A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
A harrowing tale of sacrifice, survival and identity, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl presents an unvarnished look at how the American Dream can morph into a nightmare for immigrants.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
You won’t forget Jinwoo Chong’s big-hearted, beautifully written I Leave It Up to You, about a son returning to his fractious but loving family following a two-year coma.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
A heartfelt coming-of-age story about a son leaving college to help on his father’s farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s Red Dog Farm is note-perfect in its evocative depiction of life in rural Iceland.
“Life, this up and down life” is on full, multifaceted display in Ethan Joella’s debut novel. A Little Hope begins with a family facing one of life’s greatest tests: a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, a cancer within white blood cells. Greg Tyler and his wife, Freddie, are caught up in worry and fear. How do they tell their daughter, Addie, that Greg is sick? What will the next looming doctor’s appointment reveal? The calendar year may be sliding into fall and then winter, but it is just the beginning of a long, unknown road that neither of them wants to take. And they are not the only ones questioning and wrestling. They are so very far from alone.
The small, fictional town of Wharton, Connecticut, is a well-connected community of characters who feel like people you know or people you could be: mothers and sons, wives and husbands, lovers and friends, parents and those soon to be. The cast of characters—Freddie and Greg, Ginger, Luke, Iris, Alex and Kay, Suzette, Damon, Ahmed, Darcy—are honest as they move through the vagaries of love, illness, infidelity, death or disappointment as best they can, searching for a foothold in the midst of all that is happening. Their unceasing thoughts and fickle feelings all strike a familiar and fully human chord.
Joella’s poetic side shines in his moving but never maudlin novel. He captures loneliness, sadness, happiness and anger in all their fleeting hues. He has created a truly intertwined world around the Tylers, portraying their neighbors truthfully yet kindly. From beginning to end, A Little Hope finds the grace of the everyday and homes in on the surprises (both heavy and light) that each day can hold.
Life is both painful and hopeful, but in Joella’s world, it is blessedly more of the latter.
Life is both painful and hopeful, but in Ethan Joella’s debut novel, it is blessedly more of the latter.
Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich understands the sense of significance, whether subliminal or overt, that we can glean from stories—and what this offers our daily lives. The Sentence, Erdrich’s latest novel, unfolds over the course of one tumultuous year, and its persistent search for meaning reveals astonishing, sublime depths.
Tookie is an ex-convict turned bookseller working in a Minneapolis bookstore after years of reading for pure survival. Her voracious appetite for words has made her very good at what she does, but on All Souls’ Day in 2019, her world is thrown into disarray by an unlikely challenger. A customer who recently died has made her way back to the store, bringing along some revelations in a mysterious handwritten book, and she won’t leave until Tookie can figure out why she returned in the first place.
Though this often comically unpredictable ghost story forms the spine of The Sentence, Erdrich also branches out to explore the broader landscape of Minneapolis in 2019 and 2020, from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic to the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed. Yet her narrative never loses its grip. As vast as its scope may be, The Sentence doesn’t feel overstuffed because Erdrich roots it in Tookie’s own longings, beliefs and challenges.
Tookie isn’t just plagued by a literal ghost; she’s also haunted in other ways, and as she searches for the significance of these hauntings, she finds that she’s far from alone in her experience. Erdrich’s prose, layered with unforgettable flourishes of detail—from the mesmeric spinning of a ceiling fan to the quest for the perfect soup—enhances and deepens this growing sense of a larger, collective haunting.
The Sentence is an imaginative, boldly honest exploration of our ever-evolving search for truth in the stories we both consume and create. It’s a staggering addition to Erdrich’s already impressive body of work.
Unfolding over the course of one tumultuous year, Louise Erdrich’s novel searches for meaning and reveals astonishing, sublime depths.
Readers first fell in love with Lucy Barton in Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, a gentle reflection on the titular character’s life and parental influence during an extended hospitalization. In Oh William!, it’s been years since Lucy left her first husband, William. But despite the many affairs he conducted during their marriage and her own affair that prompted her departure, they remain each other’s confidants.
As the novel opens, Lucy has been widowed for a year after the death of her second husband, David. She explores her grief throughout the book, but her devotion to William also demands her attention. As in each of Strout’s novels about Lucy, her narration is nearly a stream of consciousness. The novel’s lack of chapter breaks reinforces its interior nature and invites readers to immerse themselves in Lucy’s ruminations.
As Lucy contemplates her lasting bond with William, she considers their marriage and the ways their relationship has affected their daughters. She also takes the reader through the pair’s misadventures in their later years. It isn’t always clear whether Lucy likes or respects her ex-husband, but her tie to him is unbreakable, her curiosity about him unwavering: “I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this.”
Likewise, William turns to Lucy, rather than to his current wife, when his sleep is disrupted by night terrors involving his late mother. And it’s Lucy he seeks when he confronts a secret his mother kept from him.
Pulitzer Prize winner Strout is a master of quiet, reflective stories that are driven more by their characters than by events. Her fans will find plenty to love as Lucy and William set out to explore his family history. At each step, Lucy contemplates her relationships to the people around her. Though she often feels invisible, her ties to William, their daughters and the strangers they encounter remind her that she has a place in the world.
Strout is a master of reflective stories that are driven more by characters than by events. Her fans will find plenty more to love about Lucy and William.
Natashia Deón’s The Perishing is a dark, gritty and slow-burning mystery involving an immortal protagonist.
In Depression-era Los Angeles, a Black girl wakes up naked and alone in a downtown alleyway. She doesn’t know who she is, not even her name. Her body and mind are bruised but not broken, her origins a mystery. She’s placed with a Black foster family, and her foster mother suggests the name Louise, which gets shortened to Lou.
Lou may not remember her previous life, but her intelligence and talent are evident. She goes to high school and becomes a trailblazing journalist at the Los Angeles Times. But her feelings are divided; she vaguely thinks there might be a birth family out there for her, and a face continually haunts her, showing up in her sketches and dreams.
This is just one part of a story that hops between various time periods, including the future. As an immortal being, the woman known as Lou has lived many lives and has seen many things. Her storytelling is peppered with social observations and grim philosophical pronouncements about gender, race and the inhumanity of humankind. “We fight among ourselves in this village of earth,” she says, “wars to maintain elitism and its bounty, wars we should have never been fighting, where both winners and losers are traumatized and not just in war. But in love.”
The 1930s mystery of Lou’s family is a throughline in each era, as are recurrent themes of death and despair. As a new reporter, Lou’s beat is to report on the “tragic deaths of colored people,” and death touches her on a more personal level as well. In 2102, now named Sarah Shipley, the protagonist finds herself on trial. Acting as her own attorney, she pleads not guilty. “He got what he deserved,” she says. “I can defend all my lives. . . . And anyway, no woman kills unless in self-defense. If not in defense of a current wrong, for all the wrongs that came before without justice.”
Deón’s writing is beautiful, with a rat-a-tat quality, like brutal poetry mixed with fierce prose. The noirish plot is sometimes hard to penetrate, but fans of challenging and ambitious speculative fiction should be pleased.
Natashia Deón’s The Perishing is a dark, gritty and slow-burning mystery involving time travel and multiple lives.
Jung Yun’s second novel is a riveting story of a Korean American woman claiming a country that has done its best to reject her.
After decades as a model, Elinor Hanson went back to school and reinvented herself as a journalist. Barely supporting herself with freelance work, she is surprised when one of her graduate school professors offers her a plum assignment: covering North Dakota’s oil boom for a prominent magazine. Elinor, who grew up on a U.S. Air Force base in North Dakota, is curious about the changes this new gold rush has created, so she agrees to travel home.
Elinor barely recognizes the state she left behind. Its small towns burst with new arrivals seeking opportunities, and fracking has all but destroyed the land. But the anxiety expressed by longtime residents is dishearteningly familiar to Elinor, and her encounters with sexism and racism quickly bring back the trauma of life on the air base. Elinor is the daughter of an American airman and a Korean woman who met overseas, and on the base, other wives withheld their friendship from Elinor’s mother, while other husbands were all too willing to flirt.
As Elinor grapples with the difficult assignment, she is drawn into an unsolved missing persons case: a white woman who disappeared while jogging eight years ago. But that story doesn’t allow her to forge fresh investigative paths or distract from the rage she realizes has been simmering since her teens. In fact, the longer Elinor stays in North Dakota, the angrier she becomes, and a meeting with her sister only exacerbates the flood of bad memories. When some of her former classmates reach out about a harassment suit against her professor, she begins to question his motivations in passing on the assignment in the first place.
O Beautiful moves swiftly, with all the force of a finely honed thriller. As Elinor reckons with her past and the ways people have treated her, her mother and her sisters, she begins to examine the anger and love she feels for both her family and country. Open-ended and openhearted, O Beautiful may provide Elinor with more questions than answers, but it also instills in her a newfound determination to claim America as her own
Open-ended and open-hearted, O Beautiful instills a newfound determination in its Korean American heroine to claim America as her own.
“The Arctic had a way of reminding you that your life was unimportant, expendable, and easily extinguished,” writes Nathaniel Ian Miller in his stellar first novel. He knows this harsh environment all too well, having lived there as part of the annual Arctic Circle artist and scientist expeditionary program. During his residency, he happened upon a century-old hut where a hermit once lived on an otherwise uninhabited fjord. Although biographical details of the man are sparse, the discovery inspired Miller to write a fictional account of his life. The result, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven, seems so authentic in both detail and slightly archaic narrative voice that it’s easy to forget it’s not an actual memoir.
Growing up in Stockholm, Sven Ormson is determined to escape an unhappy life of “menial drudgery.” He dreams of polar exploration and reads not only famous, heroic accounts but also all of the “terminally dull voyage narratives” he can get his hands on. At age 32, he sets out for Spitsbergen, a Norwegian archipelagic isle in the Arctic Circle, where he begins working in a dangerous, soul-sucking mine. Before long, a horrific accident leaves him not only disfigured but also “resolved to spend [his] life alone” as an Arctic trapper. And he’s hardly a gifted trapper.
Thus begins a truly walloping tale of solitude and survival told in visceral detail, a combination of Miller’s wild imagination and his beautifully precise prose. By design, the novel is so full of lengthy descriptions that a certain amount of perseverance is required of the reader. But Sven is an insightful yet comically ironic narrator, and there is often great excitement in his story, including “ice bear” attacks, near starvation, northern lights and the haunting sounds of calving glaciers.
The arctic landscape is mostly barren, but Sven encounters a parade of quirky yet meaningful characters who appear, disappear and sometimes reappear in his life. He also offers a surprising amount of social commentary, touching on corporate greed, the plight of workers, the tragedy and senselessness of war, the rewards of canine-human relationships, the necessity of intellectual pursuits and more.
Although The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven is a vastly different book from Peter Heller’s The Guide, these two novels may appeal to the same audience: readers who love exquisite nature writing and crave no-holds-barred, extreme outdoor adventures. Miller goes one step further, however, by imbuing his novel with an unforgettable narrator who asks essential questions of human connection, a remarkable achievement for a novel ostensibly about solitude. What makes a family? What makes a devoted friend? What makes a great life?
Like the arctic landscape itself, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven is beautifully stark and unimaginably rich, a book that will long be remembered by its lucky readers.
Like the arctic landscape itself, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven is beautifully stark and unimaginably rich, a book that will long be remembered by its lucky readers.
Imagine a fig tree speaking, the unexpected perspective its voice would lend to a war-torn island’s history, full of forbidden teenage love, reunions and cultural divides. Such is Elif Shafak’s intergenerational novel of love, loss and family, The Island of Missing Trees.
The novel moves between 1974 Cyprus—as cities collapse amid war, as neighbors are made enemies depending on whether they are Greek or Turkish, Christian or Muslim—and London in the 2010s. Ada Kazantzakis, teenage daughter of Kostas and his wife, Defne, is fascinated and bothered by the fig tree that her botanist father spends so much time and energy tending. While Ada wonders at her father’s obsession, the tree tells her own story, offering the keys to discover how this family came to England, far from the island that Ada only knows in stories, the place that Kostas still calls home.
The novel shifts easily in time and space, but even more interesting is the way that it functions as a story of environment and species. The fig tree notices birds and bats, other trees and ants; she sees and comments upon politics, war, love and the broad impact of human choices. She sees into the hearts of humans, animals and the earth, and tries to convey the beauty and challenges of doing so.
Shafak’s novel, particularly in the meditative moments when the fig tree speaks, asks readers to see beyond themselves, to consider cultures and conflicts that are not their own, to see how each action ripples.
Elif Shafak’s novel asks readers to see beyond themselves, particularly in the meditative moments when a fig tree speaks.
No one does an art thriller quite like B.A. Shapiro, and with such as novels The Art Forger and The Muralist, she’s carved out quite the niche by blinding literary thrills with questions of authenticity, value, museum politics and the inner workings of various historical art scenes.
Shapiro’s next novel, Metropolis, arrives this spring from Algonquin Books, and BookPage is delighted to reveal its cover and an exclusive excerpt!
First, read a bit about Metropolis in the official synopsis from Algonquin:
This masterful novel of psychological suspense from the New York Times bestselling author of The Art Forger follows a cast of unforgettable characters whose lives intersect when a harrowing accident occurs at the Metropolis Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
But was it really an accident? Was it suicide? A murder? Six mysterious characters who rent units in, or are connected to, the self-storage facility must now reevaluate their lives. We meet Serge, an unstable but brilliant street photographer who lives in his unit, which overflows with thousands of undeveloped pictures; Zach, the building’s owner, who develops Serge’s photos as he searches for clues to the accident; Marta, an undocumented immigrant who is finishing her dissertation and hiding from ICE; Liddy, an abused wife and mother, who re-creates her children’s bedroom in her unit; Jason, who has left his corporate firm and now practices law from his storage unit; and Rose, the office manager, who takes kickbacks to let renters live in the building and has her own complicated family history.
The characters have a variety of backgrounds: They are different races; they practice different religions; they’re young and they’re not so young; they are rich, poor, and somewhere in the middle. As they dip in and out of one another’s lives, fight circumstances that are within and also beyond their control, and try to discover the details of the accident, Shapiro both dismantles the myth of the American dream and builds tension to an exciting climax.
Metropolis hits bookstores and libraries on May 17, 2022. While you wait, we’re delighted to reveal the cover from designer Sara Wood and art director Christopher Moisan. Plus, an exclusive excerpt after the jump!
BOSTONGLOBE.COM, JANUARY 7, 2018. Cambridge, MA—Rescue workers were dispatched to the Metropolis Storage Warehouse at Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street in response to a 911 call at 11:15 this evening. At least one person was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with critical injuries after a fall down an elevator shaft. Details are limited, and neither police nor hospital officials identified the victim. Questions were raised about what people were doing at the self-storage facility at that hour, and police are investigating other violations concerning the building. This is a developing story. It will be updated.
ONE
Zach
May 2018
It’s Rose’s fault. It’s Aetna’s fault. It’s Otis Elevator’s fault. All of the above and none of the above. Zach Davidson hovers at the edge of the crowd, but at six two it’s tough to blend into the background. The auctioneer doesn’t know Zach is the recipient of the money from the forthcoming sales, and he wants to keep it that way, although he doesn’t know why this matters. He isn’t even sure why he’s come, unless as some perverse form of self-flagellation.
“Most of you know the rules,” the auctioneer begins in her booming voice, “but I’m going to go over them quickly. Due to foreclosure of the building, the contents of twenty-two abandoned storage units are up for sale. The minimum bid is one hundred dollars. Cash only. I’ll open the door to each unit, and you’ll have five minutes to see what’s inside, and then I’ll start the auction. You may not cross the threshold. You may not touch anything. You may not ask me any questions, because I don’t have any answers. You take it all or you leave it all. Then we move on to the next unit. Is this clear?”
There’s a murmur of acceptance, which echoes off the concrete walls and floor, the steel-reinforced ceiling. They’re standing outside Rose’s old office, the woman Zach shouldn’t have relied on. Every direction he looks pisses him off. Rose’s empty desk, the dim bulbs, the peeling paint. He turns his back on the yellow police tape stretched across the elevator.
It’s been almost four months since it happened, and still no one knows for sure if it was an accident, a suicide attempt, or a murder attempt. Could be any of them, but it doesn’t make all that much difference. He’s screwed any which way. Damn elevator. Damn Rose. Damn hard luck.
He follows the auctioneer as she marches down a corridor lined with heavy metal doors, each imprinted with a round medallion containing a large M intertwined with a smaller S and W. Metropolis Storage Warehouse. One hundred and twenty-three years old. Six stories high. Ninety feet wide. Four hundred and eighty feet long. Almost four hundred storage units of various sizes and shapes; some even have windows. Zach knows it well.
Author B.A. Shapiro
The potential bidders are a mixed bunch. Two men in ratty clothes smell as if they’ve been sleeping on the street, which they probably have. Another three look like lawyers or real estate developers, and there’s a foursome of gray-hairs who appear to have just stepped off the golf course. A gaggle of middle-aged women in running shoes sends stern glances at a girl clutching a pen and a pad of paper, who seems far too young to be the mother of the children she’s yelling at. Male, female, tall, short, fat, slim, white, Black, brown, rich, poor, clever, or not so clever. Like the inner recesses of Metropolis itself, a diverse assemblage that stands in contrast to the archipelago of cultural and economic neighborhoods Boston has become.
Zach has owned Metropolis for ten years, bought at a ridiculously low price in a quasi-legal deal that looked to be the way out of the consequences of his bad choices. Although it still belongs to him, however temporarily, he has no idea what’s behind any of the doors. The building had a well-deserved shady reputation when he purchased it, and he concluded he was better off not knowing what people were storing in their units. In retrospect, a little prying might have averted this mess.
The auctioneer, a beefy woman with biceps twice the size of Zach’s, takes a key from her backpack and dramatically twists it into the lock. Then she slides the ten-foot-wide fireproof door along its track on the floor to reveal a murky room, lumpy with shadowy objects. She reaches inside and flips on the light.
“Take it all! Leave it all!” she cries. “Five minutes!”
Revealed by naked light bulbs hanging from the eleven-foot ceiling, #114 is decidedly dull. An old refrigerator, an electric stove, a bunch of mismatched chairs, a couple of mattresses, clothes overflowing from open cartons scattered all over the floor. There are at least two dozen sealed boxes lined up against the far wall and a four-foot pile of empty picture frames ready to topple. Everything is coated with what appears to be decades of dust. Zach groans inwardly. He needs every cent he can squeeze out of this auction, and no one’s going to bid on any of this junk.
But he’s wrong. After the auctioneer starts rippling her tongue in an impenetrable torrent of words, people start raising their hands. When the contents go for $850, Zach is flabbergasted. The other units surely contain more impressive stuff than this and should generate even higher bids.
Some do, some don’t, and two are completely empty.
“Take it all! Leave it all! Five minutes!”
When the auctioneer unlocks the door of #357, there’s a collective gasp. The interior looks like a stage waiting for the evening performance to commence: a complete upscale office suite, including a desk, bookshelves, and a small conference table surrounded by four chairs. Bizarre. It goes for $3,500.
On the fifth floor is a tiny and perfectly immaculate unit: a neatly made single bed, an intricately carved rolltop desk, a chair, a small bureau. Nothing else. One thousand dollars. In #454, there’s another bizarre tableau. Creepy, actually. It appears to belong to a couple of teenagers. Two desks piled with books and trophies, walls covered with movie posters, and corkboards adorned with invitations and photos and newspaper clippings. Did they come here to study? To hide? Zach stretches his neck in as far as he can without the auctioneer cutting it off.
She almost does. “Step back, sir!” she yells, her voice stiletto-sharp. “This minute!” Everyone looks at him as if he’s committed a heinous crime. “Take it all! Leave it all! Five minutes!”
Annoyed, he does as she orders, but he wants to see more, surprised to find himself interested in the lives lived here. This is something he’d never considered before, or to be more correct, he had thought about it, but only as a means to get the bad guys out of the building and clean up his own act. Now the questions surge. Who were these people? Why these particular items? And, most intriguing of all, why did they leave so much behind?
Unit 421 is another stage, but this one is freakish in its attention to detail. It’s a double unit with two round windows, and it looks like an upscale studio apartment, perhaps a pied-à-terre. Against one wall, a queen-size bed is covered by a rumpled silk bedspread and an unreasonable number of pillows. A nightstand holding a lamp and a clock sits to its right side; a large abstract painting is centered over the headboard. At the other end of the unit is an overstuffed reading chair, a writing desk, and a sectional couch, also with too many pillows, facing a large-screen television. In the corner, there’s a small table, two chairs, and a compact kitchen featuring cabinets, a refrigerator, a microwave, and a fancy hot plate.
“Take it all! Leave it all! Five minutes!”
This time there’s no doubt in Zach’s mind to whom the unit belongs, or rather, to whom it had belonged. Liddy Haines. He closes his eyes and presses his forefinger to the bridge of his nose in an attempt to make the horrific image go away, which it does not. Six thousand dollars.
Unit 514 was apparently used as a darkroom, and from the looks of it, also as a bedroom. He stares at the sheets pooling at the edge of a cot, at the dirty clothes heaped on the floor. He’s seen three beds in three different units over the last hour, and he clenches his fists to contain his anger. If Rose didn’t know people were living here, she should have. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen—even if it wasn’t the lawsuit now upending his life. An irony he’d appreciate more if he weren’t so damn furious.
In contrast to Liddy Haines’s unit, there’s no expensive furniture here, but there is a lot of high-quality photographic equipment. A long table edges the south side of the room, overflowing with trays, chemicals, jugs, paper, an enlarger, and an assortment of spools, filters, thermometers, and timers. A clothesline with pins attached stretches over the jumble, and there are at least a dozen five-gallon Poland Spring containers, most of them full, along with another dozen warehouse-size cartons of energy bars.
A Rolleiflex camera is perched atop a stack of cartons, its well-worn leather strap dangling. Zach recognizes it because of the nature photography he’s been doing lately, his current obsession. Highpointing, climbing the highest peak in every state, was his last one, and that’s what got him into taking landscape pictures in the first place. But his interest in mountaineering has been waning—thirty-two states is more than enough—as his new interest in photography has waxed. He’s usually only good for one obsession at a time, dropping the previous one when another grabs his fancy. He’s an all-in or all-out kind of guy.
The Rolleiflex is a twin-lens reflex, medium format, which hardly anyone uses anymore. But if you know what you’re doing, it takes remarkable photos. Zach rented one when he was at Bryce last year, and the first time he looked down into the viewfinder—which is at waist, rather than eye, level—he was blown away.
The vastness of the mountains and the big sky in front of him were perfectly reflected through the lens, without the tunnel vision effect of a standard camera. When he returned to Boston, he kept it a few extra days and experimented with street photography. The cool part is that because you’re looking down rather than directly at your subject, no one is aware they’re being photographed. Vivian Maier, arguably one of the greatest street photographers ever, used a Rolleiflex.
Zach leans into the unit as far as the Nazi will allow, searching for pictures. There are a few lying about, but it’s difficult to see them from the hallway. The ones he can see are all square rather than rectangular, a feature of the Rolleiflex. He tilts his head and squints at a photo on the end of the table closest to him: a striking black-and-white with afternoon sunlight cutting a diagonal across the image.
A man is standing in front of an open door with an arched top; the word “Office” can be clearly read behind his head. His shoulder leans against the doorframe, one knee slightly bent. His eyes stare off into the distance. Before Zach understands what he’s seeing, his stomach twists. It’s a photograph of him.
When you open the pages of my novel Angelology, you will enter a secluded convent nestled next to a wide, mirror-dark river; you will climb into a narrow gorge cut deep into the granite of an Eastern European mountain; and you will sit in a shadowy lecture hall filled with students during the Second World War. You will meet a young woman named Evangeline, whose family history has drawn her into a centuries-old hidden society of scholars who practice the ancient discipline of angelology, the theological study of angels. You will become acquainted with nuns; a handsome art historian named Verlaine who rushes into Evangeline’s quiet world and changes her life; and a nefarious group of angels called Nephilim.
As you can imagine, the places and characters in my book are extremely different from my “real life” as a 30-something mother of two. In fact, the world of my novel could not be any more different from my daily life. And yet, looking back over the process of composing Angelology, I see that many of these settings and characters were inspired by places I have visited and people I’ve met. The art of studying how the imagination works is a nebulous one, but it is interesting for me to try to pick through the many experiences that have contributed to Angelology.
One of the main settings of the novel is the convent of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. As a girl, I went to a Catholic grade school where many of my teachers were nuns. One of the requirements of my parochial education was attendance at mass each morning at 7:30, and so we were forever going back and forth between the school and the church. My parents went to church on Sundays (their one session per week) and thus I was in church six mornings out of seven, sitting on a hard wooden pew, often gazing at the angels painted throughout the church. I don’t remember a single prayer or hymn from that period of my life, but I do remember the way I felt looking at the golden figures hovering upon the walls. It was as if I might be able to adopt the wings of these heavenly creatures and gain the power to escape the dim church. I found some relief from the sobriety of mass in the beauty of the angels. Perhaps the seeds of my novel began then, as a child daydreaming in church.
I had forgotten about of my interest in angels entirely, however, until I went to a convent called Saint Rose Convent to speak with the nuns who lived there. My great-aunt Drusilla was a Franciscan Sister of Adoration living at the convent, and I had decided to visit her home to interview the Sisters living there. I knew I wanted to write a book that involved the Sisters, but at that time I had no clear vision of what I would write. I spent many days at the convent, following the Sisters through their daily activities. There was a beautiful chapel in the convent where the nuns went to pray. One night, when I was walking back from the chapel, I found myself in the convent reading room, a small space filled with religious books. One shelf of the library was filled with books about angels. I took a stack of books down, sat in a comfortable chair and began reading. Within hours I was aware that angels would be at the very center of my book and that I would use the convent I had visited as one of my primary settings.
While my decision to use the convent as a primary setting was a surprise, using the mountains of Eastern Europe was something that I had long hoped to do. I lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, for four years with my husband, the writer Nikolai Grozni. My husband had taken me to the Rhodope Mountains and I had fallen in love with the stark, craggy landscape. We went together to an underground cave called The Devil’s Throat, an UNESCO site with an amazing waterfall that flows into an underground river, and I knew I would one day write about it. In Bulgarian legend the cavern formed the entrance to the underworld where Orpheus descended to save Eurydice. Some years later, when I was writing the first draft of Angelology, I decided to incorporate the cave and the legend into my novel.
Who can say what alchemy brings such disparate elements as Orpheus, a convent, angels and a cave in Bulgaria together to create a novel, but in the course of writing this book I understood that all of one’s reading, travels, friendships and dreams contribute to the final result. I can only hope that the experience of reading Angelology is as surprising and enjoyable as the experience of writing it.
Danielle Trussoni is also the author of the memoir Falling Through the Earth. Angelology is her first novel, and has already been optioned for film. She and her family divide their time between New York City and Bulgaria, and she is working on a sequel to Angelology.
When you open the pages of my novel Angelology, you will enter a secluded convent nestled next to a wide, mirror-dark river; you will climb into a narrow gorge cut deep into the granite of an Eastern European mountain; and you will sit in…
I'm fumbling around in a Mississippi bookstore, waiting to do my reading gig . . . tugging on my necktie, sipping bottled water, and trying to decide whether or not I've locked myself out of my hotel room. It's hot outside, the air a little wetter and the land a little flatter than I'm accustomed to.
I look along the walls, take in the spines of a thousand books, and it occurs to me this is about six stops into my book tour that there's a good deal of commerce and lucre bound up in this art. More precisely, it occurs to me that there is a phenomenal amount of competition on the shelves. I'm starting to go through the opiate progression of publishing; in the beginning, you're after just a tiny taste, and when the taste is pleasing, you want that much more. Two years ago, I simply hoped to see my book in print and would've been happy to have sold it out of the trunk of my car. Now I want to throttle Harry Potter. It's like the Springsteen lyric: Poor man wants to be rich, rich man wants to be king, king ain't satisfied till he rules everything.
So I decide to check out the competition's wares, to see what else people can spend their money on. At random, I pull down a book David Gates's The Wonders of the Invisible World. I'd read one of his novels before, and I remember liking it, although I read it for sport and entertainment back in those days, not to see who had the biggest prose. I thumb through a short story and turn miserable. The writing is perfect, the rhythms and tone flawless, the story so good I end up going back to finish it before I leave. David Gates's book is better than mine. I spot check a few more hardbacks all well written, it seems and get this visceral, black surge of disappointment. You know the sensation . . . expectations torn down and razed, that flushed, febrile feeling you get standing in a cafeteria while some guy with sideburns and a job and a Camaro asks your 10th grade crush to homecoming. I decide to jolly myself up by skimming through The Rock Says . . . , the wrestling tome. Thank goodness this one won't be on the short list in Stockholm.
Standing in this store with a best-selling book on professional wrestling in my hands, I've just realized that the book business is much like many other things that are vaguely artistic and subjective. Luck is often a finer muse than skill, and timing, publicity, and the backing of good people are the three Graces of a writer's world in the year 2000. A lot of exceptional writing and music is buried because it didn't arrive in the store with a poster and cardboard display. I mean, is Britney Spears really 12 million CDs better than Robert Earl Keen? I doubt it. Okay, I'm sure of it she's not.
I do my reading and head back to my hotel; I have in fact lost the key to my room, and the clerk at the front desk gives me another one. I go to bed feeling fortunate to be traveling around the country with my writing, grateful that people have plugged my novel and that reviewers have said kind things about it, thankful to a superb publishing house and a bright, diligent publicist, and pricked by a little guilt, a bit like the "B" student who gets into Yale because of his family's deep pockets and good connections.
Also, I'm told there is an interest in such things, so here's my take as a neophyte touring author on some folks and places that deserve high praise: Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi; Carytown Books in Richmond, Virginia; Fact and Fiction in Missoula, Montana; Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Nashville; the Mysterious Bookshop in New York; and New Dominion Bookstore and Barnes ∧ Noble in Charlottesville, Virginia. And since I've mentioned him, Robert Earl Keen provides the perfect background for two-hour drives between cities. His CD No. 2 Live Dinner is the finest recording on the planet.
Martin Clark is a Virginia circuit court judge whose first novel, The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, was published in April by Alfred A. Knopf.
I'm fumbling around in a Mississippi bookstore, waiting to do my reading gig . . . tugging on my necktie, sipping bottled water, and trying to decide whether or not I've locked myself out of my hotel room. It's hot outside, the air a little wetter and the land a little flatter than I'm accustomed to.
First allow me to say that I had nothing to do with our current financial meltdown. A few years ago I found myself starting a novel about a family of bank robbers set during the Great Depression, a story that would become The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. At the time, our stock market was briskly accelerating, the wind in its hair and its wrist casually dangling out the window. My house had almost doubled in value, along with pretty much everyone else’s, and people at parties traded ideas for the next great investment (redo the kitchen? buy nanotech stocks? get a second house?).
While casting about for an idea for my second novel, I read a history of bank robbers during the Great Depression and was intrigued by colorful characters like John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd. I next read a number of books about the Depression itself and marveled at the stories. Fistfights at the offices of employers who announced they needed to hire two men and found themselves fending off a riot of hundreds of applicants; long lines of laid-off white-collar workers waiting on city sidewalks for a free lunch, shamefully shielding their faces from view; families facing desperate decisions about how to simply stay alive; angry young men robbing banks and redistributing wealth the old-fashioned way.
This all seemed so otherworldly to me as I read about the ’30s from the comfortable vantage of 2007. And it had seemed so otherworldly to the people living it, too. People in the Great Depression, particularly the early years, felt utterly unmoored. Their world had been turned upside down. One year, shoeshine boys had been trading stock tips; the next year, stockbrokers were taking walks out their 20th-floor windows. Countless people were dispossessed, out of work and literally starving. How had this happened? We were a nation in complete and utter shock. All of the foundations of normalcy had been torn down—faith not only in capitalism but also in democracy; the belief that hard work would be rewarded, that the American Dream could be achieved. Our most basic assumptions had been revealed to be no more than empty myths.
One year, shoeshine boys had been trading stock tips; the next year, stockbrokers were taking walks out their 20th-floor windows.
I had always wanted to write a novel centered on a typical American middle-class family unexpectedly derailed by economic disaster, but had struggled with figuring out how to do so without being too depressing—and had wondered how I might make the story interesting to readers who were themselves living in the strongest economy ever known to man. The larger-than-life bank robbers of the Depression, I realized, presented me with a perfect opportunity. My fictional family could be a shop-owning clan in a small Midwestern city, ruined by the father’s horribly timed real estate speculation. In response, two of the three sons become bank robbers—and, soon enough, folk heroes to the legions of angry souls who blame the banks and the government for the hard times—and a third son can stay home to try supporting the family legitimately. The domestic tension, the sibling rivalries, the cool bank-robbing scenes, the fedoras and Tommy guns and fast cars, the mythology of the ’30s bank robbers, the sense that all of America’s founding principles had suddenly and irrevocably been called into question, a nation that seemed on the verge of revolution—all these were rich in narrative possibility for the novelist, even in 2007. I had no idea that any of this might also become frighteningly relevant to my own times—after all, as I wrote the rough draft, the Dow was above 13,000.
A very unfunny thing happened during the final revisions of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers—the world economy collapsed. I had, alas, not seen this coming (one glance at my retirement account will prove my point). But as I read and reread my book in the final months of copyediting and proofreading, it was eerie that so many things I had once considered borderline fantastical were becoming commonplace in 2009: entire neighborhoods foreclosed and vacant; a modern-day Hooverville popping up beneath a highway overpass in my childhood home of Providence, Rhode Island; populist rage at government and banks, along with accusations and counteraccusations about the merits of socialism and the failures of capitalism; the sense that we had, for the last few years or decades, been deluded fools, recklessly living according to a set of fictional principles that had finally crumbled in the face of reality.
When writing The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, I had not been trying to tell the future or draw parallels between a distant time and our own—and I think the book works even for readers unconcerned with such analogies. But it also proves that no matter how hard a writer might try to tell own his story and control his characters, there are always more powerful forces at work. The best you can do is tell your tale and let it loose upon a world that we’re all trying to make sense of, even as it changes around us, day after day.
Thomas Mullen made his literary debut in 2006 with the award-winning novel The Last Town on Earth. His second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, has just been published by Random House. Mullen lives in Atlanta with his wife and two sons.
First allow me to say that I had nothing to do with our current financial meltdown. A few years ago I found myself starting a novel about a family of bank robbers set during the Great Depression, a story that would become The Many Deaths…
When I get rich, I want my own spokesman. Well, spokesperson. I want to be able to stand next to someone, looking off and smiling dimly, while he or she interprets my every thought and translates them into words.
"Mr. Martinez," my spokesperson will say, "emphatically denies that he stole one word from Angela's Ashes while writing Ethel's Urn. Any similarity between the ashes, the abject poverty or the Irishmen is purely coincidental. He has nothing more to say on the subject." Members of the media will continue to fire questions but my spokesperson will wave them off and lead me to a waiting limo. Then we will have lunch and he/she will order for me, and I won't say a word all day and possibly for the rest of my life. When I die, they will bury my spokesperson with me, just in case.
It is a dream that began while I was hustling my book around Los Angeles. The book is called The Last City Room, and because it is my first novel, I have been pushing harder than usual to make it fly. When I don't feel like a hooker peddling my ass all over town, I feel like a mother bird shoving her baby out of the nest.
Everyone has a spokesman in L.
A., from a strung-out actor caught trying to pick up a transvestite taxi dancer to a celebrated homeless poet who reads for old ladies enraptured by a versifying bum. It is said that when Barbra Streisand was married recently, a spokesperson replied "She does" when asked if Barbra would take James Brolin to be her lawful-wedded husband. "If you really want to be noticed," a fellow novelist advised, "hire your own publicist." That's what I did, and it spoiled me. Her name is Kim Dower. I am a columnist for the L.
A. (by God) Times and already am semi-noticed, so when she went to work I became mega-noticed.
There is both a plus and a minus to that. The plus is that it gets you interviewed by smart people who ask intelligent questions. The minus is, it gets you interviewed by idiots who have never read the book. You know they haven't when they begin the interview with, "Tell us about your book." I was tempted once to respond to a TV interviewer, "Well, it's about a family called the Joads who leave Oklahoma during an economic downturn and move to California to pick fruit and face a lot of difficulties." I didn't because I was warned that the interviewer has a violent temper and, perceiving my mockery, might mash me like an Idaho potato right there on live cable television.
My book is actually about a fictional San Francisco daily that crashes in the 1960s against the calamity of student uprisings. It is ironic that on the day it ceased publication, the San Francisco Examiner ran a highly favorable review of The Last City Room. I thought about asking my publicist if she had engineered the newspaper's collapse to sell the book but I didn't. There are some things I just don't want to know.
I hired her for two months and then it was over. For awhile, I found myself unable to decide what to say when called upon to speak. I thought about handing out press releases at signings and readings, but that probably wouldn't be acceptable. I would have to refer to myself in the third person like Bob Dole. "Al Martinez believes that writing a novel is like having a baby in your 50s. It is possible but not easy." Laughter. Applause. If, upon reading this, you all go out and buy a copy of The Last City Room and call it to the attention of the sheltered Eastern media, who are still not convinced that the land west of the Great Divide is populated, I will be grateful. And then perhaps I will be wealthy enough to hire a spokesperson/ghost writer who will submit works such as this and say, "Al Martinez sincerely hopes you like this, but it must stand on its own. There will be no further additions or rewrites. Thank you and that will be all." Al Martinez' spokesperson tells BookPage that his first novel, The Last City Room, was published by St. Martin's. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Martinez says he is currently working on another novel, rooted in the Korean War, and finishing up a travel book, I'll Be Damned If I'll Die in Oakland.
When I get rich, I want my own spokesman. Well, spokesperson. I want to be able to stand next to someone, looking off and smiling dimly, while he or she interprets my every thought and translates them into words.
I'm James Patterson and I write thrillers such as Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls.
Having said that, let me tell you a love story.
Around 18 months ago, I had a glimmer of an idea to write a novel called Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas.
The story begins with a book editor who has fallen in love for the first time in her life, and she has fallen hard. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, the man walks out on her. A day later, she receives a diary and the following note from her lover:
Dear Katie, No words or actions can begin to tell you what I'm feeling now. I'm so sorry about what I allowed to happen between us. It was all my fault, of course. I take all the blame. You are perfect, wonderful, beautiful. It's not you. It's me. Maybe this diary will explain things better than I ever could. If you have the heart, read it. It's about my wife and son, and me. I will warn you, though, there will be parts that may be hard for you to read. I never expected to fall in love with you, but I did. Matt
Katie can't help herself; she starts the diary. And reading it changes her life. To be totally honest, the prospect of writing this novel scared me, because it was a love story actually two love stories and I had never even written one love story before. I remember that it was a Monday and that I happened to be in the offices of Little, Brown in New York City. I was meeting with the publisher and the editor in chief and suddenly I found myself saying, "Let me tell you a story that I can't get out of my head. I must warn you though, it's not a thriller." I told the story I had in mind for Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, and when I finished, both of these somewhat tough (though tender on the inside) New Yorkers were crying.
At this point, I knew I had to try to get the story down on paper if I could.
For the next 10 months, every day, I continued to be scared, but I also was as excited as I had ever been while writing a book. I customarily write in my office, but I wrote Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas in the bedroom. I usually write six or seven drafts of a novel, but I wrote 11 drafts for Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas.
When I was finished, I gave it to my wife to read. When she came out of our bedroom about four hours later, she was crying.
I gave it to friends to read, and they cried. And then, this spring, a bookseller got hold of a reader's copy and sent me this e-mail. He wrote: "I'm an Irish man, and I don't cry. I never cry. I just finished Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, and I cried for the first time in 20 years. Thank you." Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas comes out on July 16. Take it to the beach. But you better bring a handkerchief.
Former advertising executive James Patterson has become a one-man publishing powerhouse, with a string of best-selling novels, including the Alex Cross thrillers and a new mystery series, launched with the spring release of 1st to Die. His latest novel, Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas is a romantic departure from his earlier work. Patterson lives with his wife, Sue, and their young son. They have homes in New York and Florida.
I'm James Patterson and I write thrillers such as Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls.
Having said that, let me tell you a love story.
Around 18 months ago, I had a glimmer of an idea to…
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