Amy Scribner

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.

Best-selling author J. Courtney Sullivan never was that little girl who dreamed of her wedding day—and she definitely never thought about having a sparkling diamond engagement ring perched on her hand. When she told a friend she was engaged, her friend’s reply was, “Oh, I can’t wait to see the piece of string around your finger.”

“I didn’t want a wedding,” Sullivan admits during a phone call from her Brooklyn apartment, which she shares with her fiancé. “But now I’m having a very traditional wedding. There will be bridesmaids in taffeta.”

All the wedding talk is relevant for two reasons: First, her dazzling new novel, The Engagements, is an examination of marriage and the eternal siren call of diamonds. Second, Sullivan got engaged while she was writing the book, so she was researching her book and her nuptials at the same time.

While her real-life wedding will take place this summer, Sullivan depicts weddings in many different times and places in her book—showing, as she describes it, how marriage has changed and stayed the same over the past 100 years.

Paramedic James and his high-school sweetheart struggle to make ends meet and raise rambunctious boys in 1980s Boston. Parisian Delphine marries her best friend and business partner, only to leave him for a passionate affair with an American violinist. Evelyn and Gerald married in the 1920s, when both were grieving the death of Evelyn’s first husband—Gerald’s best friend.

Woven throughout the book is the real-life story of Frances Gerety, a Philadelphia copywriter who coined the phrase “A diamond is forever” in the 1940s for De Beers, the South African company that dominates diamond mining. Gerety herself never married, but was a pioneer in the male-dominated advertising industry. In addition to writing one of the most memorable slogans in history, Gerety helped market the essentially meaningless “four C’s” of diamonds—cut, color, clarity and carat weight—as the measurement that millions of brides use to make sure their gem is worthy.

“I’ve never written a real person before,” says Sullivan, who worked as a New York Times researcher before writing her first novel in 2009. “I liked [Gerety] so much. The book is done, and I still write with her picture hanging over my desk. I feel compelled to honor her. She was never married or had kids, so not a lot of people were around who knew her.”

The real-life copywriter who coined the slogan “A diamond is forever” plays a key role in Sullivan’s captivating book.

Sullivan interviewed several of Gerety’s co-workers, neighbors and friends. She spent two years trying to find the annual reports that Gerety’s advertising firm submitted to De Beers, finally locating them packed away in boxes in Gerety’s former home. (The search was well worth the effort. The excerpts Sullivan chose are funny and telling, like the one from a 1948 strategy paper: “We spread the word of diamonds worn by stars of screen and stage, by wives and daughters of political leaders, by any woman who can make the grocer’s wife and the mechanic’s sweetheart say, ‘I wish I had what she has.’”)

“This book has the most research of any book I’ve ever written,” Sullivan says. “I really thought about, ‘Would this character have said this particular word in 1940?’”

The character with whom Sullivan says she most closely identifies is Kate, a modern-day mom who is perfectly happy without getting married, thank you very much. Like Sullivan, Kate never dreamed about her own wedding. She struggles to be supportive when her cousin decides to marry his longtime partner and turns into a gay bridezilla obsessed with wedding-day weather reports and snagging the best photographer in town. Kate simply doesn’t get the point.

“Deep down, she hated other people’s wedding photos,” Sullivan writes. “She hated the way a bride would raise up her bouquet in victory after saying ‘I do,’ as if she had just accomplished something. She hated that even normal-sized women dieted for their weddings until they looked like bobble-head versions of themselves. She hated all the money thrown into some dark hole, when it could have been put to good use in a million other ways. Every one of her friends got so overwhelmed by the event, as if they were planning the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Now there were even blogs for the stressed-out bride, the reluctant bride, the indie bride. But no one she knew, other than her, had stepped back and asked themselves, Why be a bride at all?”

Sullivan admits to spending hours “bingeing on wedding nonsense” and surfing TheKnot.com as she planned her wedding and wrote the novel. And while she came around on taffeta, she still isn’t a fan of diamonds, some of which we now know are “blood diamonds” from war-torn countries.

“When I started writing the book, I was pretty anti-diamond,” she says. “I’ve always been sort of against them. My best friend got engaged and she wanted a diamond ring. We were in the store and they were so powerful, especially the older ones that have a story you will never know.”

It is those unknown stories—and the surprising ways in which they intertwine throughout the book—that make The Engagements an exhilarating, compulsive read. Sullivan fully inhabits her characters, whether she’s writing about a blue-collar Massachusetts emergency worker or a patrician elderly woman. Her time as a researcher is obvious on every page, as she deftly spans decades without ever hitting a false note. She hired a researcher to pull important news stories from each decade since 1900 to help infuse each story with reality, so that Evelyn’s reaction to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby seems just right, and the reference to the 1980s stock market crash frames James’ story accurately.

Astonishingly self-assured for a writer in her early 30s, Sullivan has already experienced critical and commercial success. Her debut novel, Commencement, offers an incisive portrait of four unlikely friends who bond at Smith College (the author’s alma mater) in the 1990s. Her follow-up, the family drama Maine, was also a hit with readers and critics.

Still, Sullivan says she feels no pressure to keep her name on the top of bestseller lists. For her, it’s always been about the writing.

“I’ve been writing fiction—whether it’s published or not—since I was 6 years old,” she says. “I would go up in the attic and write short stories. I know every single day how lucky I am, and it is a challenge to keep loving it as much as when it’s not your full-time job.”

Sullivan and her fiancé both work from their one-bedroom apartment—and the fact that they make that arrangement work seems to bode well for their marriage—he running an Internet advertising business while she writes. They spend “a really insane amount” of their time doting on their 2-year-old hound/golden retriever mix. She even cops to recently doing one of those at-home DNA pet tests, the results of which were slightly suspect, as it told them their 55-pound dog was half Chihuahua.

As for her own engagement ring, she doesn’t have a diamond on her finger, but she insists not too much should be read into that choice.

“I got a sapphire,” she says. “It’s not any sort of political statement—if you’re wearing a gemstone, you’re wearing a gemstone.”