All Interviews

Discover the magical school young readers would be thrilled to attend

Interview by RJ Witherow

Dhonielle Clayton is a bestselling YA author, the chief operating officer of the nonprofit organization We Need Diverse Books and the founder of Cake Creative Kitchen, a multimedia development company. If Clayton’s talent has a ceiling, her first middle grade novel, The Marvellers, reveals that she hasn’t reached it yet.

The Marvellers is the stuff that middle grade fantasy fans’ dreams are made of. The first book in a planned series, it’s the story of Ella Durand, the first Conjuror to attend the Arcanum Training Institute, a magical school that floats high in the clouds. Clayton spoke with BookPage about creating a fantastical world that balances playfulness and delight with analogs to real-life injustices, anchored by a protagonist certain to join the likes of Percy Jackson and Aru Shah in the hearts of middle grade fantasy readers.

The Marvellers is your first foray into middle grade. What was it like to create a story for this readership?

Middle grade fiction is my first love. I’m a former elementary and middle school librarian as well as a secondary school teacher, so those books have always had my heart and reminded me of why I love books.

I feel so excited to get to write for a younger audience because I believe that this is the developmental time period when imaginations are cultivated and grown. I was surrounded by these readers in my library every day and they inspired me as I was creating the world of The Marvellers. I tried to reconnect with the middle grade reader I used to be, diving headfirst into all the magic and all the whimsy.

Can you give us a little introduction to Ella and where she’s at when we meet her?

Ella is an eternal optimist who is very invested in making friends and determined to contribute to her community. She is the young person I wish I had been at her age, but instead I was a grumpy, fussy sourpuss and a mildly reclusive kid—more like Harriet the Spy and Turtle Wexler of The Westing Game than anything else. If I could’ve been left to my own devices rather than having to deal with the community, I would’ve gladly curled up with a book and ignored everyone.

But Ella is the ultimate lovebug and an extraordinary global citizen. If you don’t have friends, she’ll always offer you a branch of friendship. No matter the bad weather, she’s going to look for the sunshine.

Ella faces a huge challenge at the start of the book: She straddles two worlds and functions like a tiny bridge between them. The Marvellian world is uneasy about Conjuror integration into their cities and their school, because for over 300 years they’ve been afraid of how magic manifests in the Conjuror world. Conjure folk remain hurt by and suspicious of Marvellers, leaving many Conjurors torn about whether they should even share space with a group of people who have actively kept them out and ostracized them.

Ella is caught in this emotional, political and social tangle, not unlike how my parents dealt with being the first generation of Black Americans to integrate segregated schools in the American South. Ella must be steadfast and actively hold onto her joy when so many wish to take it from her.

“I hope Ella’s struggle reminds young readers that there’s something marvelous about them, and the sooner they embrace that universal truth, the better.”

The way that characters treat Conjurers in the book parallels prejudices in our world, especially racism and anti-Blackness. Why was this important to you? How did you balance giving young readers of color a fantastical escape and also representing their own experiences with injustice?

The thematic question at the heart of The Marvellers and its universe is the conflict and tension between two groups of magical people. I wanted this complex and nuanced conflict to parallel anti-Black racism, especially anti-Black racism rooted in the deep-seated prejudice against descendants of the chattel slave trade system so as to include the disapora of trafficked West Africans. I wanted to use magic and fantasy to discuss how anti-Blackness isn’t superficial, but rather an insidious system that penetrates and poisons every aspect of a society, magical or real.

However, this thematic subtext is all lingering just beneath a big story about a magic school. I was very conscious of the story’s balance, of making sure to tell the truth and confront the darker and more uncomfortable realities of queer and BIPOC kids in environments like these while also making sure those kids still just get to have a magical escape.

Each member of Marvellian society has a unique magical talent known as a Marvel, and Ella spends much of the book wondering where her own talents fit in. What would you say to young readers who are trying to discover or embrace what makes them special?

I hope Ella’s struggle reminds young readers that there’s something marvelous about them, and the sooner they embrace that universal truth, the better. My grandmother told me that it only mattered what I liked and how I felt about myself, and everything else was nonsense and not my business. I hope young readers can be excited about what makes them unique, because the magic system of this world celebrates that.

“Creating the setting of the Arcanum Institute was the most fun I’ve had while working on a book because I got to add in all the things I wish I’d had at a real school, as both a student and a teacher.”

The Arcanum Training Institute teaches students from all over the world. How did you research the various magical traditions that readers will see represented?

I did a ton of research to build the world of The Marvellers, from spending time in libraries, to traveling, to working with cultural experts from all around the world. It was important to me that all children could find their place in this universe and have the ability to self-insert and imagine themselves as a young Marveller headed to study in the skies or as a Conjuror trying to make their way.

I kept an entire notebook of research about global cultures and theorized what their marvels might be based on their unique folkloric traditions as well as their customs, food and history. I hope that through the series, I’ll be able to learn more and continue to add more inclusivity to this big world.

The world of the novel is bursting with quirks and amazing details. Can you tell us about developing this complex setting? What aspects or elements were the most fun? Were there any challenges you had to solve along the way?

Creating the setting of the Arcanum Institute was the most fun I’ve had while working on a book because I got to add in all the things I wish I’d had at a real school, as both a student and a teacher. The first step was to make a complex map, laying out where everything was and its purpose, plus infusing it all with magic and wonder.

I had the most fun while creating the Paragon Towers and the Dining Hall. I wanted each tower to be a feast for the imagination and embody a particular sensory category in unexpected ways. The Taste Tower would be filled with delicious things to taste and the Sound Tower would display every instrument you could think of and have amazing sound labs. The Dining Hall was a place where I could just have fun, play with food and ensure that the diversity of the student body was reflected in the menus and magical food trucks.

I’m wrestling with my biggest challenge now, because the Arcanum Institute never looks the same way twice, so as I work on the sequel, I have to start redoing my map and changing up the look of the school.

“My grandmother told me that it only mattered what I liked and how I felt about myself, and everything else was nonsense and not my business.”

Speaking of the Dining Hall, The Marvellers contains so many imaginative descriptions of food, from dancing dumplings to flying hummingbird cakes. Why is food such an important part of the magic of this world? What’s the most magical thing you’ve ever eaten? What’s the most magical thing you’d like to eat, but haven’t yet (or maybe can’t, because of the laws of this universe)?

I believe that food is a connector between groups of people, and I wanted to use food in this magical universe to bring people together and showcase how diverse and wonderful it could be. I was a kid who was afraid of a lot of different foods, so I wanted to animate the food in a way that might encourage a young reader to seek out cuisines from different cultures and expand their taste buds.

The food I grew up eating, made by Black American women from North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi, felt magical to me. Comfort is magic, and that’s what the food I ate growing up gave me. However, when I first had Jamaican food and food from New Orleans, it felt magical because of flavor combinations I’d never experienced before.

If the laws of the universe could bend to my will, I’d actually want to try all of the different kinds of jollof rice and have a real-life jumping jollof rice competition like the one in the book.

The Marvellers beautifully showcases the joy of learning alongside and from people who are different from yourself. What writers whose genre or category is different from yours have you learned a lot from? What about creators in other fields, like artists or musicians?

If you pay close attention to the text of The Marvellers, I’ve included many Easter egg names of people whose work has had a fundamental impact on me as a writer. I included them as literary love letters to these people (but also to make them laugh and feel seen).

As for some writers outside of my current publishing categories who have taught me a lot, I’d have to say Jesmyn Ward, Kiese Laymon, Donald Quist and Robert Jones Jr. on the adult literary side. Their work is teaching me a lot about line-level work and a deep resistance to the white gaze in modern work.

I’m also very influenced by music and musicians and their ability to be storytellers in a different format. I love what Beyoncé has done with both visual and musical mediums. I watch her as a creator who constantly and consistently understands the assignment to continually challenge her medium, which showcases the depth of her creativity.

Read our review of ‘The Marvellers.’

Author photo of Dhonielle Clayton courtesy of Jess Andree.

The Arcanum Training Institute, where students master fantastical abilities as they float high above the clouds, is the setting of bestselling author Dhonielle Clayton’s first middle grade novel, The Marvellers. Take a peek at some of the wonders that await as Clayton reveals her inspirations, Easter eggs and more.

Fiction Audio Literary Fiction

In a new audiobook recording, Mohsin Hamid is the voice in your head

Interview by Cat Acree

It’s rare for a novelist to read their own audiobook. Most authors who step up to the mic are recording nonfiction, with fiction audiobooks typically being performed by a voice actor or full cast. But Booker Prize finalist Mohsin Hamid possesses transportive powers as an audiobook narrator, and with new recordings of his first two novels, Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (4.5 hours), he has now narrated all five of his books.

Told in a first-person monologue by a Pakistani man named Changez to an unnamed American at a cafe in Lahore not long after 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist makes for an especially powerful listening experience as, over the course of one evening, a sense of dread builds and demands a reckoning. For his first ever interview on his work as a narrator, Hamid took a video call at his home in Pakistan to discuss this “one-man play.”

When writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist, how much did you think about what it would be like to step into the role of author-narrator-character?
I sort of wrote all of my books as audiobooks. I didn’t realize this until years later, but I really do think of literature or fiction as something we absorb through our aural circuitry more than our visual circuitry. Many of us read books with our eyes—some people read with their fingers or with their ears, as with audiobooks—but so many of us grew up reading with our eyes, so it’s a very visual experience, and the way things look should be important. But I tend to feel that the circuitry involved is still very much the circuitry of sound and language and rhythm and cadence.

One of the formative moments for me as a writer was taking a creative writing workshop with Toni Morrison back in 1993 spring in college. . . . And one thing she did in her class is that she would read our work aloud back to us. She could make a Corn Flakes box sound like poetry. She was the greatest reader I ever encountered, and when she would read . . . I thought, “Wow, I can really write! I’ve got it!”

She said things like, “You want to keep your reader a sort of half-heartbeat ahead of the action, so that what comes next can be a surprise, but it should feel like it was inevitable.” . . . One of the ways we do that in cinema, for example, is through the soundtrack, which suggests movements and motions and directions even while the visuals are doing something else. In written fiction, cadence and sound and rhythm can begin to establish these sorts of movements and directions, so that you have the chance of this feeling of inevitability.

“I’d always imagined it as this almost stage story, and suddenly I was on this stage, and it felt oddly like coming full circle.”

The Reluctant Fundamentalist wasn’t originally conceived as a 9/11 novel. You finished its first draft prior to that day, but as the world changed, so did your book. Now we have the opportunity to revisit your 9/11 novel with the gift of hindsight. What do you think is its place in our current reading environment?
It’s hard for me to answer that. I remember once being at this literary festival in Mantua, Italy. And as I say this, I should make clear that my life is not spent at literary festivals in Mantua, Italy. It was as exotic for me to be there as it is to say it to you now, but there I was under some clock tower in the open air, the stars above us, and Russell Banks was there. . . . I knew that a book of his had come out recently, and I had asked him if he was happy with how it had done and, you know, the usual chitchat you try to make with some literary icon when you’re this young kid who’s written a book or two. And he said something that stuck with me.

He said, “You know, it’s too soon to say. . . . It’s not until about 10 years after a book comes out that you begin to have a sense of what it’s doing. And the reasons why people are still reading it 10 years on are probably what you actually did. That’s what people got from it.” This is the kind of thing you go to literary festivals for, so that some much more experienced writer can unload this wisdom on you. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is now 15 years old, so it’s past the Russell Banks 10-year law, and I think people still seem to be reading it.

I wrote that book very much with the idea of the reader as a kind of character. Not that the novel is addressed to you, necessarily, but the book is a kind of half novel. We never hear half of the story; we never hear Changez’s interlocutor really say anything. Even more than most novels—or all novels, by virtue of being pieces of ink printed on paper that require a transmutation by the reader that makes them come alive—this book, because so much of it is missing, [forces the reader] to try and restabilize this narrative. The book was intended as a way for the reader to encounter how they feel about the story. What are the instincts that it provokes in them? What are their inclinations? Who do you think is threatening whom? Why? And it leads you, in a sense, to a position that isn’t quite resolved, and so you have to figure out either how to resolve it or what that unresolved state makes you feel. And I think it still does that, I imagine.

The form of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is this dramatic monologue, is really akin to a one-man play. So in doing an audiobook, I was performing that one-man play. I’d always imagined it as this almost stage story, and suddenly I was on this stage, and it felt oddly like coming full circle.

Read our starred review of The Reluctant Fundamentalist audiobook.

That dramatic monologue is so effective as an audiobook. The listener is called upon in a very different way than with other novels. We feel like we’re being addressed.
That’s good to hear. It is a very direct form of address. It has to be. And in that book in particular, voice is so important because Changez, we learn, is ostensibly Muslim. But he doesn’t pray, he drinks, he has sex, he doesn’t quote the Quran or think about the doings of the Prophet. . . . His Islam appears to be a sort of tribal [affiliation]. It’s sort of “these are my people, I belong to something,” much more than it is an operating system, you know, like MacOS.

Some people might imagine that Islam has a kind of . . . rigidity or formality, that it has a kind of, you know, menace. I think these sorts of perceptions that many people do have about Islam—who are not Muslims or don’t know very many Muslims, particularly in that post-9/11 environment—the novel doesn’t give those attributes to Changez, but it does use a voice that can invoke those attributes. So you can end up believing things about this guy, not because he thinks in a certain way or even does anything, but just because it sounds like he might.

And so the reading of that book was very interesting and actually fun because Changez speaks in this very formal, kind of anachronistic way, and that formality is also a distancing, and it builds to what feels like a kind of menace because, you know, so often we assume that a more colloquial, friendly form of address is not threatening, but Changez’s quite formal address [makes us wonder,] “Why is he keeping me at a distance? What does he intend to do to me? What kind of person speaks in this way? Why does he think like this?”

I used to talk about The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a thriller in which nothing really happens. And I think that sense of thrill comes from the fact that we are already frightened of each other. There’s a preexisting thrill in the reader—whether it’s a reader who sympathizes with Changez and is frightened of the American, or sympathizes with the American and is frightened of Changez—and the novel tries to invoke within the reader a feeling of that discomfort that we were all encouraged to have in those years, that we belonged to these different groups and that we had to be in conflict.

And as audiobook listeners, we’re even more vulnerable to what the story wants to invoke in us. We’re passive receivers; we’re not even moving our eyes across the page.
Weirdly enough, it’s closer to the experience of Changez’s interlocutor in the book itself. The confined space of this conversation, where somebody is forced to listen to somebody else for hours, is more akin to an audiobook experience, where you’re sort of sitting there and this person is coming at you with their voice.

“I used to talk about The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a thriller in which nothing really happens. And I think that sense of thrill comes from the fact that we are already frightened of each other.”

Are you a frequent audiobook listener?
I tend to feel that the inbound-information-to-my-eyes thing is a little bit overloaded. Either I’m reading stuff online or I’m actually reading a book or I’m writing something, and then when I’m not, there’s a complex series of advertisements directed at me and my kids’ devices, and I think that I long to just have my eyes be free. And that’s when the idea of just listening to something becomes so attractive. My daughter does the exact same thing, but she listens to music for hours every day, and she’s dancing in her room by herself, and she has that relationship with music that teens and preteens sort of have had from time immemorial. It’s just ears. It’s ears and your body in space.

You know, I’m now reminded of this thing that Philip Gourevitch once said to me when he was editor of The Paris Review. He said, “It’s strange, but we get more short story submissions than we have subscribers.” . . . I feel a little bit like that, where I’ve recorded this handful of audiobooks these last few years, but how many have I listened to? I think I’m like the Paris Review submitter of audiobooks. I talk a good game, but I don’t really walk the walk as far as listening is concerned. So it’s a bit shameful, but anyway, I’m a writer, so I make the things. I don’t listen that much.

Photo of Mohsin Hamid by Jillian Edelstein

Fifteen years after its initial publication, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets a haunting new audiobook recorded by its author.

Mystery & Suspense Historical Mystery

Jane Austen, but add a dash of murder

Interview by Elyse Discher

If you’re a Jane Austen fan, chances are you’ve always wanted to see your favorite couples from her various novels interact with one another. (Indeed, reams of fan fiction have been written on this very topic.) But what if you could do that and watch them deal with a murderer in their midst? In Claudia Gray’s The Murder of Mr. Wickham, the titular cad is killed during a house party at George and Emma Knightley’s estate. It’s up to Catherine and Henry Tilney’s daughter, Juliet, and Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s son, Jonathan, to catch the culprit. We talked to Gray about revisiting Austen’s most beloved characters in their married lives and why George Wickham was her first and only choice for her novel’s victim.

What is your favorite Jane Austen novel?
Pride and Prejudice: the answer everyone gives, probably, and for very good reasons. Name another novel written more than 200 years ago that still gets read regularly, by nonacademics, purely for pleasure. I don’t think there is one, at least not in the English language. That said, I truly love all her novels, and the one that perhaps intrigues me the most is Mansfield Park. The one that moves me the most is Persuasion. And I have to stop now, because you didn’t ask for a treatise about my feelings regarding all six novels.

“I imagined the book I wanted to read, which then became the book I wanted to write.”

What made you want to write a mystery set in Austen’s world?
It was reading Death Comes to Pemberley and . . . not digging it. I love P.D. James, so my anticipation for the book was sky-high. It comes out, I get it, and I discover that the murder victim in that book is (SPOILER ALERT) Denny, a minor character in Pride and Prejudice. My first thought was: Who cares who killed Denny? None of the beloved characters were suspects, as I had assumed they would be. So I had this big crash of disappointment that had less to do with the quality of James’ writing (which is, of course, superb) and more to do with my assumptions. I imagined the book I wanted to read, which then became the book I wanted to write.

How did you create and then navigate the conflicts between the members of each couple?
For the most part, the conflicts the couples face call upon issues they dealt with before they married, but in new ways. Darcy and Elizabeth are burdened with grief, but that grief is worsened by Darcy’s refusal to reveal his emotions. Emma’s been chastised by Knightley for her meddling, so how does she react when he feels obliged to intervene in someone else’s life? Colonel Brandon and Marianne have yet to work out how much his past will determine their future, and so on. They’re all the same people they were during courtship, and though they’re older and wiser, they can still fall prey to subtler versions of their previous mistakes.

“The most fun to write [was] Elizabeth Darcy, of course . . .”

How did you stay true to Austen’s voice?
I’m tremendously flattered that the voice rang true to you. I didn’t mimic period style exactly, but I tried to let that be the guide as much as possible—which involved a ton of rereading Austen’s work, some reading of other Regency-era novels, reading some of the Austen family letters and watching my favorite adaptations.

Which character was the most fun to write? Were there any who were surprisingly challenging?
The most fun to write were Elizabeth Darcy, of course, and Marianne, as well as the new characters of Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney. Most challenging was Fanny from Mansfield Park: Her personality is naturally timid, her moods fragile, her responses often passive. She is the antithesis of what we look for in a main character in modern fiction, and yet Fanny is capable of great courage when she knows herself to be right. So making her both true to her depiction in Mansfield Park and engaging to readers today was definitely a challenge.

What made you decide to make neurodivergence a part of Jonathan Darcy’s character?
Honestly, that emerged from the writing process itself. At first, my only goal was for Jonathan to be more Darcy than Darcy. But as I dug into the story, I had to ask what might be driving that. Once I recognized that Jonathan might be neurodivergent, it opened up so many interesting questions about how he would navigate the Regency world. I did a lot of reading and research in the hopes that he would feel authentic on the page.

One point that was important for me to remember, though, was that neither Jonathan nor his parents—nor anyone else in the novel—will ever think of him as neurodivergent. That’s not a frame of reference any of them would have; that’s not how he would be understood in that era.

Read our review of ‘The Murder of Mr. Wickham’ by Claudia Gray.

What led you to decide on Mr. Wickham being the murder victim? Were there other contenders?
Wickham was the first and only candidate I considered. The victim had to be someone whom many, many people would have a motive to kill, and who incites quite as much fury as Mr. Wickham?

Will we see Juliet and Jonathan again in future books?
I’m so glad you enjoyed them! It can be difficult to set new characters among known ones, but Juliet and Jonathan proved a delight to write. Rest assured, they’ll team up again.

Photo of Claudia Gray by Stephanie Knapp.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a good dinner party must be in want of a murder. In this case, it's The Murder of Mr. Wickham, the dastardly villain of Pride and Prejudice, which was bound to happen, according to author Claudia Gray.

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

A Scrabble tournament takes a deadly turn in ‘Queen of the Tiles’

Interview by Linda M. Castellitto

Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf’s Queen of the Tiles combines two irresistible elements: wordplay and murder. It’s the story of Najwa, a Scrabble whiz whose best friend, Trina, collapsed mid-game during the Word Warrior Weekend tournament a year ago. As Najwa continues to deal with her grief, she competes in her first tournament since Trina’s death, where she discovers that her friend may have been murdered—and the killer could be sitting on the other side of the Scrabble board.

What initially sparked your interest in writing about Scrabble and the competitive Scrabble community?

I love Scrabble. Malaysia has a thriving, active Scrabble community, and as a teen, my older brother had been part of it. I remember many weekends spent ferrying him back and forth from our house to the Parkroyal Hotel in downtown Kuala Lumpur, where meets were usually held. Naturally, I ended up representing my school at a few competitions when I was in my teens as well. The strategies employed by top Scrabble players have always fascinated me, and when you combine that with my love of wordplay, Agatha Christie mysteries and teen angst, well, that’s how Queen of the Tiles was born.

The Scrabble competition in Queen of the Tiles is suspenseful and incredibly detailed. How did you research that aspect of the book? What did you learn that surprised you?

I watched many hours of Scrabble competitions, documentaries and interviews, read as much and as widely as I could on strategy and gameplay, and mapped out moves on a Scrabble board that I kept by my desk throughout the entire process.

I am now a repository of absolutely fascinating and utterly useless Scrabble trivia. For instance, the highest scoring Scrabble word ever was played by Karl Khoshnaw in 1982: caziques, for 392 points. But Dan Stock from Ohio worked out that, in theory, the highest scoring Scrabble word possible is oxyphenbutazone, which, if the stars somehow align and all conditions on the board are just as they need to be, can get you a ridiculous 1,778 points. Yes, I am very fun at parties.

“Mysteries work best when readers can play along.”

At the beginning of each chapter, you feature a word with its definition and Scrabble point value. Did you already have words in mind for this when you began writing?

I kept a Google Doc called WORD LIST, and every time I came across a word and definition that I thought I could work into the plot—whether for the words at the beginning of each chapter, tournament scenes or Najwa’s own internal monologues—I’d note it down.

Sometimes I needed something specific, like, “Oh, for this chapter, I need an obscure word that means ‘enemy.’” I’d open Thesaurus.com, plug the word in and find the most obscure but still relevant synonym. Then I’d cross-check it with an online Scrabble word checker to make sure it was valid and read what the official definition and point value would be.

Najwa’s internal dialogue was harder to work through. She floats from word to word depending on the definition or how that word is tied to her memories or her analysis of other people. It’s a tricky thing to pull off, and every time I did it felt like a tiny miracle.

One of my favorite such moments happens early on in the book. Najwa’s thought process takes her from the word arenite (a sedimentary clastic rock) to clastic (composed of fragments) to fragment (to break into pieces), and that’s how she feels right in that moment: like she’s falling apart.

The tournament aspect of the novel is thrilling on its own, but Queen of the Tiles also contains a murder mystery! Do you enjoy reading mysteries? What was challenging about plotting one yourself?

I grew up raiding my older sister’s collection of Agatha Christie novels and still go back to them as comfort reads—particularly the Poirot books. Yes, you read that right: I read murder mysteries for comfort.

The most challenging part of it all was laying down the breadcrumbs. It’s easy to say this big reveal needs to happen in this chapter, or this plot twist goes here, but if you don’t show a logical path to get there, then you’re not really earning it. Mysteries work best when readers can play along; they’re most fun when you can go back and realize the clues were there waiting for you, and you just didn’t realize at the time that they were clues at all.

“If [Najwa] feels real to readers, then I’m grateful, because the emotions were all too real to me.”

Najwa has developed an obsession with Trina’s Instagram account, and social media plays a vital role in the story. Why was it important to you to include this in the book?

Trina was a social media star; she had a large following and we catch glimpses of how obsessed she was with maintaining a certain image for her public. But the more we get to know Trina, the more we see how much more depth and darkness lie behind the facade.

And it isn’t just Trina. In all instances where we see social media use in Queen of the Tiles—and we see it a lot—there’s always the underlying question of what we present to the world versus who we really are. How much is being shown, and how much is being hidden? How do you evaluate what is real when you don’t know how much is being shared and how much has been withheld?

In her grief after Trina’s death, Najwa experiences memory issues, intrusive thoughts and more. Your portrait of Najwa is so real and raw. What was it like for you to craft this moving depiction of loss and healing?

I did some research on therapy and coping mechanisms for loss, grief and PTSD, but to be honest, writing Najwa was difficult not because I couldn’t understand what she was feeling, but because I understood it too well. I mined my own memories and emotions and buried shards of my own remembered grief in Najwa; if she feels real to readers, then I’m grateful, because the emotions were all too real to me.

I loved how often Najwa refers to her therapist when she talks about what she’s been going through. Why was it important to you to include therapy as part of Najwa’s experiences and to depict her openly relying on its lessons?

In Malaysia, we’re still working on destigmatizing mental illness and therapy. I really wanted to show a Malay Muslim teen struggling with her mental health and the ways in which she reaches out, gets help, develops coping mechanisms and puts those tools in practice—all things that I think we need to work on normalizing.

Read our starred review of Hanna Alkaf’s ’Queen of the Tiles.’

You recently tweeted, “I cannot tell you what it means to me to see a hijabi on the cover of a book that has absolutely nothing to do with Muslim pain or oppression. A book where she just gets to play Scrabble and solve a mystery and be a teenage girl.” That’s such a powerful statement. What do you hope Najwa and her story might mean for teen readers?

All too often, Muslims and hijabis have to perform our pain in order for our stories to be taken seriously. And those stories are important and necessary. But they’re not all we are. The Muslim experience is varied and colorful; we contain multitudes. We should have stories that showcase all of that! Our pain and our joy and our fears and our loves and our friendships—the sum of our lives and not just one aspect of it.

What do you think draws us to word games like Scrabble, crossword puzzles or, recently, Wordle and makes us want to play them time and again?

I can only really speak for myself, but in my case, I am endlessly fascinated by language and the way that the smallest changes in letters, word choice, tone, inflection or emphasis can entirely change the message we’re trying to get across. My dedication in this book reads simply, “This one’s for the word nerds.” I might as well have said, “This one is for me.”

Author photo of Hanna Alkaf courtesy of Azalia Suhaimi.

Hanna Alkaf’s new YA novel is a murder mystery set in the cutthroat world of competitive Scrabble.

Nonfiction Memoir Essays

Mary Laura Philpott never met a bookstore she didn’t like

Interview by the editors of BookPage

Author Mary Laura Philpott has crafted another witty, heartfelt memoir-in-essays with Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives. To celebrate its release, we asked Philpott a few questions about her favorite bookstores and libraries, both real and imagined. (Spoiler alert: Her method for organizing her own bookshelves is every bit as charming as you’d imagine.)

What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store?
I go right to that front table to check out new fiction and nonfiction. I’m also a sucker for a good display. It’s fun to see what booksellers are showcasing on a given day.

Do you visit bookstores differently after having worked for Parnassus in Nashville?
I pay more attention to the shelf-talkers—the little cards on which booksellers write up their favorite reads. That’s partly because I often know the people writing them! But I also know now how hard booksellers work every day, and I know it takes extra time to come up with a concise blurb that somehow conveys what they love about a book. Same goes for librarians. A lot of librarians and booksellers are really good writers!

Read our starred review of ‘Bomb Shelter’ by Mary Laura Philpott.

Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child.
I went to an elementary school for a few years that held chapel services in the mornings, and for the littlest kids the services were conducted in the library. We sat cross-legged on the floor in rows. It was my favorite room of the school, but it drove me crazy to be expected to concentrate on singing hymns when all the books were RIGHT THERE.

While writing your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful?
Oh my goodness, so many! The first thing that comes to mind is actually from an airport bookstore. I can’t even remember what city I was in, but I had just gotten off a plane and checked my email. A newspaper editor had asked if I could write about a book, but the deadline was going to be tight. I knew if I could get the book in my hands before I got on my connecting flight, I could use my airborne time wisely and start working on it. So I dashed into a Hudson Booksellers shop and explained all this in a breathless and verbose and probably nonsensical way. The staffer knew exactly the book I was talking about. She also helped me find a new travel charger for my phone, because I realized I’d left mine in a hotel. I love airport bookstores!

“More of an open YES to every opportunity I get to see a beautiful library or shop I haven’t seen before.”

Do you have a favorite library from literature?
I can’t stop thinking about the virtual library in Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. One of the plotlines involves a teenage girl all alone on a spaceship; the idea is that she was part of a mission to populate a distant planet after Earth became uninhabitable, but somehow she ended up as the only one alive on the vessel. She has a headset she can put on to enter a library where she can find any book ever written, plus video archives of human history. There’s more to the story about the importance of reading and the evolving life of literature from generation to generation, but I don’t want to spoil anything. Everyone should read this book; it’s a big, strange, amazing masterpiece.

Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet?
Not a list, per se—more of an open YES to every opportunity I get to see a beautiful library or shop I haven’t seen before. Thankfully my children are used to this by now, so no one balks when we’re on vacation and I make everybody detour into a book spot.

How is your own personal library organized?
Not alphabetically or by genre or color. I shelve books together that have something thematic in common or that I feel would be friends. For example, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is next to Karen Thompson Walker’s books, which are next to Ling Ma’s Severance. All the end-of-the-world gals have their own little neighborhood.

“I love any bookstore animal. Give me bookstore lizards, bookstore chickens, bookstore goats!”

What’s the last thing you bought at your local bookstore?
I marked the publication date of Taylor Harris’ memoir, This Boy We Made, on my calendar and went to buy it the day it came out.

Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs?
I’m more likely to pet a bookstore dog than a bookstore cat because I’m allergic to cats, but I like the cats just as much. I love any bookstore animal. Give me bookstore lizards, bookstore chickens, bookstore goats!

What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack?
Oh, I can’t eat in a bookstore—I’m too nervous about spilling things, and I need my hands free for making book piles—but I love a hot beverage once I’m home and settled on the sofa with my new reads.

Author headshot of Mary Laura Philpott by Heidi Ross.

Read our review of ‘Search’ by Michelle Huneven.

How did your time at the Methodist Claremont School of Theology influence this book? Did you, like Dana, ever consider the ministry as a vocation?
In my 30s, I’d been supporting myself as a restaurant critic while trying to write a novel. I’d been working on that novel for more years than I’m willing to admit, and I was not getting anywhere. Like Dana, I yearned to do something more strenuous and meaningful with my life than write about what I put in my mouth.

The minister at my church was literary, erudite, funny and wide-ranging in his interests, and I thought I might like to do what he did. (Ministry and novel writing are among the few careers for generalists.) Also, I loved the sermon as a literary form almost as much as I loved the novel. So, off to seminary I went. Although the Claremont School of Theology was Methodist-affiliated, students from 31 denominations attended, including an African denomination of one. My study partner was a nun.

I loved every minute of my time there—the classes, the reading, the papers and preaching, the conversations, my colleagues, and professors. But about a year and a half in, as I sat in my Backgrounds of Contemporary Theology course, it came to me what I’d been doing wrong with the novel I’d been trying to write for so many years: I’d been starting it in the wrong place!

When school got out for the year, I went back to work on the old project, and by the fall, I was so deep into it, I put off finishing my divinity degree—and indeed, I never did complete it. I did, however, finish the novel, which was Round Rock. My second novel, Jamesland, was my first “church” novel, and Search, my fifth novel, is my second “church” novel. They share a character, and both make use of my seminary experience and, I hope, justify it. In Search, Dana actually gets my seminary years and, like me, never finishes. Like Dana, I have never lost my interest in ministers and ministry.

“Ministry and novel writing are among the few careers for generalists.”

Why did you decide to include recipes with the book? And how did you decide which recipes to include?
When I won a James Beard Award years ago, it was for the category “Feature Writing With Recipes.” The “With Recipes” clause always made me laugh. It seemed like both a pulled punch and the promise of a little bonus. That is, some might see the category as a lighter, perhaps slightly frivolous form of feature writing, while others might consider the recipes as a bonus, like a crackerjack prize. At any rate, the idea of a Novel “With Recipes” has also always amused and appealed to me.

Some recipes—like chicken fiesta and the whole wheat chocolate chip cookies—I knew I would include from the start, while other recipes made themselves known as the characters cooked and carried their dishes into committee meetings.

I had a lot of fun testing the recipes to get them right. How many fresh coconuts did I hurl on our concrete patio for the buko pie? Many! Enough to become an expert coconut cracker. And friends still speak reverently of the lamb nihari feast we held outside under heaters during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that’s an interesting recipe—it’s not difficult, except that you must get out (and use) every single spice in your cabinet.

What link(s) do you find (or draw) between food and spirituality?
My husband, who is Jewish, likes to say, “Where two or more are gathered, food is served.” Eating together, breaking bread, communion, picnicking, coffee hour—here is where generosity, nourishment, conversation, conviviality and community occur, and connection is made. Food connects us to a vast web of labor and resources, not to mention growing cycles and the seasons. If you ever need a sense of “the interconnected web of which we are all a part,” consider how that cup of tea or apple or slice of bread reached your lips.

“Eating together, breaking bread, communion, picnicking, coffee hour—here is where generosity, nourishment, conversation, conviviality and community occur, and connection is made.”

Dana comes out squarely in favor of whole wheat chocolate chip cookies. And you? Do you prefer yours crunchy, chewy or cake-y?
Oh, I really do love those whole wheat chocolate chip cookies from Kim Boyce’s whole grain cookbook, Good to the Grain. Someone called them “adult cookies,” and maybe they are. They are certainly burly cookies. (I gave the recipe to a friend who had two adult sons living with her during the pandemic, and they nicknamed the cookies “The Burly Mofos.”) I admit, I use fancy muscovado for the brown sugar and excellent chocolate, so they are especially good. They are crunchy AND chewy, with all the buttery, grainy pleasures of whole wheat toast, plus some serious chocolate action.

But then, I’m a person who halves the sugar in most recipes and craves the bitterness in dark chocolate, marmalade and radicchio. Regular Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies are way too sweet and insubstantial for me, though of course I can’t stop mindlessly eating them once I start—they’re designed for that.

What do you hope readers will take away from Search?
Gosh. Ideally? A few hours of literary pleasure. And some choice recipes!

Photo of Michelle Huneven by Courtney Gregg.

The award-winning author’s fifth novel, Search, pairs delectable recipes with a church committee’s quest to find a new minister.

For Jennifer Egan, fiction is more magical than any machine

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

More than 10 years ago, Jennifer Egan published A Visit From the Goon Squad, her groundbreaking novel of 13 interrelated stories in which she pushed style and theme to the limits of fiction’s boundaries. Not quite a sequel but connected to that earlier novel by several of the same characters, The Candy House remains true to Egan’s curiosity about technology and her commitment to experimenting with unusual narrative structures.

“Goon Squad never felt like a book I exactly finished,” Egan says with an easy laugh, speaking via Zoom. It’s a sunny January morning, and she sits in a comfortable chair beside a window that overlooks her wintry Brooklyn street. “The question was not whether I would keep writing about those people—because I always knew I would—but could I find a way to make a book viable on its own terms and not just an echo?”

Read our starred review of ‘The Candy House’ by Jennifer Egan.

One of the characters who returns in (and in a way, bookends) The Candy House is Bix Bouton, Sasha’s college classmate in Goon Squad who now takes center stage as a hugely innovative and wildly successful media magnate. Bix’s social media company, Mandala, developed the technological innovations Own Your Unconscious, which allows users to store their memories on a cubelike device, and Collective Consciousness, which allows the sharing of those memories to a database, where they can be accessed by anyone.

“Bix has a tiny role in Goon Squad, but I knew when I wrote [his] chapter that he would go on to invent something that would change social media,” says the author. “I also knew that Mindy, who was on safari in Goon Squad, would become a famous sociologist, and oddly, I knew that Susan, the wife of Ted Hollander, would have a relationship with one of her son’s friends.”

The challenge, Egan explains, was determining how to fold these inevitable plot points into the narrative styles she most wanted to use. “I was waiting for those to coalesce and feel alive, which is the only way I can seem to get to writing anything successfully. It’s trial and error. I’m like a windup toy. I bump and I turn and bump and turn again, and I keep going until I find a pathway.”

“Fiction comes the closest to giving us a sense of the play of another human mind, the intimacy of another consciousness. That is the secret weapon of fiction.”

It is impossible to read The Candy House and not marvel at Egan’s skill, from the range of techniques and shifting points of view used throughout the novel’s 14 chapters, to the skillful incorporation of to-the-minute tweets and emails. Surely Egan had a wall of Post-its to keep the characters straight. “Well, I am a Post-its maniac,” she concedes good-naturedly, “but seriously, I think there is something that has to flow in a book like Candy House, where there’s a back and forth between finding material that feels alive and some of these approaches that I wanted to try.”

The technologies in The Candy House came to the author “inductively,” not as inventions to intentionally explore in a novel. “We are so used to being able to find someone on social media, and yet there are so many people that we don’t have quite enough points of reference to find, and that sort of unknowability makes them more tantalizing,” she says. “What would be the vehicle for finding them? How could I make that even possible? Suppose there was a machine that could do that?”

Bix’s consciousness-sharing product certainly doesn’t seem a far cry from our present reality, in which people eagerly offer their DNA to be evaluated and uploaded to genealogical databases. At the heart of The Candy House is the seduction of life online; even as we acknowledge the risk of sharing personal details, we’re lured in by the sense of knowledge offered by ingesting other people’s information. We run toward the danger, eager to gobble up all we can before the witch comes out and spoils it for us.

“I am almost always curiosity- and desire-driven, and that underlies a lot of what I end up imagining,” Egan says. “Usually, if there is technology I invent, even as I know that there would be grave disadvantages, there’s something attractive to me.” One example of this double-edged sword is found in the chapter titled “What the Forest Remembers,” in which Charlie accesses her dying father’s memories of a life-changing trip to a redwood forest, but the viewing comes with devastating knowledge about the dissolution of her parents’ marriage and the roots of her own awkward relationship with her father.

As to be expected, Bix’s inventions spur the rise of an opposition. “Eluders” choose to exercise their right to be forgotten, and a company called Mondrian allows them to erase their digital footprints or, more disturbingly, create false avatars to conceal their true locations and identities. Bix’s son Greg, a would-be novelist who makes his living selling weed, is an eluder, and so is Lily, the daughter of Goon Squad’s morally compromised publicist Dolly. Lily is also a former spy whose brain has been infiltrated by a “weevil” that tracks and reports her every thought.

“Each new iteration of technology seems to bring about a kind of analogous unfolding of discoveries,” Egan says. “For example, there are huge advantages to the ease of DNA analysis, and yet once you’ve had your DNA analyzed, it’s part of a worldwide database. It’s no different [in the novel]. With every discovery, there’s a reaction to that discovery. In The Candy House, it’s the two organizations Mandala and Mondrian—one that offers access, the other the ability to disappear. As the technology unfolds, it becomes a dialectic between the lure of access with all that it brings, including the loss of privacy, and the counter to that is the will to vanish, a real-life wish to be unavailable.”

Egan is quick to point out that something already exists in our world that offers access to people’s inner thoughts in a manner similar to Mandala’s technology: fiction. “I realized as I was writing that this machine, which I created, can do what fiction already does,” she says. “The fun, voyeuristic nature of fiction lets us peek into people’s minds. I love the idea that, in a way, I was reifying the kind of advantages of fiction as a Silicon Valley device.”

In the chapter “Eureka Gold,” Greg makes this connection as well, as he realizes that writing a novel is an act of shared consciousness. This idea connects him to his father’s greatest creation. “I feel it’s what fiction can do that nothing else can do,” Egan says, “and it’s why it has remained relevant to the degree that it has. Nothing else suggests an inner life quite that way. Fiction comes the closest to giving us a sense of the play of another human mind, the intimacy of another consciousness. That is the secret weapon of fiction.”

“Fiction is about confronting and honoring the mystery at the heart of human experience, so I would never give the book a tidy ending.”

By the novel’s end, despite the myriad storylines and characters, The Candy House all comes together—though, fittingly, not without a few enticing threads left dangling.

“My job is to bind what I have in such a way that it really metabolizes into one creature,” Egan says, “but I’d never want to totally wrap things up. Fiction is about confronting and honoring the mystery at the heart of human experience, so I would never give the book a tidy ending. In the end, to me, the enormity of what I am trying to evoke is that using language to capture human experience and human consciousness is magic. More magic than any machine.”

And will we see these characters again? Will Greg become a novelist? Will Charlie find peace? What happens to Lily and the weevil in her brain?

“I’ve got things I know and things I haven’t done yet,” Egan admits with a smile. “I’m already concocting!”

Photo of Jennifer Egan by Pieter M. Van Hattem.

In her curiosity-driven novel The Candy House, Jennifer Egan returns to the unfinished business of her Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Romance Historical Romance Fantasy Romance

India Holton’s ‘League of Gentlewomen Witches’ sets hearts—and houses—aflutter

Interview by Amanda Diehl

Romance readers fell in love with India Holton’s madcap and magical version of Victorian England in her debut, The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels. Now, she’s back with more daring witches, dashing pirates and flying houses in The League of Gentlewomen Witches, which follows Charlotte Pettifer, a witch who will one day take over as leader of the titular society, as she teams up with pirate Alex O’Reilly to recover a powerful amulet. We talked to Holton about which fictional witches she would want in her coven and what the Victorian setting allowed her to say about the power of femininity.

How does this book compare to The Wisteria Society of Lady Scoundrels? There’s still a grand sense of adventure, but what else can returning readers expect?
The main thing returning readers will get from The League of Gentlewomen Witches is more. More action, more enemies-to-lovers romance, more tea and more explosions, in all senses of the word. The League takes the Wisteria Society experience up several degrees! Also, the literary allusions focus on Jane Austen this time, which seemed appropriate for my feisty Charlotte and fierce (but rather nonplussed) Alex.

“I’ve always felt that bookish, introverted and sensitive women can be just as powerful as the warrior type . . .”

Your world is so inventive and fun! What were your inspirations? Was there anything specific you wanted to change about the Victorian period? Why did you decide to blend history and fantasy?
My inspirations for the world were honestly right out of my own head. But I was also influenced by the fun, madcap energy of old rom-com movies and TV shows.

I chose a historical setting because the things I wanted to say about women were really emphasised by a Victorian milieu, rather than an imaginary world. For example, I’ve always felt that bookish, introverted and sensitive women can be just as powerful as the warrior type, given an opportunity. By placing my heroines in a time period in which women were constrained to be ladylike (“the angel of the house”), I could explore this more easily. So it wasn’t so much about changing the Victorian period as using what it offered for my purpose. Although the books offer light fun, at their heart is a contemplation of how we as a culture view women—and indeed men, too—and how that can harmfully influence their relationships with themselves, as well as with others.

Do you have any tips on balancing romance with action?
An action-filled plot is a wonderful opportunity to bring two characters together in the forced proximity of a shared problem. But if they have different ideas about solving that problem, or different goals, therein lies the tension. The conflict between them reflects the conflict that incites the action. Also, tying the momentum of their personal relationship to that of the overarching plot provides continual opportunities to address the romance, even while things are exploding all around them.

The League of Gentlewomen Witches feels a bit spicier than its predecessor. Was that a conscious decision on your part or just where Charlotte and Alex’s journey took you?
My very first glimpse of this story was a scene that included them fighting, then kissing in the rain. I became absorbed in the intensity between the characters and actually developed the entire plot around this one moment. So it didn’t really surprise me that Charlotte and Alex demanded more heat than Wisteria’s Cecilia and Ned.

If you designed your own magical, moveable house, what details would be essential?
First and foremost, plenty of bookshelves! Also, a comfortable chair in front of the wheel, set high enough that I could see out the window, since I am very short. And a rooftop deck, with good fencing around it because I’m scared of heights!

Read our review: “The League of Gentlewomen Witches” by India Holton

If you could cast your own League of Gentlewomen Witches, which famous witches (fictional or historical) would you include in your magical girl gang?
Sophie Hatter from Howl’s Moving Castle, Samantha Stephens from “Bewitched,” and Nanny Ogg and Agnes Nitt from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. (Not Granny Weatherwax—she’d take over in the worst way.)

What can we expect next from the Dangerous Damsels series?
I don’t want to say just yet who will be featured in book three; I want to see if readers can guess. But I’m so very excited to share their story, because I fell in love at first sight with both characters. It involves one of my favorite tropes: fake marriage. It also includes rivals-to-lovers, forbidden love and only one bed, of course!

What are you reading and loving right now?
I’m in the middle of Two Wrongs Make a Right by Chloe Liese, which is a truly delightful rom-com due out this fall. And I’ve also started If You Ask Me by Libby Hubscher, which is a charming, hilarious rom-com.

Photo of India Holton courtesy of the author.

The whimsical romance-fantasy-historical fiction mashup of your dreams returns.

Nonfiction Social Science Memoir

Maud Newton’s debut is much more than a conventional family memoir

Interview by Harvey Freedenberg

According to an article in the MIT Technology Review, by early 2019, more than 26 million people had added their DNA to the four leading commercial ancestry and health databases. That level of interest cries out for an in-depth examination of genealogy’s broad appeal, and Maud Newton gives us just that in Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation, a thoughtful investigation of genetics and inheritance as viewed from the branches of her own family tree.

Speaking by FaceTime from her home in Queens, New York, the red-haired and bespectacled Newton is relaxed and cordial as she sits in front of a wall of glass-enclosed bookshelves. She speaks thoughtfully but with evident passion about a project that had its genesis some 15 years ago, when she started researching her family on Ancestry.com. But it wasn’t until 2010, when she received her 23andMe DNA test results, that her interest in the subject took off. Even then, she admits, she was “puzzled by my obsession with it. I wasn’t really sure exactly what I was trying to get at.”

Read our starred review of Maud Newton’s ‘Ancestor Trouble.’

A 2014 cover story for Harper’s Magazine on “America’s Ancestry Craze” led to a book contract and launched Newton, a writer and former book blogger who briefly practiced law before her literary career began, on a long and sometimes circuitous path through subjects like the heritability of trauma and the spiritual importance of ancestors in various cultures. “As a layperson, my ability to understand the deep science was limited,” she says, “but I really wanted to do my best.” The broad reading list reflected in her book ranges from ancients like Aristotle and Hippocrates to the work of contemporary writers such as Dani Shapiro and Alexander Chee.

At the core of Ancestor Trouble is Newton’s complex and often difficult family story. She describes her birth as a “kind of homegrown eugenics project,” writing that her parents “married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together.” The union between her father, a Mississippi-born lawyer and unabashed racist, and her mother, a Texas native who later in life became a fundamentalist minister who conducted exorcisms in the family living room, lasted only 12 years but left Newton with a colorful, though at times painful, lineage to explore.

Among the most memorable characters in her family line are her maternal ninth great-grandmother, Mary Bliss Parsons, who faced multiple allegations of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts, and her maternal grandfather, Robert Bruce, who reportedly married 13 times. (So far, Newton has only been able to document 10 marriages, though she’s still searching.) Another is Charley, Robert’s father, who was accused of murdering a man in downtown Dallas with a hay hook in 1916. He died in a Texas mental hospital, but Newton became so engrossed in his story that she purchased a tombstone to mark his previously anonymous grave.

“As a layperson, my ability to understand the deep science was limited, but I really wanted to do my best.”

For Newton, the most problematic aspect of her ancestry concerns her family’s connections with slavery and with efforts to expel Indigenous peoples from their native lands. On her father’s side, that history hardly came as a surprise; he was, after all, obsessed with the Confederacy. But Newton was dismayed to discover that some of her mother’s ancestors also enslaved people and participated in genocide against Native Americans. “It was an unpleasant surprise, but ultimately a healthy and useful one,” Newton says, “to recognize that it wasn’t possible for me to divide my family into the part that enslaved people and that I didn’t relate to as much, and the part that I related to more that didn’t have this history. It was on all the sides.”

Though her family history is rife with material, Newton wanted to write a book that was more than a conventional family memoir. “The only way I wanted to write it was if I could . . . look at it through these different lenses, both through my own family history and in the larger historical, sociological, scientific, philosophical and religious history context,” she says.

That broad perspective magnified Newton’s reservations about online DNA research websites like the ones that launched her investigation. “I am very skeptical and very concerned about the data those sites are collecting and the lack of control we have over what is done with that data,” she says. “And I also continue to use both of those sites regularly. I objectively think they’re highly problematic, and on a personal level, I continue to be seduced by the tools that they offer.”

“Making it personal is the most powerful force we have for change.”

Newton’s comprehensive approach also led her to explore different ancestor veneration practices, such as Tomb-Sweeping Day in China and the Day of the Dead in Mexico. As she studied these rituals throughout history and the world, she came to realize that “we in the contemporary West who do not venerate ancestors or minister to them in the afterlife are the aberration, not the other way around.” That intriguing and moving investigation, she says, provided her with “a spiritual connection now, a healthy connection to my ancestors, including to some of the ancestors who were problematic when they died, with whom I had difficult relationships in life.” In the end, she says, “it’s less important or interesting whether there’s some objective reality to this feeling that I have of connection to my ancestors. What’s important to me is the healing potential that this inquiry can have.”

Readers will connect with many aspects of Newton’s vivid story, but there’s one—what she calls “acknowledgment genealogy”—that she hopes will especially resonate. This encompasses, as she puts it, “personal harms that we can acknowledge within our own family or larger harms that relate to the systemic problems that we’re facing now as a country. . . . If each of us can feel a little more comfortable coming forward and recognizing these harms and thinking about them and feeling about them in a larger context,” she says, “we’ll move a lot further along as a country toward the kind of conversations and healing that we need.” Newton believes this and brilliantly reflects it in Ancestor Trouble. After all, she says, “making it personal is the most powerful force we have for change.”

Maud Newton author photo credit: Maximus Clarke

The essayist and critic has penned a thoughtful investigation of genetics and inheritance as viewed from the branches of her own family tree.

Nonfiction Social Science

Amanda Oliver considers what it costs librarians to be the saviors of society

Interview by Jessica Wakeman

We asked Amanda Oliver, author of Overdue: Reckoning With the Public Library, a few questions about how libraries become overburdened, why librarians burn out, and what effect this has on the health of our communities.

You write that Overdue will “push directly against the romanticization of what libraries are and who they are for.” Why do people romanticize libraries?
I think now, maybe more than ever, we need hope. And libraries, at least as we commonly understand them, are symbols of that hope—that we can share; that we can provide free, community-based items and care and space; even that we still love, read and uphold books. But there are more accurate truths, which I dig into extensively throughout the book, that I think will ultimately lead us to a more realistic version of hope around, within and from libraries.

Did you romanticize libraries yourself at any point?
My relationship to libraries has fundamentally, since childhood, been based in warm feelings toward them as safe havens and quiet spaces of comfort. I still love libraries. I still find them comforting and recognize that they can be safe havens. But I am always touched by the whys: Why do libraries provide so much in America? Why do so few institutions like them exist en masse? Why not look a little more closely and critically at them? I can’t, and don’t ever want to, look at libraries without the whys.

Overdue uses your experiences as a librarian in Washington, D.C., to address societal and structural issues that affect libraries nationwide. Did you consider interviewing other librarians and incorporating their experiences into the book as well?
I’m not sure people realize that many public library systems have clauses in their contracts about what you can and cannot say publicly while working for them. I’ve had many private, off-the-record conversations with librarians that I didn’t include in the book out of respect for their privacy and need for job security. In many of those conversations, librarians said things along the lines of “I can’t say this stuff while I still work for my library system.” Meanwhile, I knew I could say “this stuff” because I had left library work and didn’t intend to go back.

“Why do libraries provide so much in America? Why do so few institutions like them exist en masse?”

You write movingly about how you operated with empathy while working with patrons facing poverty, racism, substance abuse and other issues. It led you to feel empathy fatigue and burnout. What do you hope readers, whether or not they’re librarians, learn about that process of burning out?
It has always been very interesting to me what happens when I explain to people the toll that working as a librarian took on me. Even the most socially conscious and empathetic people I know sometimes find it bewildering. I think it is deeply ingrained in American work culture and ethic that we should work and not complain, especially in professions where you are serving vulnerable and underserved people. I know that this was part of why I burned out. The idea that I was overreacting, that I was too sensitive and not tough enough, that I wasn’t working hard enough—this sort of deep-rooted self-flagellation, in lieu of looking more closely and critically at the system(s) I was functioning within, didn’t help me, and it didn’t help the people I was serving.

My hope is that people will recognize that you can’t pour from an empty cup (no matter how much you want to) and you also shouldn’t be asked to—by an employer, a co-worker or, as it ultimately comes down to, the perverse, inhumane, unimaginative and oftentimes cruel systems of capitalism in this country.

Early in Overdue, you explore how libraries in colonial America were for wealthy white men and how racial segregation in libraries continued until the late 20th century. Why was it essential for you to include this history?
This is a key factor in all of American history, and yet it often seems to go missing from the narrative around libraries. That it was almost entirely wealthy white men who funded and founded public libraries (and so much else) means this was who determined libraries’ earliest roots, policies, procedures and so forth. It’s impossible to look at where libraries are today without looking at where—and how, and by and for whom—they were created. It was especially important to me to establish that our segregated past wasn’t that long ago, and that racism and systemic inequalities today still actively impact library patrons and employees in a negative way.

Read our starred review of ‘Overdue’ by Amanda Oliver.

Helping professions (such as nurses, childcare workers, etc.) can be seen as “feminized” labor and treated with less respect compared to more male-dominated fields. Do you think, in general, librarianship is viewed as “feminized” labor? How do you believe that impacts how society treats libraries and librarians?
Yes, I think librarianship is often viewed as “feminized” labor, and historically as well as statistically, it is. Something like 30% of librarians are men, with an unequal proportion of them in leadership roles. There are also still pervasive stereotypes of librarians—as either shrewish, unpleasant women or “sexy” women in skirts and unbuttoned cardigans—that I find debasing. Any type of gender stereotyping, inequality and discrimination negatively impacts everyone, of all genders, in innumerable ways. At the library level, it’s another way of preventing progress and an accurate understanding of the profession.

What are some of the reactions you would like to see from library administrators and local governments in response to the issues you raise in Overdue?
I’d like to see a bit more honest reckoning—as the subtitle of the book implies. Which is to say, a bit more of those in power acknowledging mistakes and missteps as well as facing up to more realities and failures on an institutional level. I’d like to see local governments looking to libraries for guidance on how they can establish community supports and services—not necessarily as resources for information on this topic (which, of course, they are) but as living, breathing, working examples.

I also hope my book gives people in leadership or decision-making roles some genuine insight into what is being asked of librarians, the immense weight that carries and the potential tolls it can take. My hope is that we will see better, more conscious, caring and community-minded decisions being made in the future. I think public libraries have a real opportunity to implement and model better work environments and better ways of caring.

“I hope my book gives people in leadership roles some genuine insight into what is being asked of librarians, the immense weight that carries and the potential tolls it can take.”

You mentioned how you like to visit a library in every place you travel. Is there one library that you especially love—either for its design, its people or something you did, saw or read there?
I have a particular fondness for the Seattle Public Library’s main branch. It’s a beautifully designed building. I also still go back to my first library sometimes when I am visiting Buffalo, New York, because it’s full of many warm memories for me.

Do you have plans for another book, and if so, can you tell us what it’s about?
I do! I’ll be attending a six-week writing residency this summer to focus on my second book, which is quite different from Overdue. I am a stylistic prose writer at heart, which is not what readers will see in Overdue but is something they can find in some of my essays. I’m quite excited to get back to writing that is meditative, experimental and not based in heavy research. The book is, loosely, about living in the desert, the idea of Home with a capital H and the many ways it shifts and fragments in a life.

Author photo of Amanda Oliver by Justin Danks

The debut author draws on her experience in the Washington, D.C., public library system to explore how libraries became Band-Aids for American inequality.

Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction

John Scalzi is ready to rumble

Interview by Chris Pickens

After wrapping up the Interdependency trilogy, sci-fi author John Scalzi planned to write a weighty and serious novel. Instead, he had a monster of a good time. The Kaiju Preservation Society is an adventurous romp that follows one-time delivery driver Jamie, who lucks into the job of a lifetime working for the titular organization, studying and protecting enormous monsters who live in an alternate dimension. We talked to Scalzi about the book he calls “as much fun as I’ve ever had writing a novel.”

There’s nothing like a good monster book to shake things up. What drew you to writing a story about Kaiju?
Well, I was actually writing another novel entirely—a dark and brooding political novel set in space—and it turns out that 2020 wasn’t a great year to be writing a dark and moody political novel, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who lived through 2020. That novel crashed and burned, and when it did, my brain went, screw it, I’m gonna write a novel with BIG DAMN MONSTERS in it. It was much better for my brain, as it turns out.

When creating the world that the Kaiju live in, what details were important to you? Were there certain inspirations you drew from?
I think the most obvious inspirations were the classic Japanese Kaiju movies, starting with the original Godzilla. From there, I worked backward: If you want to have Kaiju, how do you build a world where they could not only exist, but in fact, it makes sense that they exist? I wanted the world to have at least a sheen of plausibility. So the end result is a much warmer, much more oxygenated Earth, to start . . . and when you have those two things, a lot of other aspects of the world present themselves.

“Self-honesty is important, especially when some creature wants to eat you.”

You mention in your author’s note that The Kaiju Preservation Society is “a pop song . . . meant to be light and catchy.” Did it feel like that to you, easy and fun, while writing? Or were there elements that proved to be surprisingly challenging?
Not going to lie, writing Kaiju was as much fun as I’ve ever had writing a novel. Some of that was in contrast to the unfinished novel before it; anything would have been easier than that one, given the subject and year I attempted it in. But most of it was just giving myself permission to feel the joy of writing, and of creating something expressly to be enjoyed. I wrote it as quickly and as easily as I’ve written anything.

There are many homages to sci-fi and monster movie tropes in this book. What preexisting audience expectations served you best?
All of the preexisting expectations served me! One of the important things about world building is that the characters are in on the joke—they’ve seen all the Godzilla movies, they’ve watched Pacific Rim and Jurassic Park, and so all the tropes are on the table for them and the book to lean into, to refute and to play with, depending on the circumstances of the plot. No one, not the characters nor the readers, has to pretend that the characters have no concept of Big Damn Monsters, and that opens up a lot of narrative opportunities.

The dialogue in The Kaiju Preservation Society positively crackles with life. How do you approach writing dialogue?
Dialogue is one of the things I “got for free”—which is to say, something that was already in my toolbox when I got serious about writing. That’s great, but that also means it can be a crutch, something I fall back on too easily, or get sloppy with because I know I can do it more easily than other things. So, paradoxically, it’s something I have to pay attention to, so that it serves the story.

Read our review: ‘The Kaiju Preservation Society’ by John Scalzi

Do you see yourself as a Jamie? Ready to believe, optimistic, quick with a joke? (Maybe we all wish we were like Jamie, at least a little bit.)
You’ve hit on something, which is that Jamie is meant to be someone whom the readers can see themselves in, or at least could see themselves relating to. There’s a little of me in Jamie, sure. There’s also some of me in Jaime’s friends. They each have qualities that help them work together, which becomes important in the book.

OK, real talk: What weapon would you reach for first if you were face to face with a Kaiju?
If I’m being real, I’m going to remember what the weaponmaster in the book asks the characters, which is, basically, “Are you competent enough for that weapon?” Self-honesty is important, especially when some creature wants to eat you. In which case, I’m going for the shotgun: widespread, low level of difficulty to use. Perfect. And then, of course, I’ll run like hell.

Did working on this book make the insanity of 2020 and 2021 any easier to bear? What did you feel like when you finished writing?
When I finished writing, honestly, I was all like, “Fuck yeah, I nailed this one.” Which absolutely made the previous year easier to bear, considering how badly I flubbed the previous novel I had been trying to write, and how awful the year had been generally. I should note I wasn’t having a crisis of confidence in my skills; I’ve written more than 30 books, I know I can do it. But I was disheartened at how that one novel was a mess, and how it all-too-closely mirrored my mental state for 2020. Kaiju got me back in my stride, and I’m grateful for that.

Headshot of John Scalzi courtesy of the author.

Why The Kaiju Preservation Society was the most fun John Scalzi has ever had as a writer.

Nonfiction True Crime Memoir

Erika Krouse, private eye

Interview by Alice Cary

“My favorite book growing up was Harriet the Spy,” Erika Krouse says, speaking by phone from her home in Colorado. “It’s funny because that’s what I ended up doing. [Harriet] wanted to be a writer, and she wanted to be a spy, and I did too.”

In 2002, years after Krouse’s Harriet the Spy phase, she had a chance encounter with a corporate lawyer in a bookstore. At the time, she was a 33-year-old fiction writer working a series of temp jobs, but there was something about her face that had always made people, including this lawyer, confess their innermost secrets to her. After experiencing this phenomenon for himself, the attorney offered Krouse a job as a private investigator, and she accepted. As she writes in Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, “I wanted to help people and find things out, not necessarily in that order.”

Read our starred review of ‘Tell Me Everything’ by Erika Krouse.

That moment in the bookstore launched Krouse’s five-year investigative career, which included work on a landmark Title IX case involving college football players and recruits who raped fellow students at a party. For legal reasons, Krouse changed their names in the book. “I was committed to keeping the survivors safe,” she explains, “but the funny thing is, I also had to disguise the perpetrators, even though they didn’t deserve it, because some of that could have splashed back at the survivors.” The only concrete details she provides are that, at the time of the case, she was living “in the Front Range foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, in a small city that hosted a university and a swarm of tech startups.” It’s enough information for readers to connect the dots with a quick internet search.

“It’s the most famous case that no one’s ever heard of,” Krouse says. “There have been whole books about Title IX sexual assault that don’t mention this case, which is amazing to me because it was the first college case like this.” Krouse’s sleuthing helped reveal that the football team had used alcohol and sex as recruiting tools. The school eventually reached a settlement in 2007, with one victim receiving $2.5 million and another receiving $350,000.

At the time, Krouse didn’t fully appreciate the enormity of her involvement. “I’ve been thinking about this recently,” she says. “How many times in your life do you get an opportunity to save someone when they need it or work on something that’s important? That’s not ordinary life, right? Ordinary life—you’re just trying to pay the bills and get groceries and get here and get there. So when these opportunities do come up, it is actually an extraordinary circumstance. And a lucky one. A very, very lucky one.”

“How many times in your life do you get an opportunity to save someone when they need it?”

Throughout the memoir, Krouse also writes about her own childhood experiences of sexual abuse by a man she calls X. “I would have preferred to use his identity,” she says, “but in some ways, it was freeing not to—in that, this is a person who doesn’t even get to have a name.” Another benefit of this approach was that she didn’t have to address any of the psychological factors that may have contributed to his crimes. “I could just focus on the functionality of this person, which is that he was a perpetrator,” she says, “and not have to spend a lot of time humanizing someone who dehumanized me.”

At first, Krouse didn’t plan to address her own victimization in the book. “I generally don’t talk about my history, even with friends,” she says. She didn’t even discuss it while working on the sexual assault case. But as Tell Me Everything began to take shape, she decided, “I’m writing about all of these very brave women. For me not to even talk about my own past would be cowardly.”

Krouse knew her personal history would make investigating a sexual assault case tricky. “In some ways, I think I might have been able to be more strategic had I had more distance from the topic of sexual violence,” she says. “But in other ways, I think I was able to understand the people I was talking to on a deeper level. I don’t know what the balance is.”

“I think there’s some strength to planting your flag in the sand and saying, ‘This is me, and here I am. Deal with it.’”

Since she had no prior detective experience, Krouse learned on the job. Luckily, she says, fiction writers are uniquely qualified to be PIs. “We love the narrative. And we think, ‘Oh, wow. That moment back when they were 4 years old contributed to this completely unrelated thing.’ We like the web, and the way we figure out the next clue, so to speak, is never in a linear way. It’s always roundabout.”

Krouse’s chops as a writer, plus her talent for making strangers spill their guts, gave her an edge, but there was still plenty of trial and error. She readily admits, with a laugh, that as an Aries, her modus operandi tends to be “ready, fire, aim.” But this approach worked. “I don’t think there’s a way to prep in advance because so much is fluid,” she says. “I definitely had no idea what I was doing, and that feeling turned out to be an asset because we were in new legal territory. Nobody had done a case like this, ever.”

Krouse says she never imagined that she’d write a book about sexual assault until suddenly, she was doing it. The process has been healing—“but not in a warm bath and candles kind of way,” she says. “I think there’s some strength to planting your flag in the sand and saying, ‘This is me, and here I am. Deal with it.’”

Headshot of Erika Krouse courtesy of the author

Meet the fiction writer who unexpectedly became a private investigator and helped crack a landmark sexual assault case.

Fiction Historical Fiction

Karen Joy Fowler returns with the triumphant ‘Booth’

Interview by Alice Cary

By now, Karen Joy Fowler’s husband knows what to expect when his wife starts writing a book, like the bestselling The Jane Austen Book Club or the Booker Prize finalist We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. She will lament, “Oh, it’s never been so hard,” and he will remind her: “You did say that last time. And the time before that, you know.”

“Is it possible that every book is harder than the one before?” Fowler wonders, speaking from her home in Santa Cruz, California. “Or do you just not remember? I don’t have an answer to that question.”

As she does in her writing, Fowler laces her conversations with curiosity, humor and reflection. You can practically hear her good-natured wheels turning as she discusses her latest novel, Booth, an immersive, behind-the-scenes account of the years leading up to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre in 1865, by way of an investigation into the family of assassin John Wilkes Booth. The Booths were a famous theatrical family celebrated for their Shakespearian performances, especially father Junius and brother Edwin, whose 1893 funeral was described as one of “the most remarkable ever held in New York City” by the New York Times.

“As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”

Despite such a wealth of source material, and despite her husband’s reassurances, writing this book was particularly difficult for Fowler. Her despair over gun violence in the United States prompted her to choose this topic, but she didn’t want to focus on the assassin. Instead, she was interested in exploring the culpability and guilt of the Booth parents and siblings. How to achieve this delicate balance, “from the words, to the conception, to the way the book was organized,” was something Fowler “grappled with on nearly every page.”

Now she passes that same conundrum along to her readers. “I would not have written this book if John Wilkes had not killed Abraham Lincoln,” she says. “As much as I am trying to argue that he is not the most interesting person in this family, I know that the narrative tension in the book is all because of John Wilkes Booth.”

Even the book’s title is problematic. “It actually should be Booths—plural,” Fowler says, “but that’s just so hard to say. I knew that at least in America, if you saw a book entitled Booth, you would think this is a book about John Wilkes Booth. Which is exactly what I didn’t want you thinking!”

Read our starred review: ‘Booth’ by Karen Joy Fowler

This is one of the primary reasons why the novel doesn’t depict Lincoln’s shooting in real time. “I didn’t want to imagine what John Wilkes Booth was thinking [in that moment]. First of all, I can’t—my imagination doesn’t stretch that far. But it’s still very painful to see that turning point in our history, to wonder what might have been.”

One passage in the novel, in fact, enumerates the many close calls with death John Wilkes had throughout his life, even before he carried out his tragic deed. “It was something that really struck me when I did the research,” Fowler explains. “[His death] would have been devastating for his family, but so much better for everyone else.”

The Booth clan has long fascinated Fowler, and she has featured various family members in three short stories, including “Standing Room Only,” which is about time travelers who journey to witness Lincoln’s death. A science fiction fan, Fowler was frustrated by the many stories she read in which time travelers seem to go undetected by those they encounter. “I thought, obviously not, it won’t be that way at all,” she says. “They’ll just be like tourists everywhere. I live in a tourist town, and I can spot the tourists. And then I went from that to thinking, well, there will be destination holidays, and one of them, unfortunately, will be the Lincoln assassination.”

Research, she muses, “is probably the closest we will come to time travel,” and from the start of creating Booth, she had mountains to sift through. A godsend came in the form of biographer Terry Alford, author of Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, which Fowler calls “magnificent,” and the forthcoming In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits. Alford’s biography features unique details, so Fowler reached out to ask a few questions. “He’s been researching this family for 30 years, and he sent me piles of research that would’ve taken me months and months to find on my own, if ever,” she says. “It was just mind-bogglingly generous.”

John Wilkes Booth was born in 1838, the ninth of 10 children. In 1822, his parents, Junius and Mary Ann Booth, emigrated from England to Bel Air, Maryland, where they bought 150 acres and moved a small log cabin onto the property. Junius, an alcoholic who was at times mentally unstable, was often away on tour, leaving his wife—with the help of enslaved men and women—to tend to farming and maintaining the home. The family faced poverty, hunger and disease; four of the 10 children died. Fowler portrays these ordeals with startling immediacy, especially from the perspective of young Rosalie, who watches “the household collapse into madness” and communes with the ghosts of her dead siblings.

“I’ve had dreams about the place,” Fowler says. “In my dreams, the barn is there, and the slave cabins are there. It’s clearly a metaphor for doing research. The property [in my dreams] was beautiful, but I had a sense of menace, that something was very wrong and that it was a dangerous place to be.”

Junius eventually had a larger home, named Tudor Hall, built on the property. It’s now a museum on a fairly small lot surrounded by other houses. “There’s a lovely group of people who maintain it,” Fowler says. “It seems the ghosts have been purged.”

The name Tudor Hall is something of a touchstone, since Fowler’s love of historical fiction was inspired by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, about Thomas Cromwell and the court of King Henry VIII. “I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense,” Fowler says. “Wolf Hall was so powerful that somehow Hilary Mantel has persuaded me that this is how you write a historical novel.”

Indeed, readers will feel as though they’re watching events transpire in real time, with different sections told from the perspectives of not only Rosalie but also brother Edwin and sister Asia. Information about Edwin was plentiful due to his acting career, but Asia also left behind a valuable resource. In 1874, she wrote a secret memoir about her infamous brother, though it wasn’t published until 1938, long after her death. Fowler calls Asia “an incredible woman, but hard to like. . . . I would probably have wanted to make her more likable if her own words hadn’t condemned her in certain ways.” (For instance, although Asia disapproved of John Wilkes’ crime, she blamed Lincoln for going to the theater that night.) Photographs of Asia, however, continue to bewilder the author. “Nobody talks about Asia Booth without mentioning what a beauty she was,” Fowler says, “and you look at the pictures, and you just think, what are they talking about?”

Rosalie, in contrast, remains a cipher, with few details available. She never married and had some sort of “infirmity,” widely commented on but never specified. “Every time Rosalie’s name comes up, you hear, ‘What an invalid she is, poor Rose,’” Fowler laments. But these gaps in Rosalie’s history proved useful. “There was a little more freedom to imagine who she might be. She’s pretty much made up, although the things that happened to her are not. I cannot tell you how delighted I was to discover that she had a romance with a lion tamer!”

“I blame Hilary Mantel for the fact that [Booth] is in present tense.”

Although Fowler says she is always on the hunt for such “small details that I hope will bring the world more to life,” she also keeps a bigger picture in mind. When she first began to write Booth, she was primarily focused on issues of gun violence, but the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump caused a shift in the story’s significance. “I wasn’t really thinking about the Civil War, the ongoing legacy of white supremacy and the various ways in which that war has just never ended in this country,” Fowler says. “And yet, as I wrote, those things seemed more evident to me than the fact that John Wilkes Booth had a gun.”

By the time of the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Fowler had completed her manuscript. “To watch the Confederate flag being carried into the Capitol was just terrifying and heart-wrenching, having just immersed myself in what that flag meant,” she says. “I couldn’t turn the television off. I sat and watched the footage in real time, and just couldn’t believe it.”

There’s a similar sense of horror in Fowler’s visceral descriptions of how various Booth family members react to the news of John Wilkes’ horrific act: “Edwin’s first thought is not a thought, more like a blow to the head, a sense of falling, the crashing of the sea in his ears. His second thought is that he believes it. He wishes he didn’t.”

There were several post-assassination details that Fowler had to omit from the novel—such as the fact that Ford’s Theatre collapsed during Edwin’s funeral, killing 22 people. “Maybe there needs to be a second book,” she says. “Something short—a slender, poetic novel dealing with their later lives.”

After all, Fowler says, “History is full of fabulous stories.” Fabulous, provocative, challenging and necessary—such is the story of Booth.

Photos of Karen Joy Fowler by Nathan Quintanilla

In her eighth novel, Karen Joy Fowler offers a wholly original perspective on American history through the story of John Wilkes Booth’s family.

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