Fiction book reviews archive | Page 83 of 452

by Lynne Kutsukake

From the moment that first audacious thought crossed my mind—I will write a novel!—I knew only one thing for sure: the setting would be Japan.

I’d studied the language and I’d spent time living there. In my career as an academic librarian, I’d specialized in working with Japanese materials. I knew exactly where I wanted my novel to be set. What I didn’t yet know was when.

Initially, I assumed I would write about the present. This seemed perfectly logical, as I had already written several short stories set in contemporary Japan. I thought I had lots of ideas for a novel, but each time I sat down to write, I couldn’t seem to work up momentum. I went back to working on my short story collection. Maybe I was not meant to write a novel after all.

And then I read about the letters sent by the Japanese people to General MacArthur during the Occupation, and I knew I had found my time period. It was the past, not the present, that I needed to explore in the story that would become The Translation of Love.

The book that sparked my imagination, Dear General MacArthur by Rinjiro Sodei, is a study of the correspondence sent to MacArthur while he was in Japan. In their scope and variety, the letters were very interesting, but most astonishing of all was this: Altogether, MacArthur received a staggering 500,000 letters from the Japanese people.

Half a million letters? From the people you just conquered? It seemed improbable, absurd, preposterous and . . . well, absolutely fascinating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Somewhere in this intriguing, little-known piece of history was a novel waiting to be written. I knew that the Occupation period was a time of tumult and upheaval, of great optimism and crushing despair. There was homelessness, starvation, black market profiteering, prostitution. On the other hand, many people were filled with hope for what they saw as a new direction for their country. Democracy and freedom were the hot new catchwords, and learning English was all the rage.

What kind of person would write a letter to MacArthur? The question kept coming back to me. What if that person wasn’t an adult, I wondered. What if she were a young girl? And so I decided to create Fumi, a 12-year-old girl with a desperate need to write to MacArthur. I didn’t yet know what her letter would be about, but I was eager to find out.

As soon as I had Fumi, I knew she needed a friend, and Aya, a 13-year-old Japanese-Canadian girl, sprang to life. Aya and her father are among the 4,000 Japanese Canadians who were repatriated to Japan after spending the war in an internment camp. As a third-generation Japanese Canadian whose own parents were interned during the war, I realized that Aya’s history was one that I absolutely needed to include.

I immersed myself in the Occupation period by reading anything I could get my hands on, starting with John W. Dower’s extraordinary Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. I devoured history books, academic studies, memoirs, journalistic accounts, biographies of MacArthur. Anything with photographs made me especially excited.

During the writing of The Translation of Love, I spent some time in Japan. I walked around the area where MacArthur had his headquarters—the original building is still standing!—and tried to look at the landscape not through my own eyes but through the eyes of my characters. Back home, I did some traveling to places I had never been before. I joined a tour of the Japanese-Canadian internment camp sites in the interior of British Columbia, and I visited a friend in California who took me to see Manzanar, one of the biggest of the Japanese-American internment sites. Each time I came back to my writing after a trip, it was with a stronger sense of the past. Most importantly, I came to appreciate the powerful imprint that history leaves upon a particular place—and upon our understanding of ourselves.

Recently, I went back to Japan and strolled in the famous Ginza district along with all the tourists. People were taking pictures of themselves in front of Wako, the most luxurious jewelry store in Japan, and I wondered how many of them knew that it had once housed the PX where only the Occupation forces could shop. Everywhere I looked, the streets were clean, the shoppers sleek and well dressed, and the store windows overflowing with abundance. It seemed as if not a single trace of the past remained, and yet I knew that if I listened hard, I might hear the sound of my two young characters—Fumi and Aya—running down a dirty alley that no longer exists.

A third-generation Japanese Canadian, Lynne Kutsukake worked for many years as a librarian at the University of Toronto, specializing in Japanese materials. Her short fiction has appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Ricepaper and Prairie Fire. The Translation of Love is her first novel.

This article was originally published in the April 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From the moment that first audacious thought crossed my mind—I will write a novel!—I knew only one thing for sure: the setting would be Japan.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Finding truth in art

Behind the Book by Amber Brock

by Amber Brock

A secretive painter who may not be all he appears and a bored, wealthy socialite are at the center of Amber Brock's hypnotic debut novel, A Fine Imitation. Brock, who teaches British Literature at an Atlanta high school, shares the story behind the book and explains how art shaped the journeys of her characters.

My novel, A Fine Imitation, tells the story of a wealthy beauty, Vera, who comes to realize how suffocating her rarefied world of 1920s Manhattan really is when she falls in love with a mysterious painter and unexpectedly reconnects with an old friend. It’s a tale full of false identities. Some are obvious: the artist, Emil Hallan, is not who he claims to be and has dark, dangerous secrets lurking in his past. Vera, on the other hand, spends most of her life believing she is the woman she wants to be. Hallan’s arrival upends her world and makes her question that certainty, much the way her relationship with her college friend Bea did 10 years earlier. Vera comes to see that she’s been pretending to be the person others in her life (particularly her mother) wanted her to be. As glamorous and glittering as her life is, it’s all surface, all a show. She’s been playing a part, imitating someone else’s style, and the cracks show—her life has been, in effect, a forgery.

In writing A Fine Imitation, my first novel, I fell deep into the art world, researching the Spanish golden age of painting, Vermeer’s work, and the art nouveau style so popular in Vera’s youth. I also studied cases of art forgery, and I found myself considering how many false works were discovered because of the exceptional difficulty of copying another artist’s style. In the very act of attempting another artist’s use of color or shading, these forgers were giving themselves away. To my mind, this hit on a central fact of human nature. When we pretend to be someone we’re not, the truth of who we are tends to “out” us.

When we pretend to be someone we’re not, the truth of who we are tends to “out” us.

These became the twin issues in A Fine Imitation: a deep focus on visual art intertwined with the little forgeries of daily existence, something I think the title expresses beautifully. I think this performative aspect of day-to-day life—the small ways in which we try to meet other people’s expectations, the white lies and fake smiles—is something that everyone feels, and I really wanted to explore that in the novel.

Researching the novel brought back memories of the first time I felt I really “got” a work of art, Diego de Velazquez’s Las meninas. I didn’t know before then how to appreciate art outside of looking at it in a museum and thinking something along the lines of, “Ooh, that’s pretty” or “I could never do that.” I never understood that a static work of art could tell a dynamic story. In the painting, a court portrait of the Spanish royal family, Velasquez also included himself. It’s both a portrait and a self-portrait, a fascinating riddle of perspective. If the painter is in the painting, whose perspective does the viewer take? And how does that change the narrative? I never fully comprehended how closely related visual art and storytelling were until I encountered Velazquez’s masterwork, how a work of art tells a story, and how point-of-view can change the narrative. That one painting opened a world of characters, adventures and mysteries to me. I relished being able to return to a world that I loved, that of visual art, in writing A Fine Imitation.

Art is in the creation, and as humans, we have an innate desire to create. That act of construction even extends to ourselves, as we fashion the different versions of ourselves that we present to others. A Fine Imitation is about what happens when Vera realizes that the woman she’s pretending to be is a work of fiction. Interestingly, it is in the stories of art that she finds her truth.

Author photo by Nina Parker.

A mysterious painter who may not be all he appears and a bored and wealthy beauty are at the center of Amber Brock's hypnotic debut novel, A Fine Imitation. Brock, who teaches English in Atlanta, shares the story behind the book and explains how art shaped the journeys of her characters.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

‘Miss Jane’ Chisolm vs. my great-aunt Mary Ellis ‘Jane’ Clay

Behind the Book by Brad Watson

by Brad Watson

The character Jane Chisolm in my new novel, Miss Jane, was inspired (an insufficient term I don’t really like) by my great-aunt, Mary Ellis “Jane” Clay, born in 1888 on a farm in east-central Mississippi. That is to say, there was the real person, my great-aunt, about whom we knew very little aside from her apparent (but secret, in terms of details) urogenital birth defect that left her incontinent and alone her entire life; and then there was, is, the character Jane Chisolm, about whom I’ve written, trying to imagine what it must have been like to live a life like that of my Aunt Jane. Jane Chisolm, the character in my novel, is born in 1915 and dies—well, that date is not certain. My Aunt Jane died in my nearby hometown of Meridian in 1975 at the age of 87.

I have only one personal memory of ever seeing Aunt Jane. When I was a boy, my mother’s extended family gathered every Sunday afternoon at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the country. One day, a car came up the red dirt road and parked beneath the oak tree near where we children stood. A man got out, went around to the passenger door, and helped out an old, thin, frail-looking woman dressed entirely in black, her long gaunt face obscured by a black lace veil pinned to the front of her little black hat. An uncle trotted over from the house to help, and the old woman was carefully conveyed across the yard to the house, the men’s hands gently gripping her bony elbows and resting against the small of her back. All we children had fallen silent and still as we watched the grave and strange processional.

One of my cousins whispered: “That’s Aunt Jane.”

“Who?” someone else said.

“Granddaddy Spurge’s sister,” another said.

Then we kept quiet, watching. We knew there was something remarkable about this old woman, this frail relic in black. Our parents would say, vaguely, when we asked, that “something was wrong” with Aunt Jane. Though what that might be we had no earthly idea at the time.

Years later, I was going through a box of old photographs and came across a black-and-white snapshot of a pretty girl wearing a dark dress and wide-brimmed hat, looking back over her shoulder at the photographer. Her expression and pose struck me as flirtatious. When I asked my mother who it was, she said it was Aunt Jane. Great-Aunt Jane.

I was surprised, and curious. This picture looked like it could have been taken by a boyfriend or lover.

My mother said that there were community dances back then, and Jane loved to go to them. She was quite popular with the boys.

“How did she manage that?” I said.

My mother didn’t know.

“But nothing ever came of it,” I said. “With a boy or man, I mean.”

“No.”

That’s when I became fascinated with my Aunt Jane and what her life must have been like. What her condition may have or could have been. How she managed it. How she managed being a person who found a way to enjoy the early, flirtatious part of courtship but no doubt had to back away from it at some point and become an “old maid.” Not only an old maid, but an old maid with what was, in that day, considered to be a shameful secret.

I never really stopped being curious about Jane. I never forgot the photograph. Never stopped being deeply curious about the story behind it.

No one knew exactly what was “wrong” with Jane. It wasn’t spoken of among people, even relatives, with any candor. Jane did not discuss it with anyone. My mother didn’t know. Distant relatives in Texas, children of her siblings, didn’t know. Her medical records had been disposed of or destroyed. The rest home where she’d lived out her last days was defunct and I couldn’t find anyone who’d worked there. All I had to go on was the fact that, in her last days, she’d told my mother’s older sister that she had only one opening for the elimination of waste. I had that, and the fact of her lifelong incontinence, and the fact that apparently she was relatively healthy, urogenital “deformity” aside. And nothing else, really.

Add to that the odd disappearance of the photograph that first fascinated me: It disappeared, and my mother could not recall ever having seen it. As if I’d invented it, made it up. I may as well have. Now I had an entire life to invent, make up, after all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Miss Jane.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Look! There’s a man in my book club!

Behind the Book by Ann Hood

by Ann Hood

I joined a book club for the first time in the late 1980s in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Back then, Park Slope was still a new frontier of dilapidated brownstones and streets littered with empty crack vials. Book clubs, too, were a new frontier. I’d never even heard of such a thing the day I saw a sign for one at my local ATM. A book club? Where members read books? To an English major and a full-time writer, that sounded pretty dreamy. I called the number at the bottom of the sign, and a couple weeks later walked into the apartment of Pete and Karen May, a dermatologist and an opera singer who had just moved to the neighborhood and wanted to make friends who loved to read, like they did.

Pete wasn’t the only guy in our book club. There was also Doug, a young copywriter at Scholastic with a burning desire to read the classics. Maybe because none of us knew anything about how these things worked, it never occurred to me that males and book clubs aren’t always simpatico. Somehow—and our process is kind of fuzzy to me now—we took turns selecting books, among them a biography of Montgomery Clift, Doris Lessing’s Diary of a Good Neighbor and If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. Doug had us read Emile Zola; Pete chose John Cheever’s Falconer. It didn’t strike me then, nor does it now, that their selections were particularly male. In fact, our book club of eight, never even discussed gender.

Perhaps this is why, when I formed a fictional book club for my new novel, The Book That Matters Most, it didn’t occur to me to leave men out of it. True, in the almost 30 years since I walked into that book club in Park Slope, I have visited hundreds of book clubs around the country and I can count on three fingers how many times a man was in one of them. And that’s including the husband of the hostess who felt compelled to join in only as a matter of etiquette.

There are some all-male book clubs in which manly books like The Things They Carried or Nobody’s Fool are read. “We do not read so-called chick lit,” Andrew McCullough, a member of the eponymously named Man Book Club, has said. In fact, the club’s website states its criteria as: “No books by women about women (our cardinal rule).” An all-male book club that meets in a Boston bookstore not only chooses manly books to read, but offers single malt whisky and cigars during the discussion.

When I was writing The Book That Matters Most, I asked male friends of mine if they’d ever been in a book club. Most of them answered no, and those who had were in co-ed book clubs rather than gender-exclusive ones. But none of them lasted very long. They didn’t like the books or the discussion or the lack of discussion. And women I spoke to claimed that a male changed the mix too much. “Men have a way of taking over the conversation,” one told me.

Fiction writers have to make a lot of decisions for the sake of plot. I wanted my main character, Ava, to have a romance. And I wanted her to also make a new friend who was male to help her trust men again after her divorce. That meant my fictional book club had to have at least two males in it. In the novel, each member has to choose the book that matters most to them. Although in my personal experience men didn’t choose “manly” novels, my initial instinct was to have one of my male characters choose Atlas Shrugged, a book I admit having no affinity for but that seemed appropriate for a certain type of guy to select. However, the more I wrote, the less my character became that type of guy. Instead, he emerged as a tender man trying to overcome the loss of his wife. By the time his book was going to be discussed, I jettisoned Atlas Shrugged in favor of Slaughter-House Five, a novel that examines grief in an unusual way.

My other male character? Well, he was the love interest and so I gave him The Great Gatsby as the book that mattered most to him. What woman wouldn’t fall for a guy who liked a novel about a man who did everything for love?

Ann Hood is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle and The Red Thread, among others. She has won two Pushcart Prizes and lives with her family in Providence, Rhode Island.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Book That Matters Most.

Author photo by Christina Sebastian.

Author Ann Hood opens up about her first brush with book clubs in a behind the book essay on her new novel, The Book That Matters Most.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

From one unforgiving landscape to another

Behind the Book by Beth Lewis

by Beth Lewis

Beth Lewis drops readers into an unexpected and brutal world with The Wolf Road, the story of a girl who has just discovered that her savior, a man she calls her father, may be a serial killer. Lewis shares a look behind her debut.

When I pull back the curtain and actually think about where The Wolf Road came from, rather than what single moment inspired it, I realise writing it was pure escapism. It was a novel partly born of frustration at city life. There’s too many people, too much concrete and glass and noise, not enough trees and fresh air and wildlife. Elka’s attitude to and love of nature is mine, her mystification at certain peoples’ behaviour is also mine. Whenever I would put pen to paper, or more accurately, fingers to laptop, I would be transported to the forest and mountains, away from my too-small middle-floor London flat. It was wonderful and I hope is something readers can experience too.

When I dig deeper, pull the curtain back further, this frustration diminishes and I realise there are other reasons behind certain aspects of The Wolf Road. I grew up in the countryside. Two fields stood between me and the wild Cornish coast, the sheer cliffs and hidden coves, bristling with tales of smugglers and pirates. The weather bore down on us from all sides, and sometimes the squall lasted all night. It was a visceral, evocative place, and I’d never realised before how much it’d fed into my writing.

In the fields and along the coast stood two Second World War watchtowers. Both abandoned and given up to the elements. One tall and thin, three storeys of red brick with open sides on the top floor. The other squat, made of dark grey stone, walls two-foot thick and further away, on an area of moorland at the lip of a valley. We’d play in them, make them our dens, then flee when we saw the farmer coming. My brother and I would wander around these valleys and scrubland, populated by straggling sheep and too many rabbits, and we’d find dozens of shell casings, unexploded artillery rounds, ammo boxes, even an old, crumbling rifle. They were remnants of another world, a past of violence and gunshots and invading forces that I knew almost nothing about. At 10 years old, I had a vague sense of WWII, but it wasn’t a real event to me. It was what we learned in history class or were forced to hear about from grandparents. I knew it was Big and Bad and it left its mark everywhere, but it was never in the forefront of my mind. At that age, I never needed or wanted detailed and thorough explanations of the cause or its repercussions throughout the country. It didn’t affect me. It was done and dusted years ago. I just lived where a piece of it had happened.

The fact that this huge, world-changing event could happen and, eventually, be largely forgotten about, was fascinating to adult me and perfect story fodder. I figured the people alive generations down the line would not be all that interested in why their world was the way it was, instead, I thought, they’d be concerned with just living their lives. That’s really the origin of the post-apocalyptic element of The Wolf Road and the reason the Damn Stupid, Elka’s term for the decades-ago war that changed the world, is only touched upon. Even with scraps of history all around her, tales handed down from grandparent to parent to child, Elka’s concerns were of the “here, now” not the “back then,” as were mine at her age. She was worried about where her next meal would come from, where she would sleep that night, how she could reach the top of the ridge and there is a beautiful purity in those most simple of motivations.

Beth Lewis was raised in the wilds of Cornwall and split her childhood between books and the beach. She has traveled extensively throughout the world and has had close encounters with black bears, killer whales and great white sharks. She has been, at turns, a bank cashier, a fire performer and a juggler, and she is currently a managing editor at Titan Books in London. The Wolf Road is her first novel.

www.bethlewis.co.uk
Twitter: @bethklewis
Facebook: facebook.com/bethlewisauthor

Author photo credit Andrew Mason.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Slipping into the moccasins of an 18th-century American pioneer

Behind the Book by Alix Hawley

by Alix Hawley

The whole idea behind my novel, All True Not a Lie in It, was a gamble. Once I was hit with the memory of an old National Geographic article about Daniel Boone, I couldn’t stop thinking about him and his story. I was hooked, utterly. But would other people want to read about a long-dead American frontiersman? (And, hang on, would they even know who he was?)

It took a lot of writing and rewriting. And one of the books that influenced me, perhaps surprisingly, was Lolita, whip-smart and shocking. It turns me into a gawper, a gasper—not so much for its horrors as for its own wild gamble. What writer can pull off the tale of an aging, predatory child molester without scattering readers like pigeons at a gunshot?

Nabokov can. His Humbert Humbert is one of literature’s most ghastly and sorry creations, but we find ourselves listening to him, following him across America, even as we recoil from his desires. Loathsome as he is, I will argue for this book every time. So why does Nabokov win? Why do we go along with Humbert into the dark?

We have Nabokov’s electric prose, of course. But we also have the character’s own words, his own voice: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

It’s the key. The gamble only succeeds because of it. If we’d had, instead, “His sin, his soul,” the book’s pull would have frayed like old rope. Well, I suppose I have a gambler’s heart, too. I rolled the dice and stepped into the first-person shoes, which I’d always found pinching. I fought it, writing draft after draft in other voices, until I caved. Fine. I, Daniel Boone. Double or nothing.

I walked around until the shoes fit. His voice is not my voice. He’s a rough, charismatic leader and a famous hunter; I’m female, fairly quiet, Canadian and vegetarian. But first person was the only voice for this book. Once I could hear it in my mind, I couldn’t shake it. I hope readers will follow me into Daniel’s shoes—and head—as he moves through the wilderness in search of perfection, a quest that leads to his daughter’s kidnap and his son’s murder. The aftermath is denial, guilt and hard suffering.

My story elides chronology in places, making guesses and filling in gaps for the sake of narrative. But I didn’t need an unreliable narrator—the story had plenty going on already—so I looked at complicated speakers, like Humbert, and how they tell us their stories.

And we want books to create a reality. To reanimate the 1700s, I had to plough up forests of detail and try to use what Daniel and his family would have known in a natural way: the Quaker meeting house of his childhood; the Appalachian wilderness he explored; the homes he and his wife, Rebecca, built; and the Delaware, Shawnee, Cherokee and Black lives that intersected with his. I read several biographies, including Lyman Draper’s The Life of Daniel Boone, a 19th-century rescue of Boone oral history and manuscripts, trying to expose the flavor of 18th-century life.

But the books that gave me what I most needed were fiction, Peter Carey’s and Hilary Mantel’s. Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang snares Ned Kelly’s wild mind and feeds it to us in pieces, letters and articles. Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, while in third person, give a similar feeling of an access-all-areas pass to someone’s brain. What works in these books is the uncanny sense that we’re listening to the characters while at the same time experiencing what it’s like to be them. We’re inside and outside. For me, this was the trick: We had to be able to see Daniel from both sides at once.

My Daniel Boone is talking to his dead, trying to turn himself inside out and see what he has done, and who he has become. This book is about what is lost, and what remains.

Canadian writer Alix Hawley studied English at Oxford University and now teaches at Okanagan College in British Columbia. All True Not a Lie in It, her debut novel, was longlisted for the Giller Prize. She is currently working on a sequel.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Storied NYC building inspires a thoughtful debut

Behind the Book by Fiona Davis

by Fiona Davis

I have always been intrigued by the history of buildings, whether I’m wandering around Blenheim Palace in England or the Tenement Museum in New York City. During an apartment hunt a couple of years ago, I was brought to the Barbizon 63 condo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, formerly known as the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

Built in 1927, the Barbizon stands out among its neighbors, a 23-story tower of salmon-colored brick studded with Gothic and Moorish architectural elements. It housed thousands of women, including several icons-in-the-making like Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Joan Didion, Eudora Welty and Sylvia Plath.

Potential guests were required to provide three character references and, once registered, obey the hotel’s strict dress codes and rules. The contradiction between establishing one’s independence while being treated like a child seemed to capture the paradoxical message of that time period: You can pretend to be a career girl for now, as long as you settle down and have a family once Prince Charming puts a ring on it.

I’d seen photos of the hotel before the renovation, and the change was striking. What had been a virtual beehive of small rooms off dark hallways was transformed in 2005 into sleek apartments with rosewood floors and marble bathrooms. When the broker mentioned that a dozen or so longtime residents had been “grandfathered” into the building after it went condo and were sequestered in rental units on the fourth floor, I couldn’t help but wonder how they viewed the changes that had been made to the building—and the equally dramatic transformation of their city—after so many decades in residence. What a perfect setup for a novel.

As a journalist, I love crafting a story from research and interviews, and when I decided to write the book I approached the project in the same way. In addition to reading everything I could get my hands on about the hotel and that era, I interviewed several women who lived in the Barbizon during the 1950s and ’60s. I looked through women’s magazines from the early ’50s and scoured old issues of the New York Times to get a sense of what day-to-day life was like back then.

The more I researched, the more pressing it became to provide a glimpse into the way women were expected to live and behave in the early ’50s, and show just how hard it was to break out of that mold. For example, one women’s magazine from 1951 suggested that women stick to part-time jobs so as not to interfere with the “satisfactions of housekeeping.” Another dictated that a woman dining out with a man should never speak directly to the waiter. Talk about being voiceless!

Since the conversation regarding women’s roles continues even today, I included parallel timelines in the book: Darby shows up at the Barbizon Hotel in 1952, eager to do well at secretarial school and never marry. Rose, who moves into the condo of today, finds herself in a prickly situation with her boyfriend. In The Dollhouse, two very different generations of women challenge each other to stand up and be counted.

The book is definitely a love letter to New York City, my home for the past 30 years, and the city played a large role in my research. A visit to Lior Lev Sercarz’s legendary spice shop in midtown, La Boîte, gave me the idea for developing one character’s passion for blending spices. When I decided to include a downtown jazz club as a setting, I signed up for a class on bebop at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University, taught by the brilliant trombonist Vincent Gardner. It seemed that inspiration was everywhere.

The Barbizon Hotel holds a special place in the hearts of the women who stayed there, as a refuge where they launched successful careers and declared their independence. Every time I pass by, I look up and marvel at the beauty of the building and feel the same thrill I did a few years ago, when I first realized there was a novel within its walls waiting to be told. The cycle of inspiration continues.

Fiona Davis worked as a stage actress for nearly 10 years before becoming a freelance journalist and writer. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she now lives in New York City. The Dollhouse, her first novel, is the story of a 21st-century journalist who uncovers a 50-year-old mystery in the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Dollhouse.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Telling her story, not his

Behind the Book by Marie Benedict

by Marie Benedict

I almost didn’t write The Other Einstein. The little-known story of Mileva Marić, who made a heroic ascent from the misogynistic backwater of 19th-century Eastern Europe to become one of Europe’s first female physicists, kept calling to me, begging to be written. But the tale necessarily involved a depiction of Albert Einstein, the fellow Zurich Polytechnic student who wooed Mileva for years before their marriage in 1903—and who wanted to face that hurdle?

The idea of writing about the so-called secular saint, who was chosen as the Person of the Century by Time magazine and galvanized not only science but also the cultural and political landscape with his genius, daunted me. Obviously. Not to mention that people hold many preconceptions about Albert Einstein, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to challenge them with The Other Einstein.

But then I realized that The Other Einstein wasn’t his story. It was her story. One that had been buried by time and prejudice and misconceptions. And I realized that I was honor-bound to excavate Mileva from the detritus of the past and share her with the world.

So I faced my discomfort with writing about one of the world’s most famous figures head-on. I dove deep into the world of 19th-century science. I tried to immerse myself in whatever details I could cobble together about Mileva, a surprisingly challenging task given that she had been married to Einstein for 16 years. While countless tomes exist about him and his work, Mileva doesn’t figure prominently in many of them.

Then I discovered Mileva’s letters. Written to family members, friends and, of course, Albert, those letters became my window into her life. They enabled me to imagine myself as the young Mileva. So tiny, her family joked that they needed to put stones in her pockets to keep the wind from blowing her away. So startlingly brilliant that her father fought against the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s laws preventing females from attending high school to secure her place in an all-male upper school. So different from all the other girls that she received the brunt of their youthful mockery. And so physically deformed in her hips that she believed no one would ever want to marry her.

In becoming Mileva, I began to see Albert Einstein through her eyes. He became a roguish, charismatic college student. He changed into a youthful, open-minded scientific partner and collaborator. He shined as a violinist who accompanied her singing with the gusto of a fellow musician. He transformed from a friend into a determined and ardent lover, who morphed again into a husband and father, bringing both tremendous joy and heartbreaking disappointment.

No longer the wild-haired scientific icon, Albert Einstein became a person. Marvelous yet flawed, as all people are. This metamorphosis, achieved only after long months of research, freed me from my fears. And I was able to write about Albert as Mileva experienced him.

But no matter how comfortable I became writing about Albert Einstein, The Other Einstein never became his story. It always remained hers.

Marie Benedict practiced law for more than 10 years before launching a career as a novelist. The Other Einstein is the first in a planned series telling the stories of women lost to history. Benedict, who has also published three thrillers as Heather Terrell, lives in Pittsburgh with her family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Other Einstein.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

A dark and twisted thriller drawn from 15 years of academic memories

Behind the Book by Joanne Harris

by Joanne Harris

My grandfather was a teacher. My parents were both teachers. Their friends were all teachers, which meant that at home, their conversation revolved almost exclusively around teaching. For me, as a child, that meant a constant stream of school stories, drama and intrigue. It also meant that for many years it was more or less accepted that I, too, was destined for the teaching profession.

And when, age 9, I timidly dared to challenge this decree and suggest that I might try writing books instead, my mother showed me a room in our house, in which stood a wall of books—all by 19th-century French novelists, all having died in poverty, of syphilis and TB—after which she said to me: “And that’s why you need a Proper Job!”

And so I became a teacher. I liked it—I was good at it—and yet I kept on writing. During that time—over 15 years, most of which I spent teaching in a boys’ grammar school in Yorkshire—three of my books were published, though it was only after the unexpected success of Chocolat that I was able to give up teaching for good. And my mother’s advice served me well, for during those 15 years I was able to collect enough wild tales, dreadful scandals, quirky characters and everyday moments of drama to fill a hundred books.

I realized during those 15 years that a school is a factory of stories. Small communities so often are, and schools, with their volatile chemistry, cut off from the rest of the world by arcane rules and rituals, are a kind of microcosm, a mirror for the outside world. And it is from the events and experiences of those 15 years that I built my books—especially Gentlemen and Players, and my new book, Different Class: both set in St. Oswald’s, a fictional boys’ grammar school in the north of England.

Knowing this, it must be tempting for readers to assume that the events depicted in my books are based on some kind of real-life event. The fact is that real life is nowhere near as plausible as fiction, at least as far as schools are concerned, and if I were to base my books on actual, real-life incidents encountered during my teaching career, the critics would scoff and refuse to believe that any such thing had happened. Having said that, schools are filled with stories; they’re communities in which tragedy and farce are only ever the turn of a page away. My teaching career saw plenty of both, and it is inevitable that certain stories, incidents and characters remained in my writer’s subconscious.

The writing process is very much tied up with memory. But St. Oswald’s is a construct, rather than a portrayal of any single place. It contains elements of schools (and universities) at which I was a pupil, as well as the schools in which I taught. Some minor incidents are based on things that really happened. The main plots, however, are mostly made-up or loosely based on current events.

As I was writing Different Class, I was also watching the unfolding of the Operation Yewtree police investigation, the results of which rocked [the U.K.] and implicated a number of TV and radio celebrities in a series of accusations of historical sex abuse. This scandal, with all its complexities, seemed to have disturbing parallels with the book I was writing. Again, I didn’t plan it this way. Ideas are like dandelion seeds, landing where the wind takes them. That year, the wind was full of tales of past and present abuses. Some of them must have made their way into the book I was writing: a story about the past, about memory and perception, about loyalty and childhood and guilt and of the dark side of friendship.

I find my “dark” books at the same time curiously satisfying to write, and emotionally and intellectually draining. But I believe that stories should contain equal proportions of light and shade in order to be meaningful. The monsters of our daily lives are not the demons and werewolves of fairy tale, but sexual predators, murderers and those who hide their malevolence behind an everyday façade. Stories enable us to face our monsters, and sometimes, learn to fight back. Facing them isn’t always easy, but maybe that’s the point.

During her 15 years as a teacher, Joanne Harris published three novels, including the bestselling Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Since then, she has written 15 more novels, two collections of short stories and three cookbooks. Her new novel of psychological suspense, Different Class, is set at an antiquated, failing prep school. A new headmaster arrives, bringing changes that seem more corporate than academic. While curmudgeonly Latin teacher Roy Straitley does his best to resist these transformations, a shadow from his past begins to stir—a boy who haunts his dreams, a sociopathic young outcast from 20 years before. Harris lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, where she writes in a shed in her garden.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of Different Class.

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Suspense

Fiction Suspense

The harrowing world of intelligence

Behind the Book by T.L. Williams

by T.L. Williams

It was July 16, 1991, and 17 November, the Greek terrorist group, had just attempted to assassinate the Turkish charge-d’affaires in a car bomb attack. I had driven through the very intersection where that attack took place with my family, 10 minutes before the fateful event took place. Despite varying our routes and times of departure every day on our way to work, we could easily have been the victims that morning.

“In Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars . . . I was able to draw upon 30 years of experience as an Operations Officer in the CIA to portray true-to-life operational scenarios.”

Years before, in China, I had faced a very different sort of menace. The Chinese security services viewed foreigners, particularly American diplomats, with a great deal of mistrust, even animus. Local citizens, the Public Security Bureau, and the counterintelligence professionals surveilled their targets constantly, monitoring their every move. From the moment we left our residences until we returned home in the evening, American diplomats were under some form of surveillance. Even the housekeepers we hired to clean our apartments were required to report on their employers’ contacts and patterns of activity. It genuinely felt as though we were living in a goldfish bowl.

In the late 1990s, I was part of the NATO SFOR Stabilization Force in Bosnia Herzegovina. There were snipers in the hills between the embassy and my location at Camp Ilidza, SFOR Headquarters. There were mines and other unexploded ordinance strewn all over the country. A misstep here, or a wrong turn there, could spell disaster. But I had a job to do and I accepted those risks as part of my everyday life as a CIA officer deployed to a war zone.

These are just a few examples of the types of threats CIA personnel all over the world face day-in and day-out as we go about fulfilling our respective missions. We accept these risks because we view ourselves as the first line of defense against America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. We have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, and we take that pledge seriously.

In Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars, as well as my two previous novels, Cooper’s Revenge and Unit 400: The Assassins, I was able to draw upon 30 years of experience as an Operations Officer in the CIA to portray true-to-life operational scenarios imbued with the kind of rich contextual detail that only comes from actually having lived and worked in the cultures and geographic locales that I portray. It’s the difference between gazing down on a scene from 10,000 feet and being plunked down in the thick of it. One’s senses are sharpened from participating in the real life experience on the ground, and with any luck, the author is able to transport the reader to that same place with a measure of authenticity that enriches the reading experience like no other. As John le Carré famously said, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

The methods of espionage, known in the business as tradecraft, have evolved over the years, with the most modern technological advances typically cloaked in secrecy decades after they are added to the ‘toolbox,’ unless they are somehow compromised and are thrust into the public domain. But the age old techniques of running surveillance detection routes and conducting recruitment operations remain very much the same as when they first appeared in the early days of spy literature. These methods have been bountifully described in the espionage literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. This might lead one to conclude that anyone could write a convincing scene describing the lead-up to a clandestine meeting in a high-threat counterintelligence environment, or the planning that is involved in conducting a recruitment operation against a high priority foreign target.

Would you trust your mechanic to do your heart surgery? I’m sure that anyone could read Gray’s Anatomy and come away with some sense of where to start, but you would not want that person wielding the scalpel. There is a reason why people gravitate to experts in all things. It is because we intuitively understand that they are the best at what they do. That’s no less true when you are looking for an authentic voice in the books you read.

T.L. Williams ran clandestine human intelligence (HUMINT) operations in Asia and Europe for over 30 years as a CIA operative. Now retired from active duty and living in Florida, he has written three espionage thrillers, including his latest release, Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars. The CIA was so concerned about Williams’ extensive knowledge of sensitive national security information that it prevented the book’s publication for months while vetting the manuscript for classified information.

A CIA operative for more than 30 years, T.L. Williams uses his extensive experience in the intelligence community in his latest spy thriller, Zero Day.

Fiction

Fiction

Honoring a library legacy

Behind the Book by Romalyn Tilghman

by Romalyn Tilghman

National Library Week is April 9 – 15, 2017, and this year’s theme is “Libraries Transform.” At BookPage, we celebrate the contributions of libraries and librarians every day, but this is an extra-special time of year to honor those who promote literacy all across the nation. Romalyn Tilghman’s debut novel, To the Stars Through Difficulties, is the story of three women who create a library and arts center after a tornado devastates a small Kansas town, inspired by the real-life frontier women who helped stock the 59 libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie in early 20th-century Kansas. Tilghman’s novel opens with a quote from Carnegie that says it all: “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”

My father insists my first trip to the library happened a few minutes after I learned to talk. Exaggeration, perhaps, but I do remember library visits before I learned to read. The Peevish Penguin was the family favorite, and we renewed it repeatedly. Later, I lived in the Nancy Drew section of the library, until I graduated to biographies of Clara Barton, Jane Addams and Amelia Earhart. The library was a Carnegie library, and my elementary school was named after the first librarian who served there. In other words, I grew up in and around and through that Carnegie library in Manhattan, Kansas, finding inspiration in the stories I found there.

Manhattan was a big city compared to most of the 59 Kansas communities that received grants from Andrew Carnegie at the beginning of the 20th century. Right there, across the Plains, before the arrival of indoor plumbing or the Model T, a literary movement took hold.

Early in my career, I visited many of those communities, not for the libraries but for the burgeoning arts councils that were forming across the state. I was struck by the dedication of volunteers who were determined to bring cultural opportunities to their communities, some who were turning their Carnegie libraries into arts centers. Places like Dodge City, Goodland and Lawrence. Determined and innovative in their efforts, they hounded the local banker for contributions and asked local farmers to dedicate “a bushel for the arts.” It didn’t take long to see similarities between these (mostly women) volunteers and their foremothers who’d managed to get Carnegie libraries in their towns.

As I traveled, I stashed pieces of information and anecdotes from those Carnegie library arts centers. When it came to write, I decided on fiction. I invented Angelina, a Ph.D. candidate in library science who sleuths the historical library minutes. I invented Traci, a hip and feisty artist-in-residence who brings the arts center to life in a contemporary setting. And I invented Gayle, a tornado survivor, who demonstrates what is most important when rebuilding a community from scratch. With the help of a journal from 1910, these three characters convey the strength and wisdom and determination of women who change their communities, as they are changed themselves.

Now we carry the world’s knowledge in our pockets and access culture on our laptops, but these buildings still burst with energy. As I popped into libraries to do research, I was inspired by people looking for jobs, checking newspapers, researching genealogy, reading to kids, grabbing the latest bestseller. Toddlers who skipped in and seniors who struggled with canes. The same diversity is true of arts centers where kindergartners dance to hip hop in one room as a barbershop quartet sings show tunes in another, or teenagers make graphic murals as quilters piece paisleys. These cultural centers, both literary and artistic, thrive with life, inspire those who enter, give us a window to the greater world and a mirror on ourselves.

The dedication page of my novel, To the Stars Through Difficulties, has a single vintage photo: the Carnegie library in Manhattan, Kansas. To that library, I owe so much.

Author photo credit Rachel Warecki.

National Library Week is April 9 - 15, 2017, and this year’s theme is “Libraries Transform.” At BookPage, we celebrate the contributions of libraries and librarians every day, but this is an extra-special time of year to honor those who promote literacy all across the nation. Romalyn Tilghman’s debut novel, To the Stars Through Difficulties, is the story of three women who create a library and arts center after a tornado devastates a small Kansas town, inspired by the real-life frontier women who helped stock the 59 libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie in early 20th-century Kansas. Tilghman’s novel opens with a quote from Carnegie that says it all: “A library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert.”

Fiction, Popular Fiction

Fiction Popular Fiction

A gem of a novel from ‘Arthur Pepper’ author

Behind the Book by Phaedra Patrick

by Phaedra Patrick

Phaedra Patrick follows her debut novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper (an Indie Next selection that was published in over 20 languages worldwide), with the whimsical, poignant tale of a down-on-his-luck jeweler in Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone.

On a shelf in her pantry my mum keeps a round tin box full of beads, gemstones, buttons and buckles that she’s found or collected over the years. I’ve always been a fan of anything small, shiny or sparkly, and as a child, I spent many happy hours sifting through the box. I enjoyed examining and playing with the little bits and pieces, as did my son when he was a toddler. I suppose being a writer is a little like having a tin box in your head, where you store all your snippets of ideas to search through, and pick out, to write a novel.

When I got engaged to my now-husband, I knew that I wasn’t a diamond-ring wearer. The clear brilliant stone just isn’t me. Instead I wanted something different and visited a local jewelry shop where I found a wide silver band with a leaf design, set with a small round green peridot. I’ve worn it for 20 years and still love it. Peridot is my birthstone, for August. However, when I was younger, I felt rather envious that other months were represented by (what I thought were) more glamorous gemstones—ruby for July, or emerald for May. A peridot seemed kind of anonymous and pale in comparison.

When I initially thought of the idea for my second novel, Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone, I started to read more about gemstones. I learned that, even in ancient times, gems have different properties associated with them. Peridots are supposed to help you to let go of the past, lessen stress and anxiety, and enhance harmony in marriage—perfect attributes for an engagement ring! However, if you’re a dedicated diamond wearer, then you’ll be pleased to know that they signify honour and pure intention.

Through my research, I discovered that the ancient Greeks believed that coral was formed from the severed head of Medusa, and that jade changes color, often to shades of brown, when buried with the dead. Jasper was one of the most popular stones for making seals and amulets, and Mark Antony was reputed to own a red jasper seal ring with which he stamped his letters to Cleopatra.

And through these meaning of gemstones, my premise for my book developed and emerged. Indeed, each chapter starts with the name of a gem and its properties.

The book finds 40-something jeweler Benedict Stone stuck in a rut. In the small village of Noon Sun in England, his jewelry business is failing. He and his wife, Estelle, can’t have children, and she has moved out of their home. When Benedict’s American teenage niece, Gemma, crashes into his life, together they discover an old journal about gemstones in the attic. Gemma challenges Benedict to win Estelle back, and Benedict also begins to incorporate gemstones into his jewelry, which has a very surprising effect on the villagers of Noon Sun.

Throughout the book, we’re never quite sure whether it’s the gemstones or Gemma who helps to make Benedict’s life sparkle again, so I’ll leave that up to readers to decide. The button box still lives in my mum’s pantry. Sadly, my son has outgrown playing with it now. But if anyone in my family ever needs a spare button for a coat, or a bead for a necklace, we know exactly where to look.

Author photo credit Sam Ralph.

Phaedra Patrick follows her debut novel, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper (which was published in over 20 languages worldwide and was an Indie Next selection), with the whimsical, poignant tale of a down-on-his-luck jeweler in Rise and Shine, Benedict Stone.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Rethinking the mystery of Agatha’s disappearance

Behind the Book by Andrew Wilson

by Andrew Wilson

In 1977, I was 10 years old and on holiday with my parents in an uninspiring (and no doubt rain-soaked) coastal town in North Wales. We were walking down the high street when we passed a bookshop. Something in the window caught my eye and I stopped, refusing to move a step further.

As I stared at the book on display—the posthumously published autobiography of Agatha Christie—I became possessed by a sense of longing that took me by surprise.

At that point I don’t think I had read any Christie, but my grandmother was an avid fan, and as a precocious aspiring writer, I wanted to know all about the Queen of Crime, particularly the secrets of her success (she is still the bestselling novelist of all time).

My parents dragged me away from the shop, refusing to purchase the book for me—they thought it was too “grown-up”—yet my interest in Christie only increased, and I soon devoured book after book. At 12, when my English teacher asked his students to write an extended piece of fiction, I handed in a 46-page story entitled “The German Mystery,” which I still have. From its opening lines it’s not hard to spot the source of my inspiration:

“Dr Bessner’s frail hand reached inside the ebony box and took out a white cyanide pill. He placed it in his dry mouth and swallowed with a loud gulp. There was a small whimper, his body jumped and fell back in his black leather car seat, gave a last gasp and he was dead.”

Throughout my teenage and adult life I kept returning to Christie’s books, especially when I was writing the biographies of dark subjects such as Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath and Alexander McQueen. Yet it wasn’t until I moved to Devon, the location of Christie’s Greenway estate (now operated by the National Trust and open to the public), that I started to think about writing a novel about her.

I had always been fascinated by the 11 days in December 1926 when Christie disappeared—she abandoned her car in Surrey, leaving behind her fur coat and driving license. The police suspected that she might have been murdered by her husband, Archie, who wanted to leave her for his mistress, Nancy Neele. The search for clues involved 15,000 volunteers, airplanes and sniffer dogs, and the sensational story even made the front page of the New York Times. Christie—who was discovered at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, after checking in under the name Mrs. Neele—always maintained that she had been suffering from amnesia, but there were many elements of that claim that simply did not add up. My imagination started to work, and using police and newspaper reports as a framework, I came up with a crime story, an alternative history about why she disappeared.

We meet Christie when she is at her most vulnerable: Her mother had died earlier in 1926, her writing is not going well, and she has just discovered that her husband wants to leave her for another woman. In London to visit her literary agent, she is waiting for a tube when she feels someone push her into the path of the oncoming train. At the last minute, a doctor pulls her back to safety but the medic, Dr. Patrick Kurs, turns out to be a blackmailer with a sadistic streak.

At the end of the first chapter Kurs outlines his sinister plan: He wants Christie to kill on his behalf. “You, Mrs. Christie, are going to commit a murder,” he says to her. “But before then, you are going to disappear.” We know she disappeared in real life, but the question my novel poses is this: Christie wrote about murder, but would she—could she—ever commit one herself?

Andrew Wilson is a British journalist and the author of four biographies (including the award-winning Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith), several other nonfiction books and a novel, The Lying Tongue. A Talent for Murder, Wilson’s fictional take on the real-life 1926 disappearance of Agatha Christie, will be released in the U.S. on July 11.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Andrew Wilson, a devoted and lifelong fan of Agatha Christie, takes us through the process of writing his mystery about the famed author's real-life disappearance.