Amy Scribner

Although she’s been writing for years, The Weird Sisters is Eleanor Brown’s first novel, and her joy at being published is almost palpable.

In a birth announcement of sorts, Brown posted a photo of an early copy of the book on her blog and gushed somewhat adorably about its beauty. “The paper is beautiful and doesn’t reproduce quite right in photos—it’s a beautiful pearlescent white that glitters in light,” she wrote.

It’s true—the cover is gorgeous. That’s nothing, though, compared to what’s inside this delicious, wholly original novel.
Brown laughs when teased about her blog post.

“There’s something about seeing the hardcover that just made it all feel very real and very close, and kind of brought home that I’d done something worth celebrating,” Brown says.

Indeed, The Weird Sisters is a book worth celebrating. Because their father is a renowned Shakespearean scholar, the Andreas family communicates largely through the words of the Bard. It is not unusual for them to drop Shakespearean quotes into a conversation about, say, wedding rings or what to eat for breakfast.

The three Andreas sisters—Rosalind, Bianca and Cordelia, each named for great Shakespearean characters—come home to the tiny college town where they grew up when their mother is diagnosed with breast cancer. Rosalind (or Rose) doesn’t have far to go, since she lives and teaches nearby in Columbus. Bianca (or Bean) comes home from her glitzy life in Manhattan after being disgraced at work. And the baby sister, Cordelia (Cordy), wanders home from her latest aimless road trip around America, broke, tired and pregnant.

The novel wonderfully captures how it feels to go home again—and all the bittersweet, mixed emotions that can come along with it. Who hasn’t visited the parents and immediately reverted to a sullen teenager, or been home for the holidays and run into an ex at the grocery store?

“The reason I was interested in the story of the Andreas sisters comes very much from my family in broad strokes,” says Brown, who has two sisters. “When we get back together, we tend to slip back into those roles.”

It’s a meaningful choice of theme for someone like Brown, who has lived all over the world and admits she has a constant longing to find a place where she wants to stay. Brown just moved from Florida to Colorado with her partner, writer J.C. Hutchins. She has also lived in England, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Philadelphia.

And yet, she admits that someone had to point out to her the dichotomy between her own peripatetic life and the focus on home in her book.

“I did have a psychology undergrad degree,” Brown laughs. “You’d think I would’ve picked up on that!”

Brown came late to Shakespeare, never really a fan until she studied at Oxford and got to see productions at the Globe and Stratford-upon-Avon. “That’s when I really fell in love with the language and stories,” she says.

Telling someone she’s written a book about a family that speaks in Shakespeare quotes causes people “to kind of get that look in their eye, like ‘I didn’t know there was going to be a quiz,’ ” she says. “But really this is about a family that is crippled by the fact that they’re not talking honestly and openly with each other using their own words. Every family has patterns that hold them back.”

In the Andreas’ case, that pattern includes a dad who wanders around the house muttering things like, “Marry, sir, ’tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers: therefore he that cannot lick his fingers goes not with me.”

Huh?

“Here’s one of the problems with communicating in the words of a man who is not around to explain himself: It’s damn hard sometimes to tell what he was talking about,” the sisters say, in the book’s terrific first-person-plural voice. Capturing that voice—in which the sisters collectively tell the story—was no easy feat.

“It was tricky,” Brown says. “I had to kind of devise the rules; for example, how many sisters have to be in the scene to use that voice? Technically, it was really difficult, but I thought it was important because when people talk about their families, they always slip into ‘we.’ ”

So different in personality and life choices, Rose, Bean and Cordy find it complicated to be under one roof again. Bean owes thousands of dollars to her former employer. Rose is engaged to a fellow professor who wants to live in England, while she prefers to stick closer to home. Cordy has no job, no money, no college degree, no health insurance and a rapidly growing belly. How they reconnect—with themselves, each other and their parents—is the heart of this funny, warm story.

It also bears mentioning that The Weird Sisters is a book nerd’s nirvana: The whole family carries books with them wherever they go, and they read at any opportunity. Brown herself knocks off about 300 books in a good year, everything from romance to nonfiction. “Basically, I don’t go anywhere without a book in my hand,” she says.

None of this is surprising: The Weird Sisters is clearly written by a booklover. It’s irresistible and the ending, although satisfying, comes all too soon.

Loosely based on Charlotte Brontë’s beloved classic Jane Eyre, the newest gem from acclaimed novelist Margot Livesey follows the trials of a determined young orphan as she searches to find her place in the world.

The Flight of Gemma Hardy is every bit as enchanting as Livesey’s previous novels, including the 2009 award winner The House on Fortune Street. Still, one has to wonder why any author—let alone one as critically and commercially successful in her own right as Livesey—would choose to re-imagine Brontë’s archetypal character in a 20th-century setting.

“I hope the novel is sufficiently richly imagined that it’s its own thing.”

“I’ve asked myself that question 417 times while I’ve been working on this book,” Livesey replies with laughter during an interview from her home near Boston, where she teaches writing at Emerson College. Funny and frank, with a lilting Scottish accent, Livesey admits to some nervousness about how her new novel will be received.

“I hope entering into the book or enjoying it does not depend on having read Jane Eyre or knowing Jane Eyre,” she says. “I hope the novel is sufficiently richly imagined that it’s its own thing. I didn’t want to write a novel that excluded any readers or made anyone feel they had to be brainy in a sort of annoying way.”

Born in 1948, Gemma Hardy is orphaned as a toddler after her mother dies in a freak accident and her father drowns. She is taken in by her uncle, a kind and well-educated minister, and his family in Scotland. After her uncle dies, Gemma is left alone with her indifferent cousins and cruel aunt, who resents the time her husband dedicated to his orphaned niece. When Gemma suffers a panic attack while locked in a closet as punishment for fighting with her cousin, a local doctor takes notice of her abusive situation.

At the age of nine, Gemma is shipped off to a faltering boarding school, Claypoole, where she’ll earn her way by cooking and cleaning. Plain but smart, she is self-reliant and confident she’ll make her way in the world (much like a certain Brontë heroine).

“Well, Gemma, we’ve reached the parting of the ways,” her aunt tells her as she drops her at the train station to travel alone to Claypoole. “You’re an ugly child—my poor sister-in-law was a plain Jane—but I hope you’ll study hard at Claypoole and be a credit to me.”

“I’ll always try to be a credit to my uncle,” Gemma retorts, “but you’ve treated me like a leper. If I win every prize in the school it won’t be because of you.”

Gemma struggles through her years as a “working girl” at Claypoole, dodging school bullies and trying to get a decent education in between mopping floors and serving meals to the paying students. When the struggling school finally closes, she takes a job as a nanny in the Orkneys, a cluster of islands in northern Scotland. It is there that Gemma’s life begins in earnest. She is drawn to the wealthy owner of the home in which she lives, but slips away to Iceland to search for her roots.

Certainly the pristine writing evokes the moody, misty feel of Brontë, and the plotlines are undeniably similar. But Livesey needn’t worry about how her tale compares to Jane Eyre. In The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Livesey has created a character fully her own; her novel is more of an homage than a faithful retelling.

“I really felt more like writing back to Charlotte Brontë,” Livesey says.

Her inspiration for the book came, oddly enough, during an appearance at a book club, during which the group began talking about Jane Eyre. “Some of the best discussions and most illuminating moments I’ve had have been at book clubs,” she says. She decided to write a modern version of the book—or, at least, modern compared with the original Victorian setting.

“If she came of age when the Pill was available and women’s rights were a topic of discussion, it would really change the novel and what I was trying to do,” she explains of her decision to set Gemma Hardy in the early 1960s. Livesey aimed to write a story about a girl determined to find a place in a world with few choices for a female of her status.

Once she began writing, Livesey had no difficulty imagining a crumbling Scottish boarding school. As a girl, she herself was enrolled in one as a day student. Her father taught at the neighboring boys’ school and her mother was the school nurse. 

“I ended up in a class with girls three years older than me. It was just an enormous gulf,” the author recalls. “There were long, dark corridors, cloakrooms and stairwells. I was always hiding in some stairway trying to avoid some particularly hefty girl.”

The school eventually went bankrupt. “It was one time I felt my prayers were answered,” she says, laughing at the memory. 

After graduating from the University of York, Livesey moved to Canada in the 1970s to be nearer to a love interest, and took a series of odd jobs. 

“I discovered this amazing thing called creative writing and even more amazing was that I was qualified to teach it,” she says. “That changed my life in a more radical way than romance. It tied me to North America more than, say, waitressing or working at a dry cleaners.”

The places at which she’s since taught reads like a high school counselor’s dream list: Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Tufts University and Williams College. Yet she’s still found time to write a handful of compelling novels that have earned her a loyal following and the 2009 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award.

“I write novels that have what I so admired growing up: a strong plot and vivid characters and an exploration of moral questions, although that sounds incredibly pompous and dreary,” Livesey says. “Maybe there’s a way to better say it that is fun.” 

She plans to celebrate finishing Gemma Hardy by traveling to the Brontë family home in England, which, ironically, she never visited while studying at the University of York. 

“I’m ashamed to say as an under-grad I was too absorbed in the emergency of self,” she says wryly. “I didn’t have time for a literary pilgrimage!”

The Flight of Gemma Hardy is the beautifully melancholic and wholly transporting story of one courageous girl searching for her place in a changing world. And now that it’s finished, Livesey may even re-read the novel that inspired it.

“I never read Jane Eyre once I started my book,” she admits. “I thought, if I do, I’ll just throw down my pen.”

Chris Cleave adjusts the camera on his computer so it focuses on the bikes in the corner of the garage/office space in his London flat. He points to one in particular, a lighter bike, which he uses when it’s not raining.

“I haven’t used it for six bloody weeks,” Cleave says with a laugh, as we continue our Skype conversation.

Cleave is only an amateur cyclist. Yet in his third novel, Gold, he somehow inhabits the minds of Olympic-caliber cyclists who pursue that elusive medal to the exclusion of almost everything else. He researched every detail, from what kind of post-race recovery drink a world-class athlete might prefer to how cyclists follow each others’ slipstreams as they race around a velodrome at upwards of 50 miles per hour.

The two main athletes in Gold—Kate and Jack Argall—met as teens in an elite cyclist training program. They go on to marry, but only after a tumultuous courtship marred by a love triangle involving another young cyclist, the seductive and troubled Zoe. Jack and Zoe’s past decisions continue to haunt all three of them, who remain friends, competitors and eventually vigilant caregivers for Kate and Jack’s nine-year-old daughter, Sophie Argall, who is gravely ill with leukemia.

“I’m interested in what people are like when they’re pushed to the extreme,” says Cleave. “Do we put our career first or family first? It’s an abstract question until you have to face it. For this book, I thought, ‘What’s the most extreme job you could have?’ [Cyclists] are almost like monks. I like these people who sacrifice everything and for whom a silver medal is a total disgrace.”

"I hate when something as radical and raw as storytelling turns into this elitist sport."

Zoe, in particular, is a composite of several real-life athletes with razor-sharp focus on winning. Cleave cites British athlete Rebecca Romero, who won a silver in Athens in rowing. “She hated that so much that she changed sports, to cycling,” he marvels. Romero went on to win gold in that sport in 2008, becoming one of only a handful of female athletes to medal in separate summer Olympics in different sports.

“Sports are full of people like Zoe,” he says. 

While Cleave might not be gunning for a place on the podium when the summer Olympics come to London this year, he does admit to being somewhat competitive himself, at least once he began an intensive cycling training program to research the novel. He rides in semi-competitive events—and is training about 15 hours per week for a London-to-Paris race this summer to benefit leukemia and lymphoma research.

“I enjoy winning,” he admits with a sly smile. “I enjoy beating people more than I thought I would.”

After a slight pause, he reveals that the weekend before, he was on a long ride and spent about 15 kilometers (he’s British!) riding with a very nice fellow.

“And then,” Cleave says, laughing, “he got a puncture and I was like, ‘See you.’ I feel a little bad about that.”

That incident notwithstanding, Cleave comes across as a thoroughly likeable, down-to-earth guy. It’s hard to believe he is a best-selling and critically acclaimed novelist (Little Bee, Incendiary), and for two years had a regular column in The Guardian in which he hilariously recounted his adventures in parenting. He gave up the column once his own children grew past “the sweet spot, that universal state of infancy” and into an age where they might be embarrassed by Dad laying their lives bare in the pages of a newspaper.

It needs to be said, though, that the columns are laugh-out-loud funny and worth looking up online. One delicious example: While on a trip to Paris when his wife was pregnant with their first child, they purchased a cot to place in the baby’s nursery. The French salesman mentions that the cot did not meet new European fire regulations. The cot was promptly dubbed The Slightly Dangerous Cot, and lasted through all three children.

Despite his successes, Cleave eschews the British writers’ scene, which he calls “quite cliquey,” describing literary events where novelists with a capital N stand quite literally in one circle and the lesser-known, slightly drunker writers stand in a second circle. Cleave also takes good care of his readers, regularly responding to their comments on his blog and interacting with them daily on Twitter. “2 wks to publication,” he tweeted in mid-May. “Psyched. If I was an Apollo rocket, this is when giant cranes would begin taking me from the hangar to the launch pad.”

“I think storytelling is something we all do quite naturally,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I can ignore the audience or am on another level from them. Quite the opposite. I hate when something as radical and raw as storytelling turns into this elitist sport. I want my work to be a starting point for people to have great conversations with each other, enjoy it and not put it up on pedestal.”

Equally important to Cleave is thoroughly researching his stories. “Then I’m reporting back: ‘This is what I’ve learned, what do we think about that?’ ”

To capture the unique voice of young Sophie, Cleave spent time shadowing a hematologist at a children’s hospital. He called the experience “harrowing.”

“I was there when he would give the original diagnosis [to families],” Cleave says. “It was very sad, very emotionally draining even for me—and I don’t even have skin in the game. I would go home at the end of those days on the train and try not to cry. My family was at once more precious and more fragile.”

Cleave describes one child who helped shape the character of Sophie, an almost unbearably brave girl who hides the true extent of her illness from her parents so as not to distract them from their intense Olympic training.

“His parents left the room to get a coffee or something, and he immediately changed,” Cleave recalls. “He told me, ‘Do you know what really makes me sad? It’s when Mum and Dad are worried. I sometimes don’t show them when I’m tired.’ You know, death is abstract but they do understand the suffering of their parents.”

Thanks to his research, Cleave brings wondrous life to Sophie, a precocious girl who finds escape in the fantasy world of Star Wars. Like the boy Cleave met at the hospital, Sophie goes to great lengths to convince her parents she feels OK, when in truth she has barely enough energy to visit the bathroom.

But Gold is more than a story about childhood cancer, or the incredible extremes required of an Olympic athlete. It’s about what people are willing to sacrifice to succeed. When Sophie is rushed to the hospital, desperately sick, Jack sits at her bedside, praying. If you let Sophie live, I will live for her from now on, he thinks. I will hang up my bike. I will make her life my only gold.

Yet, at that very moment Kate is competing in a time trial that will secure her spot in the Olympics—or end her career. Jack chooses not to tell her about Sophie’s turn for the worse.

“He closed his eyes and imagined Kate, untroubled by anything except the race ahead. He smiled because he had given her something rarer than gold: an hour outside time.”

In Gold, as with his previous work, Cleave writes with tremendous heart, displaying a keen eye for life’s absurdities, sorrows and triumphs. The story is riveting, the characters unforgettable. Gold has everything you could ask for in a story: adrenaline-soaked racing, wretchedly human decisions, laugh-out-loud moments and quietly heartbreaking ones.