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An intensely private, bookish woman meets a charming but aimless man who is the least accomplished sibling in a dynastic political family. They fall in love and marry, then the man begins a rapid political ascent: first serving as governor, then as a president who presides over an increasingly unpopular war. Sound familiar? While American Wife is technically a work of fiction, it is a thinly veiled account of Laura and George W. Bush’s courtship and rise to the top of American politics. Even before the book’s release this month, author Curtis Sittenfeld already had garnered major buzz in the blogosphere.

Published just in time for the fall elections, the book depicts the first wife as a woman with quietly moderate values who underwent an illegal abortion as a teenager. Sittenfeld burst onto the literary scene at age 29 with her bestseller, Prep, which was selected as one of the New York Times top 10 books of 2005. Following that success, she soon established a reputation as a novelist and essayist prone to speaking her mind in various high-profile media outlets. She caused a minor dust-up when she skewered chick lit in a 2006 Times essay, raising the ire of chick lit queen and fellow best-selling author Jennifer Weiner (Sittenfeld says the two are now friends who even read each other’s drafts).

In 2004, Sittenfeld wrote an essay for Salon.com proclaiming her love for Laura Bush. In the piece, Sittenfeld declared: "I’m a 28-year-old woman, a registered Democrat, and a staunch enough liberal that I take would-be epithets such as ‘flaming,’ ‘knee-jerk’ and ‘bleeding-heart’ as compliments. I believe that George Bush’s policies are at best misguided and at worst evil. And yet I love Laura Bush. In fact, there is no public figure I admire more." Sittenfeld went on to explain the basis for her ardor, based largely on Laura Bush’s indifference to clothing and array of liberal friends.

Fast-forward to 2008. Speaking to BookPage from her home in St. Louis, Sittenfeld says despite her personal politics, her new novel is not a screed against the current president, but rather an attempt to understand a famous yet largely mysterious American figure.

"I don’t think the world is looking to me for opinions on the Bush administration," Sittenfeld says with a laugh. "The book is obviously inspired by Laura Bush, but it’s not about Laura Bush. It sort of examines the questions around her. She’s just incredibly intriguing to me. Even though she has this high approval rating, people don’t know much about her."Funny and self-deprecating, Sittenfeld conveys a warmth and light-heartedness that seems at odds with the serious subjects she so often chooses to write about. In fact, she is so down-to-earth she doesn’t even tell people what she does for a living.

"I don’t think I’ve ever said I’m a novelist, because it sounds pretentious," she says. "I say freelance writer because it dissuades people from asking more questions. I just don’t think it’s that interesting!"

Recently married, Sittenfeld was preparing for a delayed honeymoon in British Columbia, followed by a book tour to support American Wife. She seems eager to talk both about the book and its inspiration, saying she was struck by the perception that Bush is a "stiff proper person—people often say she’s a Stepford wife, but she’s actually an intellectually engaged person."Indeed, in American Wife, Alice Lindgren is a voracious reader, strong-willed and slyly funny. The only child of devoted parents, she grows up in middle-class suburban Wisconsin. At 17, Alice causes a car accident that kills her classmate, Andrew Imhof, an event that mirrors a similar real-life incident: 17-year-old Laura Bush in 1963 ran a stop sign and killed a classmate. Alice is devastated by the accident; her blossoming romance with Andrew is cut short, and she is plagued the rest of her life by wondering "What if?" After an ill-advised series of encounters with Andrew’s grieving older brother, Alice finds herself pregnant. Her grandmother guesses the truth and whisks her off to Chicago for an abortion. Later, Alice tries to put the whole chapter of her life behind her.

The following years of college and career as a school librarian are a quiet time for Alice. She dates a series of unremarkable men before meeting Charlie Blackwell at a party. Sittenfeld describes the future president in this memorable passage: He was undeniably handsome, but his bearing was cocky in a way I didn’t like: He was just over six feet, athletic-looking, and a little sunburned, with thick, dry, wavy light brown hair of the sort that wouldn’t move if he shook his head. He also had mischievous eyebrows and a hawk nose with wide nostrils, as if he was flaring them at all times. This lent him an air of impatience that I imagined enhanced his stature in the view of some people—implying that he had other, more interesting places to go, that his attention to you would be limited.

With his good looks and self-assured demeanor, Charlie sweeps Alice—the perfect wife for a politician, he thinks—off her feet. They marry within months, and Alice soon quits her job to raise their daughter and support her husband’s burgeoning political career. But in the ensuing years, Charlie’s drinking and lack of focus threaten to ruin their marriage.

American Wife is a sparkling, sprawling novel that’s at its best when it delves into the smallest details of Alice’s life: her first visit to her future in-laws’ self-consciously rustic summer compound; coping with her husband’s alcoholism; her conflicted feelings about being married to a born-again Christian with White House aspirations. A ridiculously gifted writer who has in the past had a tendency to lean on her talent with prose to the detriment of a strong plotline, Sittenfeld has harnessed her talents perfectly in American Wife, producing an exhilarating epic infused with humor, pain and hope.

One question remains about Sittenfeld’s latest work: Will Laura Bush, a well-known bookworm, read American Wife? It’s a question many will be asking about this potentially explosive new book, but your guess is as good as the author’s.

"I would think not," Sittenfeld says. "She’s the focus of a lot of attention, so I’m sure she’s used to it. I think it’s possible, but I would guess she won’t. Someone who knows her or works for her will read it and give her the gist."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Having your book picked by Oprah for her book club is a heady experience for an author. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of new readers discover your work, you appear before millions of television viewers to receive Oprah's accolades, and you make a whole lot of money.

But according to Wally Lamb, this recognition can be a double – edged sword. Having had his first two novels chosen by Oprah (She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True), the pressure to produce an equally worthy book had Lamb struggling through a year – long case of writer's block. He started and discarded several attempts before finally finding his voice in a new novel titled The Hour I First Believed.

"I was scared to death," laughs Lamb, speaking from his office in Willimantic, Connecticut. "Once the canvas got larger and larger, I was pretty scared I was not going to be able to pull it off and finish it. At one point I talked to my agent and said maybe I should just give this advance money back and scurry back to the classroom and just forget about the whole deal."The acorn which grew into his latest work came to him in a single sentence which his soon – to – be protagonist whispered into his ear: "My mother was a convicted felon, a manic – depressive, and Miss Rheingold of 1950." For the next nine years, Lamb turned this sentence into a 700 – page epic, weaving the real – life tragedy of the Columbine shootings into one man's personal experience of love and loss – a tapestry that stretches back a hundred years, showing how our ancestors can take a greater role in our lives than we might realize."That's exactly what I learned by writing this book. I came to believe that in ways we can never really figure out – because we only knew our grandparents as old people and we didn't know their grandparents – that it's all sort of connected and sets us up for certain kinds of lives. I do believe that we have some control [over our lives], but probably far less than we realize."

This belief is personified in Lamb's central character, Caelum Quirk, a man described by his second wife as "an emotional eunuch." He and his third wife, Maureen, have moved from Connecticut to Littleton, Colorado, in an attempt to save their marriage. Maureen has been unfaithful; the only emotion Caelum seems capable of expressing is anger. However, their efforts to survive these problems are quickly overshadowed by the killing spree of two teenaged boys at Columbine High School where the couple works. Caelum is back in Connecticut, settling his recently deceased aunt's estate, when he learns of the horrendous events. Maureen is at the school; it is only by the slimmest of chances that she is spared. But she becomes a victim of "collateral damage" – the guilt and devastating emotions often felt by those who escape such a hideous experience. She becomes addicted to prescription drugs as a coping mechanism, so the couple move back to Caelum's family's Connecticut farm in yet another attempt to start their lives over.

An important part of The Hour I First Believed is Caelum's family history, which is thoroughly entwined with the women's prison across the street from his farm. His great – grandmother created the prison, taking as her motto, "A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity." Concurrently with writing the book, Lamb was forging his own connection with women prisoners, teaching a weekly writing workshop at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Connecticut. From the first day, Lamb found his students eager to write about where they went wrong, where their lives went out of control. Through their work, Lamb also discovered that about 70 percent of these women were victims of incest – a number born out by national statistics."Through what they write, they free themselves from a lot of that sorrow and a lot of that terrible, terrible guilt that sometimes comes along with being a victim. It's really been a profound experience for me to bear witness to the women and their stories. But also, it's hard because as it comes out of them, it becomes your thing to bear as well."

Lamb was so impressed with the women's stories that he approached HarperCollins about doing a collection of their essays. Choosing selections by 10 of Lamb's students, the publisher released Couldn't Keep It To Myself, promising each inmate $5,600 upon her release for what she'd written. But a week before the book's publication, Connecticut's attorney general sued the writers for the entire cost of their imprisonment, a figure much greater than the modest sum promised by the publisher. An ugly fight ensued, escalating into confiscation of the women's computer disks and, among other things, investigation of Lamb as a volunteer."I thank my lucky stars for '60 Minutes' and the Pan American Center which shed light on all this," Lamb says. "All of a sudden, Connecticut did a backflip and suddenly this program is wonderful and they're really gung – ho on rehabilitation and all that kind of stuff."

The theme of damaged individuals fighting for redemption is a familiar one for Lamb – it's been central to all three of his novels. And while he says he's never sure what will happen to his characters until he writes the end of a book, his personal beliefs would certainly steer him in that direction. As he says in the afterword to this novel, "I believe that love is stronger than hate."With his first two books, Lamb chose titles from old pop songs ("Undone" and "True"). However, in his latest, he took a line from one of America's favorite hymns, "Amazing Grace." "The Hour I First Believed" ends the second stanza, which is about the redemptive power of grace, one of the novel's themes. Lamb says it guided him throughout the nine years he spent writing it."I had that title before I had the book, right from the beginning. It was the carrot before the horse – and of course, I'm the horse."

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

Stereotypes seem almost inevitable when someone tries to portray the relationships that existed 50 years ago between black people and white people in the South. Usually they swing from the extremes of Mississippi Burning to Driving Miss Daisy. So it’s a bit surprising—and refreshing—that Kathryn Stockett, who wasn’t born until years after that time, manages to capture something close to reality while avoiding most of the pitfalls in her first novel, The Help. Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, The Help is told through three voices: Aibileen, an older black woman who has been taking care of white families since she was 13; Minny, a younger black woman who finds it difficult to curb her sharp tongue around her white employers; and Skeeter, a privileged white girl fresh out of college, who wants more from life than marriage to the first presentable young man her mother can produce.

Stockett, a Mississippi native who now lives in Atlanta with her husband and five-year-old daughter, says the idea of writing the book first came to her as an antidote to homesickness. She was working for a magazine consulting firm in New York City, but frequently found her thoughts turning to the South and to Demetrie, the black woman who cared for Stockett when she was growing up. Finally she asked her bosses if she could take a month off to write about these memories. She laughs when she remembers the response.

“They said, ‘You’re not in Mississippi anymore, Kitty.’ They thought that people in Mississippi were a little more leisurely about jobs. I said, no, really, I don’t want to be paid. I just want to take a month off because I want to hunker down and write this story. And something happened—it was so nurturing and wonderful to hear Demetrie’s voice again. I think that’s really what drew me to the story, to hear her talking in my head 15 years after she had died.”

Although Stockett wasn’t born until 1969, seven years after the events depicted in her book, she said she not only had a wealth of information provided by the stories Demetrie had told her, but also from her parents and her 98-year-old grandfather.

“Demetrie worked for my grandmother and my grandfather, starting in the mid-50s, and my grandfather has the most remarkable memory. He doesn’t just remember details, he remembers dates. He remembers the temperature on that day; he’s kind of a savant that way. So I had a pretty good research tool right there in the living room with me.”

Stockett re-creates an environment that will be all too familiar to the people who lived through it: a time when “colored” people could cook food for white folks, but couldn’t sit down and eat with them. When a colored maid could wash the family’s dishes, but had to eat from her own plate because of the “germs” she might pass to her employers.

And heaven forbid that the black maid use the same bathroom as her white “family”! This is the event that opens the novel and that first opens Skeeter’s eyes to the injustice of this terribly skewed system. After listening to her friend, Hilly, present her plans for a “Home Help Sanitation Initiative” to their bridge group, Skeeter follows Aibileen, the maid, into the kitchen.

“Do you ever wish you could . . . change things?” [Skeeter] asks. And I can’t help myself. I look at her head on. Cause that’s one a the stupidest questions I ever heard. She got a confused, disgusted look on her face, like she done salted her coffee instead a sugared it. I turn back to my washing, so she don’t see me rolling my eyes. “Oh no, ma’am, everthing’s fine.

Skeeter may have had her consciousness raised a tiny bit, but it takes a long while before she can treat Aibileen as a person, rather than a colored person. Likewise, it takes a lot for Aibileen to learn to trust Skeeter. A key element of the book is Stockett’s use of language. The rhythms of the dialect are nearly flawless, due in no small part to the author’s refusal to use the “gonna,” “cain’t,” “sho-nuff,” spellings too many writers fall back on when trying to establish a sense of regionalism. Stockett credits this to her creative writing teacher at the University of Alabama.“She taught me a lot of things, but she taught me one rule and that was, as long as it’s a word in the dictionary, you can use it. So I had to be really creative in figuring out how to write idiom. As long as it didn’t set off the Spell-Checker, that was the rule—I could use it.”

Not all of the characters discriminated against in Stockett’s novel are black. Celia Foote is a white girl from the wrong side of the tracks who married well, but can’t break the barrier her background presents. Stockett felt she was important to the story, too.

“Just because you’re white and good looking and rich doesn’t mean you’re going to walk in the door of the Junior League,” she says. “I felt like if I was going to be talking about Southern women, I couldn’t leave out the fact that sometimes, they love to snub their own kind.”

While it was a daunting task to tackle stereotypes and successfully make her characters human, it took even more courage to write about this time and these issues as a white woman—something Stockett said she never forgot.

“You have to be careful what you say and how you say it, because people are really sensitive about this. We loved them [the black household workers] and they were part of our family but we didn’t ask them to sit down at the table with us. That just wasn’t done. Not that they were dying to sit down with us anyway, but there was a pretty well defined set of rules. And you knew what the rules were and you knew if you were breaking them.”

Breaking rules forms the core of The Help, an idea summarized in what Stockett says is her favorite sentence of her first novel: “Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, ‘We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.’ ”

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.