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Terry Kay is a lot more comfortable in the rural south than in any urban environment. He grew up in Royston, Georgia, plowing mules on a farm that didn't even have electricity.

Yet, there are the characters of his latest novel, The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene, traipsing all over downtown Atlanta, with enough craziness and congestion that, Kay admits, the setting could be New York or any metropolis. So what gives? "It's different than anything I've ever written by far," says Kay, speaking from the Athens, Georgia, home he and his wife built a year and a half ago. "I just decided I wanted to do sort of a thriller, action book whatever you call it." Fans of his best-selling To Dance with the White Dog may be surprised by just how different the two books are. Kay has not only traded pecan trees and pickup trucks for city soirees and commuter trains; he has set aside the heart-wrenching sentimentality of White Dog to make room for intrigue and excitement in a detective story with several twists.

Aaron Greene is a nobody. A shy teenaged mail boy at a bank, his unremarkable family could never afford the $10 million reward demanded by his captors. But the cult-like kidnappers have profound philosophical motives for the unlikely abduction, a crime that sparks a nationwide frenzy. They believe Aaron's disappearance can teach a lesson to all of society. At the center of this madness are wiseacre gumshoe Victor Menotti, a seasoned newspaper reporter, Cody Yates, and an elderly eccentric, mega-rich Ewell Pender. The novel may be his newest, but the story is one of his oldest. Kay conceived of the basic plot more than 25 years ago, when he was an entertainment reporter at the Atlanta Journal. He had never even considered fiction before, but he was broke and thought maybe he could write a movie to bring in some cash. Since he watched about 300 films a year as a reviewer, he figured he knew the Hollywood formula well enough to turn a profit on his script.

"I had four children and was making $250 a week, and I was working probably 70, 80 hours a week and not getting paid but for 40 of them," he says. "I just needed more money". But Aaron Greene's story got shelved. It would have to wait many years, until Kay's kids were grown and he could take the leap into full-time fiction. Meanwhile, a TV and film development company offered Kay a position as creative director, writing and directing industrial films. That job paid him an extra $100 a week more than his journalist's salary, so he took the offer.

It only lasted a year.

"Then we found out the guys were not paying the government any money," he recalls. "So I got into public relations, then into the corporate world." His varied experiences, going right back to his days as a journalist, all play into the characters in The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene.

"I look back and I think, 'My God, there's so much to be gleaned from all of that.' But I suppose it would have been the same if I'd left the newspaper and become a car salesman. I think you always pluck from what your experiences are." Though he doesn't know any detectives personally, Kay spent plenty of time riding around with Menotti-type police officers in his earliest job, covering crime stories. And the newspaper scenes, he admits, are close to his heart.

"I loved journalism, he says. You can sit in the middle of the newsroom, and the entire world is within 30 feet of you. Everything going on is coming through one of those departments politics, society, sports, you name it." Kay says Cody is not his alter-ego, but a conglomeration of maverick reporters he knows very well. But it can be no coincidence that the old-timer character mourns the loss of the pre-computer days, "when journalists had been able to look over their typewriters, across the newsroom, and see and hear one another, and because they could see and hear, they better understand the world they wrote about in spurts of minutes with the dogbite of a deadline snapping at their heels." Kay left the Journal one week after computers arrived on the scene. And he still loves a deadline. But now, as an award-winning novelist, he can afford the luxury of removing himself from the keyboard from time to time. Which is not to say he stops working.

"You write all the time, whether you're at the machine or not," he explains. "It's in your head, whether you're reading or watching TV. I'm not the type of person who gets up at 5, gets a cup of coffee and by 5:15 I'm writing. I may go for weeks without touching the thing. But all that time it's in my head. Then when I sit down to write, I'll write 12, 14 hours a day." He also never ends one book without immediately starting another. The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene was born minutes after Kay put the final period on To Dance with the White Dog. It's no coincidence. White Dog, which Kay calls, "more of translation of what had happened in my family than the creation of a book," was so emotionally and personally draining for the writer, that the dramatic switch in style was a breath of fresh air.

"I like working on different things at different times," he explains, "because I'm not a genre writer by any stretch of the imagination. But my background was theater in college. One semester you'd do Ionesco, and the next Neil Simon, Shakespeare, or Arthur Miller. And you learned to appreciate different voices." Among the voices that contributed to the Aaron Greene story is that of Heather Kay, the youngest of his children. Kay still has a letter his daughter wrote to her parents years ago, when she was just nine years old. Heather had been scolded for being naughty. The letter to her parents detailed how worthless she felt and how truly sorry. It was signed," Just plain old Heather Kay."

"It was so lovely and cute and all that," he says. "But it is also an absolute emotion. People feel that way, 'I'm worthless and I'm plain.' My thought in this book was that everybody I've ever met has experienced at sometime in their life, 'I'm simply a nobody. Nobody cares.' I think that's a common theme. People say, 'Wait a minute, if it was me, they wouldn't pay the ransom.' "

Kay says he set out to write a page-turner. He has. But The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene is also a page-stopper, because, as different as it may be in plot and style from his earlier work, it is full of the kind of word-play, metaphor, and wonderful description that the writer's fans will instantly recognize. "I'm not sure I'll ever write another book even vaguely close to this," says Kay, who has set the next book he's working on safely back in the country. "But I have to tell you, I had a ball with this. It really was fun. And I hope people find it a fun read."

Emily Abedon is a writer in Charleston, South Carolina.

Ohhhhh, ‘the Big Book.’ I wish I’d never said it and that it had never been published." Bret Easton Ellis is wincing as we sit at the writing desk of his East Village apartment. While he’ll cheerfully revisit the critical controversies surrounding American Psycho and Less Than Zero, a flippant remark made to Vanity Fair four years ago has him fretting a bit. "The Big Book" concept was picked up and used in virtually every piece that’s appeared since. In a string-and-can game of telephone journalism, the ironic spirit disappeared, and Ellis was understood to mean that he fancied the forthcoming work his magnum opus — one by a writer still in his mid-thirties. "I never wanted to create the expectation of ‘the big book’ because I thought it was going to take three or four years to write and would come out after American Psycho, and it didn’t. It became the big book only because of how long it took to write and all the garbage that went on in the intervening years."

The book in question is this month’s Glamorama, and if Ellis doesn’t consider it the career-defining statement (he’s too smart for that), it remains in almost every other way a very big book. Seven years in the works, the novel is 482 pages of conceptually ambitious social satire; a scathing look at the society of the spectacle. As we talk, it is apparent that no matter the reception awaiting it, the book’s greatest impact is being felt in this large apartment and in its author’s life. The birthing process has been so long and has spanned such difficult seasons that the sense of relief on publication is now palpable. For Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama is indeed a big book — the one that is now off his shoulders.

"I changed a lot because I wrote this book and because I finished this book," Ellis says exhaling smoke from a Marlboro Light. "A lot of things changed for me — certain fears, certain insecurities were alleviated, not necessarily by the book’s subject matter, but just because I wrote the book I never thought I would finish. There was a sense of accomplishment that . . . fixed me in some way." Indeed, there is an openness and a sense of peace about the man that is surprising. The dark-suited, scowling figure from the dust jackets and the magazine profiles, the tormented bad boy of New York letters, is nowhere in evidence as we chat in his spartan apartment. I’d been warned by a friend that Ellis likes to make a show of his awkwardness and inaccessibility, and revel in it.

As we sit, however, he is nothing if not eager to please. Bret Easton Ellis looks healthy and handsome in khakis and a polo shirt. He serves me cranberry juice and he laughs readily — never more so than at himself and the dramas that have been such a part of his public persona.

It’s not surprising that Glamorama‘s wicked skewering of celebrity culture has proved cathartic for its author. When Less Than Zero hit the bestseller lists in 1985, Ellis was still a junior at Bennington. The book surfed the zeitgeist in a way that earned its author money, popular acknowledgment, and no small amount of critical suspicion. The attention lavished on his chemical, sexual, social, not to mention literary, lives was exceptional for such a young writer. "Spy magazine made a living out of making fun of me and Jay McInerney during [the ’80s]," he says chuckling.

These days, Madonna has a daughter and practices yoga; Bret Easton Ellis, fellow 1980s survivor, writes books and avoids the Hamptons.

1991’s American Psycho was a daring book, one that its admirers insisted was exceptionally black and brave satire. But what Ellis himself describes as the "flat, pornographic tone" of the narrator’s account of the torture and killing of young women earned him death threats and made him a literary pariah.

When we venture to the difficult period after Psycho’s publication, Ellis smiles before doing a laundry list of personal problems that coincided with "the initial horror about the book." Though he can be disarmingly earnest, he plays with the hoary old myths of the tormented, self-destructive writer: the death of a father with whom he’d failed to make peace, "relationships falling apart, maybe . . . I can’t believe that I’m so blase about this — problems with drugs and alcohol. Of course, there’s that little part of me that loves to say that . . . but at the time it was not funny."

Unfunny enough, in fact, that the battle with Glamorama‘s initial stages threatened to drive him out of the business: "It really got to the point where I thought it took too much work to write a book, and I thought it wasn’t worth it. I thought I’d find another way of making a living."

The good news is that seven years later, Ellis remains very much a writer, and Glamorama features the same mix of seriousness and mockery as its author. The book is less a character study than his previous work. As a critique of the numbing superficiality of an age in which "beauty is an accomplishment," it comes smartly packaged as an espionage thriller.

Characters have been drawn from that patented Ellis stock of the materially overindulged and spiritually malnourished. (Narrator Victor Ward returns from The Rules of Attraction as do other minor figures from the past.) In turn, they thrust into a world in which virtually anything is possible and the indolence of the rich and beautiful is interrupted by shocking acts of violence. Ellis has written for those of us who have long harbored suspicions that Christy and Kate and Cindy are up to no good; that behind the photo shoots and runways, there lurks real evil. The author manages to play his game for a mixture of outrage and farce that connects the jet set to terrorist acts and which feels strangely authentic. As Ellis puts it, "the celebrity culture is so surreal, so that’s a big part of the book." In the end, Glamorama works because it is only marginally more surreal than the evening news featuring Barbara Streisand whispering in the president’s ear or Ginger Spice retiring from pop music to become a UN envoy. It’s when the book is most tempting to dismiss that it is most eerily familiar.

But throughout the book and over the afternoon as we talk, even the weighty themes anchoring the work won’t drag the new Bret Easton Ellis down. Amid the moral outrage driving the work, there is always a keen sense of the absurd: "It’s something that I’m really interested in as a writer — finding the comedy in the horror and the chaos of it all, drawing that out."

He talks about being older and clearing the emotional minefield of his twenties and about the perspective that it has given him. A novel set in Washington and "tangentially related to politics" is in the planning stages, but it is a memoir addressing his late adolescence and the (sort of) halcyon days at Bennington that seems to most interest him right now. Ellis continues to vent his angst onto the page: "people think it’s this grand notion — of writing as a form of therapy, but it’s really not. It’s just helpful." He’s grinning as he says it, pleased with the thought and tossing back some grapefruit juice for emphasis.

Glamorama, sprawling ambitious thing that it is, may not be the "Big Book," but it’s done. These days, for its author, that’s enough.

Christopher Lawrence is a freelance writer based in New York City.

“‘Gyp the Blood’ was a real person who actually used to break men’s backs on a two-dollar bet!” says historian Kevin Baker about the most malevolent character in his novel, Dreamland. “He was eventually electrocuted for his role in the murder of ‘Beansie’ Rosenthal.”

So far as we know, however, “Gyp the Blood” was not whacked on the head with a shovel by “Kid Twist” just as he was about to break “Trick the Dwarf”‘s back in a dingy dive in lower Manhattan (thus setting the well-oiled wheels of our story in motion). Nor did he have a sister named Esther who worked at the infamous sweatshop, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Esther organized the women of the needle trades and fell in love with “Kid Twist” at Dreamland, the fantastical Coney Island amusement park that burned to the ground in 1911. No, the exhilarating loops and turns of plot that make Kevin Baker’s historical novel so entertaining are inventions of the author’s own imagination.

“One of the interesting dilemmas of historical fiction,” Baker says during a call to his home in New York, “is how much room a writer has to make things up. I think you can create composite characters and change chronologies just as long as you get the essence of the thing right. That’s pretty much the trick in any kind of fiction — to reach for that greater truth.”

One of the truths Baker reaches for in Dreamland is the emotional complexity of the immigrant experience in America. “We have this image now that everybody came here and suffered a little but worked hard and became great successes. In fact, this was a generations-long struggle. Even when immigrants were successful, it often meant separating themselves not only from their old culture and language, but from their families as well.”

Baker portrays the anger and anguish of this struggle perfectly in his depiction of Esther’s head-strong rebellion against her old-world father, a character readers will both pity and despise.

“Esther’s father,” Baker says, “is a luftmensch, which is a wonderful term that literally means ‘a man of the air.’ In part because Jews were banned from taking part in many professions and businesses in Russia and Eastern Europe, a large emphasis was placed on learning in that culture. Eventually this proved to be very important for success in America, but in the meantime you had all these people who were raised to be scholars of the Torah and the Talmud. They came over here and found that they had to go to work. It was tremendously difficult for them, both to find work and to actually work. So you’d have mothers and daughters going out to a job and these frustrated scholars and rabbis sitting at home. It produced a tremendous number of very independent, hard-working women, but it also led to ongoing conflict. America seemed unnatural to these pious old men, who were used to a village structure. It seemed to them that their children were getting away from them and getting into all these sinful ways.”

And, oh, what sinful ways! Baker fleshes out his tale of labor and love with wonderful characters from New York’s turn-of-the-century underworld — prostitutes and gamblers, opium addicts and heartless sweatshop owners, corrupt politicians and Coney Island con-artists. Some of these characters are imaginary, but just as many are real, rediscovered and brought back to life by Baker’s prodigious historical research.

Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal, for instance, was so notorious in his day and his murder was so scandalous that his story made its way into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Who besides Baker knows Rosenthal’s story today?

Baker, who was chief historical researcher for Harold Evans’s recently published bestseller, The American Century, and has just been hired to write the History in the News column for American Heritage magazine, is a wonderful researcher. Somehow he finds exactly the right, unexpected detail to add life and authenticity to his narrative.

Dreamland hums with the lyrics of the era, and is filled with the smells and sounds of New York at the beginning of the century. Baker also has a good bit of fun with his details, sneaking “real, unnamed, historical personalities” into his story and naming one of his composite characters after his brother-in-law.

The most surprising real-life characters to appear in Dreamland are Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, passing through the story on their way to Worcester, Massachusetts, to deliver the famous Clark University lectures on psychology. “Most of their story is based quite closely on real life,” Baker says. “Freud actually did faint when he saw a column of German troops in Bremen. Jung’s dream is actually the dream that Jung had. The dialogue is almost verbatim.”

In Dreamland nearly everyone ends up at Coney Island. “Coney Island had all these extraordinary rides and exhibits — the Steeplechase ride, the All Dwarf City, tableaux of all the great disasters of the time. You could see an earthquake in Martinique or the Johnstown Flood. I was really inspired by Ric Burns’s great documentary on Coney Island. . . . I saw that Coney Island was a key part of the assimilation process, a sort of blank sheet on which these people projected their greatest hopes and worst fears about life in America. Coney Island was a sort of pageant of their lives.” And so is Kevin Baker’s Dreamland.

Alden Mudge is on the staff of the California Council for the Humanities.

The actions of Norris Lamb may occasionally embarrass you. The 55-year-old postmaster and hero of Carrie Brown’s new novel, Lamb in Love, makes his first appearance poking out from behind a chestnut tree, hoping to catch a glimpse of Vida Stephen, to whom he is afraid to declare his love. They may even make you cringe, as when he sneaks into Vida’s bedroom to bestow an anonymous gift of a silk nightgown and robe, leaving a fearful Vida to believe that there is something not quite right about her secret admirer. Yet with every squirm Norris induces, you also long to pull him aside, put your arm around him, and offer him advice and encouragement in his campaign to win the 41-year-old Vida. For he is of such generous and unimpeachable heart that he proves to be as beguiling as the novel that bears his name.

“Vida is almost old enough now to be considered a spinster,” Brown writes. “And no one has ever known her to have a young man. What a pity, people say. She might have had children of her own. But Norris knows — he believes he alone knows — what is still there to be rescued and revived. He imagines that he sees what others, lacking the wondrous prism of his passion, cannot. She has been waiting, he thinks. All along, she has been waiting. And now, could she love him? Could she? . . . I will love her so well, he thinks, that she will have to love me back. That’s the way it works.”

“Norris is so well-intentioned,” Carrie Brown says in a phone interview from her home in Sweet Briar, Virginia. “He makes tons of mistakes. He makes them over and over again. But he’s trying so hard to do the right thing.” It is a quality he shares with the hero of her first novel, Rose’s Garden, which recently won the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award. Vida Stephen, the object of Norris’s affection, also shares this quality. “I’m really interested, I’ve discovered, in people’s efforts to be good in the world. It feels to me a slightly old-fashioned concern. But in a lot of ways, that is what I almost always come back to. Obviously, both Norris and Vida are, to greater or lesser degrees, actually pretty conscious about living their lives virtuously, in some way.”

Indeed, Vida has devoted her life to the mute and motherless Manford Perry, to whom she became a full-time nanny while still a young woman, and before he was diagnosed as severely mentally and physically handicapped. But Vida loves Manford fiercely, and Brown delineates Manford with such resonant, finely calibrated details that the reader comes to love him as well: his endearing way of walking with his hands bouncing on the air; the way he pulls Vida’s hand to his cheek; the occasional shyness that causes him to cover his face with his hands; and peculiar, magical gifts. (He creates shadow play animals with his nimble hands and decorates bakery cakes with sugary weeds and flowers resembling those in the gardens of Southend House, the once beautiful estate where Manford and Vida live and which Manford’s absent father allowed to fall into ruin when he learned of his son’s disabilities.)

Though blessed with rare empathy and imagination, Brown’s tender portrait of Manford is also infused with life experience. One of Brown’s three children has cerebral palsy, and although her daughter’s impairments are all physical, not mental, Brown says she and her husband have had “plenty of experience in the community of the disabled.”

“Obviously, I didn’t set out to write a treatise on how we ought to treat the disabled in our culture and in our community. But it’s certainly clear to me that the world can be a cruel place if you’re a child,” Brown says. “The world can be a cruel place if you’re disabled. There are opportunities for cruelty at every turn.” She pauses, then adds in an uncharacteristically world-weary voice, “You don’t really have the whole market on it if you’re disabled. But you come in for a good share of it.”

Even kindly Norris, who experienced cruelty as an awkward boy and who would never treat Manford cruelly himself, is not initially comfortable in Manford’s presence. What is he afraid of? Norris wonders. “That Manford will do something peculiar? Yes, that.” And by extension, that people will view him as strange if they see him associating with Manford. For in his own way, he is as isolated from others as Manford; he has no intimate friends, and like Vida, has never experienced love or a romantic relationship. “He has certainly had the experience of loneliness,” Brown says. “But he has lived in this village all his life . . . So he does not feel like a stranger in the world. And I think in a way, it isn’t until he falls in love with Vida that it comes to him with a lot of painful force that he has been terribly isolated. And that if he doesn’t make something happen here with her now, that he never will.”

The urgency of Norris’s love, “at last, at such an age,” and his hope that Vida may return his love, give Lamb in Love a poignancy that is hard-won and rare.

Indeed, that this man whose hopes have been repeatedly dashed, this man who has never danced a step but believes that he may yet dance “like a gazelle,” comes to seem a marvel of sorts, and his hope an act of courage. “I think he’s really kind of heroic in a way,” says his creator. “He’s such a charming guy. And such a nuisance, too, in some ways.”

And what if that charming nuisance who “shouldered his way” into her fictional world were to show up at the doorstep of Sanctuary Cottage, the old farmhouse she shares with her husband and three children? Would she welcome him into her life? Could she imagine herself hanging out with him and Vida?

“Well, I don’t know that they’re the ‘hanging out sort,'” she laughs. “But in a way, I think they are the people in my life. I sometimes wonder whether people ever look around and think: ‘These are my friends? This is my life?'” She laughs. “If you ever stop to do that, you can sort of see what you life is made of . . . I’d hate for that to sound as though I was surrounded by a group of wild eccentrics. Because I don’t believe I am. But I certainly find myself in communities over and over again where I cross paths with those people all the time . . . I think they are the people of my life.”

Laura Reynolds Adler lives in New York City and regularly interviews authors.

"It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had," says David Guterson. "When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars."

For Guterson the "amazing success" of that 1994 first novel also raised the specter of the dreaded second book syndrome. "I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged."

But David Guterson's many fans have nothing to worry about. His second novel, East of the Mountains, not only lives up to the promise of Snow Falling on Cedars, but it suggests just how expansive David Guterson's maturing talent may be.

East of the Mountains describes the final hunting trip of Ben Givens, a 73-year-old retired surgeon recently diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. Givens sets out from Seattle to revisit the rural, apple-growing region of Washington State, where he grew up and met his wife of nearly 50 years, Rachel, who has recently died. His plan is to kill himself and make it appear to be a hunting accident. Crossing the mountains into eastern Washington, Givens wrecks his car, and from there his real journey begins.

"I feel that I've written a story that is in the most long-standing tradition of human storytelling," Guterson says. "The journey story is pervasive across the planet and across time. I owe a debt to every story that's ever been told in that tradition. Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young."

As Ben Givens's hunting trip goes awry, as he encounters people on and off the roads and in the villages of the Columbia Basin, and as he erratically makes his way toward his boyhood home, he reflects on his past and on his decision to die. Through a series of flashbacks, Guterson presents us with a fuller portrait of the man. "I see Ben's life as dividing into three parts," Guterson says. "The first part takes us up until he is fighting in Italy in World War II. That is an innocent life in which he takes great pleasure in hunting with his brother and father, among other things . . . After the war, he is done with hunting, and he is done with guns. He puts them out of his life and becomes a surgeon and a healer. Then his wife dies 19 months before the book opens, and he returns to the recreation of his youth. In this third part of his life he reverts to an earlier self. So part of what this book is about is the tension between these two selves. Part of Ben's journey is to come to a realization of who he really is."

That journey takes Givens through a varying landscape that is beautifully described. "I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years," says Guterson. "I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years." He adds that the semi-arid steppe desert of central Washington, where Givens wanders and has a dramatic encounter with a pack of coyote-hunting wolfhounds, proved "advantageous because there is a long tradition of desert sojourns, and the desert is a place for meditation, solitude, wandering. It's just such a happy coincidence that I happen to have this desert here to work with, the same sort of landscape that Moses wandered through."

"I've only recently come to realize," he says, "that I start just as powerfully with a sense of place and, ultimately, with a love of place, which seeks expression, which wants to use me to express itself. I felt that way about western Washington when I wrote Snow Falling on Cedars, and I felt that way about eastern Washington when I wrote East of the Mountains. It's almost as if I'm compelled to sing these places. I can't seem to stop them from becoming central. Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it."

Guterson lavishes attention on getting the details of his places and events correct. For a scene in which Givens's injured hunting dog is cared for, he visited a number of veterinarians. For the flashbacks of Givens's experiences during World War II, Guterson acknowledges a host of books and experts he consulted. It's a process Guterson says he enjoys, and he jokes that it takes him so long to write a book because he gets sidetracked by the enticing byways of his research. "It's amazing to find out what sort of things people do. Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is."

Guterson's ambition seems to be to portray the full complexity of these worlds, and his ability to do so grows with each new work. One of the big surprises of East of the Mountains is that it is so stylistically different from Snow Falling on Cedars. Yet in its fashion it is at least as lyrical as its predecessor.

"The style is leaner. There's less density to the prose than there was in the last novel," Guterson says. "There's more understatement, and there's something a bit more clear from sentence to sentence. That's something I did intentionally. I felt it was consistent with the particular themes and subject matter of this book."

He adds, "At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices. There's also the matter of the maturation of your style, which happens concurrently with your maturation as a human being. Because you grow and change as a person, ultimately and inexorably your prose style grows and changes throughout your writing life."

With the publication of East of the Mountains, David Guterson proves that he continues to grow in exceptional ways.

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.