice in Trust Her. 

As a reader, I appreciate when authors return to characters or settings. I love the deep familiarity of a duology or trilogy or a long series, the heft that comes from sticking with a detective across 10 or 20 books, as a career shifts, relationships fall apart or come together, children grow. I’m fascinated by Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, and the way each installment twists the kaleidoscope, revealing a different view of past events. That sort of casting back offers so much energy for a plot. I don’t outline my books, which means spending a lot of time wondering if what I’m writing will make any sense. There is a big twist near the end of Trust Her. When I checked back in Northern Spy, all of the clues were in place, like I’d been writing toward that moment all along. 

Read our starred review of ‘Trust Her’ by Flynn Berry.

I wanted Trust Her to echo with Northern Spy, but also to be its own complete story, with its own specific landscape. For research, I spent time in Dublin wandering around Tessa’s neighborhood, walking up and down her road in Ranelagh, hearing the Luas light-rail trams go past behind her back garden. I had breakfast at The Fumbally, a restaurant Tessa visits in The Liberties. I browsed the shelves in Hodges Figgis, her favorite bookshop, and sat on the top deck of the bus she takes home from work. I rode another bus out of the city towards the Dublin Mountains, looking out at the snow on the rooftops after a rare winter storm. Following Tessa has brought me to places I’d never have seen otherwise. It brought me into the politicians’ canteen hidden inside the Irish Parliament, and, earlier, into a production booth at the BBC during a live radio broadcast. 

It’s still hard for me to believe that Tessa doesn’t exist, in some corner of Dublin, just out of sight. Maybe she does, and I’m the one who has been haunting her.

Photo of Flynn Berry by Sylvie Rosokoff.

Why Flynn Berry wrote Trust Her, a surprise sequel to her 2021 bestselling suspense novel, Northern Spy.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

Anton Treuer on writing a Native story about healing

Behind the Book by Anton Treuer

I should not know my Native American culture or language. But I am alive. I live my culture. I speak and dream in Ojibwe.

My grandmother, Luella Seelye, was taken from her parents on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota and sent to boarding school as a child, where she was forbidden to speak Ojibwe. She came back to Leech Lake, married and raised a family. My mother, Margaret, grew up trapping, hunting, fishing and harvesting wild rice. Something profound had survived the war on our culture, but something beautiful was severed too.

I grew up at Leech Lake watching my mother become the first female Native attorney in Minnesota. By middle school, the cabin of my younger years (with no running water or electricity) was replaced with a beautiful modern home. Through it all, we harvested wild rice, made maple syrup and hunted. I grew up with books, as well as the woods, a burning sense of justice and ambition.

I went to high school with lots of Native students and many more white students. The racism was inescapable. I wanted to get out of town and never come back. I shocked everyone I knew, myself most of all, by getting into Princeton University. I shocked them again when I graduated from Princeton with a plan to come home and never leave.

I lived with one of our tribal elders, Archie Mosay. He was a teenager the first time he saw a white man, and in his 30s the first time he saw a car. I emerged from that experience fluent in our language and committed to our spiritual and ceremonial life. I have been serving Ojibwe communities in that capacity ever since.

I went to graduate school and became a professor of Ojibwe. I have nine children. My world has been filled with elders and children alike. I am so grateful for all the blessings and beauty in my life.

Where Wolves Don’t Die is the story of Ezra Cloud, a 15-year-old Ojibwe boy who is trying to find himself, while looking for clues to a murder. His family sends him to the Canadian wilderness to run a trapline with his grandfather, where he stumbles into a transformational self-discovery and learns more about his family, his culture and himself. The book is both a tense thriller and a tender coming-of-age story.

I wrote Where Wolves Don’t Die to turn Native fiction on its head. We have so many stories about trauma and tragedy, with characters who lament the culture that they were always denied. I wanted to show how vibrant and alive our culture still is. I wanted to create a story that was gripping but where none of the Native characters were drug addicts, abused or abusing others—one more like the Native life that I know. The oppressions Natives have endured are real, so I kept my work unflinching, but focused on healing. Where Wolves Don’t Die doesn’t just profess, but demonstrates the magnificence of our elders, the humor of our people and the power of forgiveness and reconciliation. I have written over 20 books, but this is my first novel. And it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

Anton Treuer longed to leave the place where he grew up—but once he left, it was only a matter of time before he found his way back.
Children's & YAPicture BookChildren's

Cece Bell crafts music and wonder

Behind the Book by Cece Bell

I have been deaf since childhood. A question I get a lot is, “Can you hear music?” My answer, “yes,” is often met with shock and disbelief. But disabilities, including deafness, are on a spectrum. I am a deaf person who benefits from hearing aids, and those hearing aids help me hear music. The music I hear might not sound perfect, but so much of what I do hear, I love.

In the early ‘80s, while my friends were rocking out to tunes on the radio, I preferred listening to the vintage albums that my older siblings brought home from thrift stores. Bacharach and the Beatles, Sergio Mendes and Joni Mitchell—even though I couldn’t understand the lyrics, my hearing aids and my parents’ exemplary turntable and speakers helped me hear voices and instruments and melodies and harmonies, bass lines and drumbeats pumping through my feet all the way to my chest.

But I wasn’t just hearing the music. I was seeing and feeling it, too. I’d sit on the floor and pore over the records’ unique album covers: 12-and-a-half inch squares featuring photographs and illustrations and fonts, a fantastic introduction to the best—and worst—of graphic design. If I was really lucky, there might be lyrics on the album cover, too, and I could sing along. I’d pause my study (and my singing) for the tactile part of the experience: flipping the record over to place the needle down on the B-side, or pulling a different record out of its crinkly, vellum sleeve to start anew.

In my newest book, Animal Albums from A to Z, each letter of the alphabet is represented by its own album cover, with each cover showcasing a different genre as performed by various animal musicians. This book is meant to be a celebration of that visual and tactile experience that I’ve described. But the unavoidable truth is that music is still meant to be heard. As I painted and collaged and cut out letters with a katrillion X-Acto blades, I dreamed about making music to go with my art. With the help of more than 60 talented musicians—many of them friends since childhood—that dream came true. I left the cherished isolation of my studio in the woods to collaborate with old and new friends in a recording studio (and beyond), and now there are 26 silly songs in 26 different genres, all accessible via a QR code on the title page of the book.

My hope is that this book replicates some of the deep sensory joys of music: that readers young and old might pore over my illustrations like I pored over those old album covers; might turn the pages like I flipped a record to its other side; might sing along with the lyrics as I did—and that they might remember these songs fondly, the way I cherish the songs of my own charmed childhood.

Photo of Cece Bell by Tom Angelberger.

The author-illustrator discusses creating the 26 original silly songs that make up Animal Albums from A to Z.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionFamily Saga

Tommy Orange on the strangeness of novel-writing

Behind the Book by Tommy Orange

Before March of 2018, I never intended to write a sequel to There There. When I first decided to do it, the mean voices inside immediately began judging me. Like it was lowbrow. Like it belonged in the Marvel universe of decision-making, like people would think it was a cash grab even though I made the decision before the success of There There.

The idea first came to me when I was sitting in a Penguin Random House warehouse signing an insane amount of books ahead of the publication of There There. That is not a romantic place for a novel to be conceived. I feel embarrassed to share that it came during that moment, but that is when it came. The sales reps who were helping me to sign all these books played a Spotify radio station based on the song “There There” by Radiohead. “Wandering Star” by Portishead came on and right when I heard it, I knew I wanted to write a sequel and that it would be called Wandering Stars. I didn’t at all know at first where the follow-up novel would lead based on this title, but I knew with strange certainty it would be the title. I could never have guessed all the unexpected places it would lead me.

Some of the earliest writing I did for Wandering Stars was about Maxine Loneman experiencing the death of her grandson. I was on a run in Baltimore, and I thought of Maxine and Tony in the afterlife and then of all these afterlife experiences of the characters from There There. That was the original conception—there was going to be a lot of weird afterlife stuff. And then in early 2019 I was in Sweden for the translation of There There. I almost didn’t go on this trip. I was to go to Italy, Sweden and Amsterdam. I’d traveled so much in 2018 that despite these being really cool sounding places, I didn’t actually want to go.

It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

Just before I was to leave I went to a Lunar New Year festival at the Oakland Museum with my family, and we parked at the Lake Merritt BART parking lot, which is notorious for break-ins. I think I wanted something bad to happen. I even left my backpack in the car. And then it did. Someone stole all of my luggage, my passport and my backpack with my computer in it, plus even my son’s toys and some of my wife’s clothes and jewelry. I was upset but also excited because I thought it meant I wouldn’t have to go to Europe. But my agent insisted I should. And she was right. So I got an emergency rushed new passport and only missed the Italian portion of the trip.

Anyway, so then the organizers in Sweden asked if I wanted a private tour of a museum. They said there was a Cheyenne exhibit. I ended up getting this really weird meta-tour where the person leading me through the museum kept explaining that they knew the museum shouldn’t have all this stuff and that they were trying to find ways to return it but weren’t entirely sure how yet. It was cool in the way land acknowledgments are cool. Until they aren’t. And it’s like, okay but what are we gonna do that means more? What’s the next step?

When we came to the Cheyenne exhibit I looked at old regalia and felt that familiar sadness I feel at museums, wondering about why anyone thought showing stolen stuff directly related to colonialism was a good idea, when I caught sight of a newspaper article clipping that said “Southern Cheyennes in Florida, 1875.” I know enough about my tribe’s history to know we were never in Florida. Not as a people. When I came home from the trip, I ended up falling deeply down a rabbit hole researching why some of us were in St. Augustine, Florida, from 1875 to 1878, at a prison-castle called Fort Marion that was shaped like a star. St. Augustine was also the very first European settlement in the continental United States. It should be noted, and some know, but many do not, that Columbus arrived in the Caribbean, not in North America. His discovery of the United States is just as false and meaningless as his legacy as some kind of hero. He went home in chains and will always be remembered by people who know the history as an awful human being.

But how would I connect this piece of history with the aftermath of the powwow from There There?

It was in the research that the moment happened. This was maybe six months after Sweden and first finding out about Fort Marion. I’d been reading a book called War Dance at Fort Marion by Brad D. Lookingbill. I was immersing myself in the world of Fort Marion and beginning to write what would become the beginning of Wandering Stars. I got to the end of the book and it listed the names of the prisoners. The character I had already started writing I’d named Star. And there in the list of names was a Southern Cheyenne named Star, and not far below him, someone named Bear Shield. I immediately started crying seeing the names. That I had already written a character named Star was one thing, but to see a family name from There There was just so overwhelming. I became convinced at that moment that I would make a generational tie between one of the prisoners at Fort Marion and one of the families who survived the shooting at the powwow at the end of There There.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing.

I have found in writing these two novels that there are things that go into the work, and also things that come out of it. For instance, the spider legs that Orvil Red Feather pulls out of his leg in There There, that was something that actually happened to me. In a West Oakland Target bathroom, just like Orvil. And then the week after I wrote the bat scene from the Thomas Frank chapter in There There, we had a bat fly into our house. The bat did what they call a flyby on my wife and niece. It felt so related to the bat I wrote into the novel and my wife definitely blamed me writing it in for what happened. And then my wife’s medical insurance had lapsed without our knowing and we ended up having to spend $10,000 to pay for rabies shots. One of the first things we did with advance money from There There was to pay that medical bill.

Writing a novel is a strange experience. Things go into it and things come out of it. It feels. It’s like this porous thing. You have to be open to what it can become, I think. You have to open yourself up to what might be possible for it to become that you might never have imagined. It can be a kind of collaboration with your unconscious, and with something else. The process, I guess. It can feel like it takes everything you have. And it does.

Read our review of Wandering Stars.

Tommy Orange author photo by Michael Lionstar.

The author shares the moments from his life that became part of the story of his hit debut, There There, and the song that inspired his sequel’s title, Wandering Stars.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Femi Kayode reveals the backstage world of megachurches

Behind the Book by Femi Kayode

Sade Dawodu, wife of a beloved bishop, has gone missing. As investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo tries to uncover the truth, he exposes an ugly underbelly of corruption and control. In this essay, author Femi Kayode tracks his interest in the facade religion can provide back to its source. 

After high school, I became swept away with the born-again pandemic that hit its peak in the early ’90s in Nigeria. I bought into it all: the rousing choir, the flamboyant pastors, the speaking in tongues and the hug-your-neighbor-and-tell-them-Jesus-loves-them. Because I am a closet voyeur, I attended only the Pentecostal churches that had large congregations. I would remain on the edge of the crowd, close enough to give the illusion of participating, but still distant enough to observe.

I loved the pastors; always smartly dressed, and almost certainly with an American accent. They are almost always men, with equally flamboyant wives who were seated to the side of the altar, piously urging their husbands to “Preach it!” The sermons could make even the most confident stand-up comedian surrender their crown; wry humor met with deep insights sprinkled with what I considered an uncommon understanding of the human condition.

My wife was raised Catholic. Since one of our shared philosophies is “A family that prays together, stays together”—quaint, right?—and we were all so joyfully (now, we would say ignorantly) patriarchal, she started accompanying me to my church, which held services in a music hall on Lagos Island.

On this particular Sunday, the pastor came on stage, an energetic GQ cover model. The choir, resplendent in their robes, walked solemnly behind him. Absolute silence. The lights dimmed, and a spotlight fell on the pastor. Boom! The backtrack of Kirk Franklin’s “Stomp” came on, and the pastor began to rap! The whole church stood up, dancing. 

Read our review of ‘Gaslight’ by Femi Kayode.

The music ended. The pastor was sweating, breathing hard. The congregation high-fived each other. The choir looked like the Sound of Blackness when they were handed a Grammy. Amid the thunderous applause, I shouted into my wife’s ear. “Did you like it?” She answered, eyes alive with happiness and devoid of judgment, “It was a wonderful performance.”

That honest response has stayed with me for the 20 years since it was spoken. Performance. Through several church attendances, across the different countries we have called home in the past two decades, I could never shake that word from the edge of my consciousness. Performance. The stage replaced the altar. The lights meant to create a celestial atmosphere became props. The congregation on high alert, an audience primed for the main event. The price of entry was in the offering box. Action! 

As this transformation unfolded in the theater of my mind, the writer in me pondered: What was going on backstage? Do the pastors wear makeup? (I have since confirmed that many do.) Do they throw tantrums like petulant divas? Yes, indeed. These questions and many more kept me awake when sermons lost meaning, choirs became sound effects and I grew too jaded to put my faith in the word of man. The sameness grated on me, like I was stuck in the reruns of a blaxploitation TV series. The recycled plot prompted my mind to travel behind the curtains, and I started seeking answers outside the script playing out in front of me.

Gaslight chronicles my journey behind the performance. It is a diary of my evolving faith. A journal of my steadfast belief that no matter how great the act, man is not God.

Photo of Femi Kayode by Nicholas Louw.

The author’s second Philip Taiwo mystery peeks beneath the facade of a picture-perfect Nigerian pastor and his wife.
RomanceFantasy Romance

Bring her that horizon: Katee Robert revives the pirate romance

Behind the Book by Katee Robert

She’s written love stories starring monsters and Greek gods, but with Hunt on Dark Waters, Katee Robert has written the high seas fantasy adventure of her dreams.

There’s something about pirates that remains timeless. We gravitate toward the idea of a reckless captain standing at the helm, the salty sea breeze whipping their stylish coat, the horizon an endless blue of possibility. The world feels big in a way that it really doesn’t anymore. Historical—and fantasy—pirates exist out of time and space, and the only rules they follow are the ones they make up. 

Obviously, reality was a bit less glamorous and more rife with scurvy and poop decks, but the mythos of pirates continues to attract and seduce. It certainly does with me, at least.

It’s hard to say when my fascination with pirates began, but I suspect it was the moment I boarded the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland when I was very young. The “briny” air wrapped around me and I sat with wide eyes through scene after scene of glamorized and entertaining glimpses of what a pirate’s life might be like. I was hooked.

Fast-forward some 30-odd years, through my deep obsessions with pirate nonfiction books, the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise and the TV show “Black Sails,” to name just a few influences. When it came time for me to circle back to my first love, fantasy novels, it was also an opportunity to mix two of my favorite things into one grand adventure.

I will admit that pirates seemed to be a bit of a long shot. While pirates have been a staple in genre fiction since the beginning of time, they’ve kind of fallen out of popularity in recent years. There’s probably some really interesting reasons why, but I love them and I’ve been on the hunt for spicy pirate romances for ages. They exist, to be sure! But there’s never enough to feed my voracious reading. One book is never enough!

Read our starred review of ‘Hunt on Dark Waters’ by Katee Robert.

Really, though, it all boils down to the fact that I’ve been chasing the high of Pirates of the Caribbean, both the ride and the movies, since my formative years. I saw the first movie in theaters five times. I was addicted to the way my heart beat faster as the music swelled and the sheer possibilities that unfolded when Jack Sparrow grinned and said, “Bring me that horizon.”

I wanted to recreate that feeling while writing—and hopefully for the reader while reading. That moment of looking out at the horizon and having no idea what it might hold. The thrill of a fight against a monster on the deck of your ship. The magic and mystery that comes when things and people aren’t quite what they seem, but you’re seduced despite yourself.

And, because it’s fantasy, everyone is freshly bathed and there’s indoor plumbing!

She’s written love stories starring monsters and Greek gods, but with Hunt on Dark Waters, Katee Robert created the high seas fantasy adventure of her dreams.
Children's & YAYA FictionYA

James Acker wrote the love story he never got

Behind the Book by James Acker

When Sandro and Bash connect at a party before the beginning of their senior year of high school, they’re surprised by an honest, genuine friendship that grows into something deeper. The Long Run is a frank, funny and beautifully written story about two South Jersey boys finding happiness and hope in the unlikeliest of places: each other. In this original essay, author James Acker reflects on the personal experiences that did—and didn’t—inspire his first book.

I’m 10 and I’m freezing. I’m sitting on top of the rotted wooden playhouse in the biggest tree in Gavin’s backyard. He’s already jumped and the rope’s been returned to me and he’s screaming: Jump! Jump! I jumped, you jump! That was the rule! And I know I’ll be fine because Gavin is fine but he’s always been luckier than me. Jump! Jump! You’ll regret it if you don’t! But I know I won’t jump because I know other ways down. I’ve got something to prove, but it’s not worth the broken ankle. Jump! Don’t you wanna say you did?

I’m 13 and I’m freezing. I’m wandering around an abandoned house on Main Street with boys I won’t be friends with much longer. The house is old and no one’s lived there for years and it was easy enough to break into. I know we shouldn’t be there, but something keeps me wandering. Jump! Jump! You’ll regret it if you don’t! RJ finds a kid’s growth chart inside the closet of what must’ve been a child’s bedroom. It’s in crayon and faded and she only grew to 4 and a half feet. I decide it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen and RJ puts his foot through it. The boys tear the house apart, and today, I am one of the boys. I want to destroy. Jump! Jump! I want the story. Don’t you wanna say you did?

I’m 16 and I’m freezing. I’m in my driveway at 3 in the morning, throwing out bedsheets because my wrestling diet has gotten away from me again. I remind myself that shame is part of growing up. I remind myself that all of this will be useful to me one day. I remind myself that new bedsheets will cost more than new laxatives, and I remind myself that Steph from bio said I was looking real sexy lately. Jump! And if I keep looking sexy and I keep making weight, maybe I’ll start making better memories. I’ll finally start enjoying myself. My high school experience. My childhood. Jump, James! If I leave with the right memories, I’ll have done my job. You’ll regret it if you don’t! If I leave with the right stories, this will all have been worth it. Don’t you wanna say you did?

It’s hard not to think that I’m only writing coming-of-age stories because I don’t like my own. My childhood felt like “Supermarket Sweep”: Fill your shopping cart with whatever you can find. Experience what you can while you can. You’ll sort through it all after time runs out. Jump. I’ve spent a lot of my 20s sorting out my shopping cart. My debut novel is dropping right before I turn 30, and I’ve begun to wonder if my stories are all that interesting. Did I receive store-brand trauma? Was there anything unique in all that crying? Should I have stopped my sweep and considered what I was grabbing before moving on to the next aisle?

“As an adult, I can look at my childhood with a warm, detached fondness. But if I could speak to myself at that age again, I would ask him to live in the moment. Not for the moment.”

The Long Run began as an attempt at capturing what my life felt like in high school. The desire to get this story out had been a long time coming, and I expected all the right anecdotes to present themselves in a polite single-file line. I’d spent a childhood collecting these memories. Where else were they supposed to go? The sweep was over. The buzzer had rung. Now was the time to prove that it had all been worth it. The stories meant something, so why was I staring at an empty page? Every idea for a chapter stayed a bullet point. None of my anecdotes would fill in their blanks. I had nothing.

So I wrote something else. I couldn’t write a memoir, so I wrote what could have happened. I used everything in my shopping cart, everyone I’d met and everything I did, and I wrote a different story. A familiar story. I filled my little New Jersey suburb with different boys in familiar houses. Different names with familiar struggles. I wrote about kids I wished I’d been friends with. Parties I wish I hadn’t skipped, meals I wish I’d eaten, conversations I wish I’d had. And if I couldn’t put myself on the page, I’d split that angry, crying boy into Sandro and Bash. Two parts of myself that never agreed. A lover and a fighter. An asshole and a crybaby. I wrote the love story I never got between two boys I always knew. If I couldn’t agree on my story, I could at least tell theirs.

As an adult, I can look at my childhood with a warm, detached fondness. But if I could speak to myself at that age again, I would ask him to live in the moment. Not for the moment. That kid did so much just for the story, just to say he’d done it, and today I’m left with shreds. Wonderful shreds, but incomplete stories. Sparks of a feeling, never the full picture. 

Writing The Long Run felt like filling in those blanks. Connecting the dots between those snapshots of childhood. A morning on a rooftop. A night in a driveway. Flashbulbs of memories, finally put down to paper. It felt like a lifetime of collection finally coming together. Even if some memories didn’t make the cut, those moments still mattered. They were still useful. Every story mattered. And I’ll spend the rest of my career as a writer trying to put them all together.

Read our starred review of James Acker’s ‘The Long Run.’

Author photo of James Acker courtesy of Bernadette Bridges.

The debut author set out to write a memoir, but when his high school experiences refused to coalesce into prose, he had to find a new way to tell his story.

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