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FictionInspirational FictionHistorical Fiction

Inspirational novels for spring 2025

Set during World War II, Ace, Marvel, Spy and Midnight on the Scottish Shore chronicle the stories of two women whose lives are testaments to the power of courage during times of upheaval.
Set during World War II, Ace, Marvel, Spy and Midnight on the Scottish Shore chronicle the stories of two women whose lives are testaments to the power of courage during times of upheaval.
FictionPoetry

Scorched Earth

Tiana Clark’s searching second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.
Tiana Clark’s searching second poetry collection, Scorched Earth, embraces “too muchness” as a pure expression of the politicized body, history and art.
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FictionHistorical Fiction

Telling her story, not his

Behind the Book 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.

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?
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

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

Behind the Book 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.

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.
FictionSuspense

The harrowing world of intelligence

Behind the Book 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

Honoring a library legacy

Behind the Book 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.”

FictionPopular Fiction

A gem of a novel from ‘Arthur Pepper’ author

Behind the Book 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.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

Rethinking the mystery of Agatha’s disappearance

Behind the Book 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.
FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Backtracking to a debut

Behind the Book by Sally Rooney

Where do your ideas come from? It’s a rather boring, frequently asked question of writers. But what if a debut author actually tries to track down where their book first began to sprout? Sally Rooney attempts to find the original seed of Conversations with Friends.

I don’t remember how I came by the idea for my book. Digital evidence suggests it happened on October 27, 2014: the date I created a Pages file titled “Melissa,” a short story idea that would later develop into my debut novel, Conversations with Friends. The basic premise of the book has survived intact since that early draft: Two college students, Frances the narrator and Bobbi her ex-girlfriend, become entangled in the lives of a charismatic married couple, Melissa and Nick. Did something happen on October 27 to trigger the idea in my mind? Something I read, watched or noticed?

Without the aid of the internet, I would remember almost nothing specific about that month, never mind that day. This would probably unsettle me—this sense of having no record of my own life, of allowing my days and years to slip away from me forgotten—if it were not for the vast, permanent internet, acting as a kind of external hard drive to my own consciousness. A few quick searches through my Gmail account produce considerable amounts of information about October 27, 2014, and the days and weeks preceding it: the assigned reading on my Master’s program, the friends I was most frequently in touch with, reminders from my counseling service not to miss an appointment. A strange, disjointed portrait of someone I no longer fully recognize.

The only emails I received on the day in question were newsletters. One of them, from which I’ve since unsubscribed, consisted that day of the famous packing list from Joan Didion’s The White Album—a list of items Didion drew up and taped inside her closet door, allowing her to pack quickly for her frequent travel as a journalist. The list is iconically, almost exaggeratedly glamorous, including items like “bourbon” and “mohair throw” but neglecting, for example, clean underwear. Did some of this aesthetic performance, and my own ambivalent response to it, sneak its way into the opening pages of Conversations with Friends, in which Frances coldly notices Melissa’s “hairbrush” and “open tube of lipstick” in the hallway of her home?

More strangely, I discover an email sent to the editor of Stonecutter, a magazine in New York, on October 25—two days before I began work on the novel. In it, I discuss the idea of writing a critical essay about monogamy. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, I was about to begin writing a book in which the exploration of monogamy plays a significant role. Do I remember writing that email? Sure, kind of—but I could have sworn, and would have, that I had written it much later, when the book was already well underway, or even finished.

To discover that the thematic concerns of the novel were on my mind before I started writing it—that I even considered writing a critical essay on the same subject instead—is genuinely weird for me. I believed, and have even stated in interviews, that those concerns developed organically from the characters. That made sense to me as an account of my book’s development, and even my own development as a writer: Characters and situations come first, intellectual concerns much later. Now, thanks to the search functionality of my email account, I’m forced to admit I may not really understand much about my writing process at all.

 

Author photo credit Jonny L Davies.

Where do your ideas come from? It’s a rather boring, frequently asked question of writers. But what if a debut author actually tries to track down where their book first began to sprout? Sally Rooney attempts to find the original seed of Conversations with Friends.

FictionLiterary FictionDebut Fiction

Remnants of a mother-daughter battle

Behind the Book by Zinzi Clemmons

I started writing when I was in college. I had plans to become a doctor, which obviously made my parents very happy. My mother was born in South Africa, and my father’s mother was from Trinidad, and he grew up in the heavily West Indian neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens. Both were strict disciplinarians. Both had nice families but modest childhoods and, like so many immigrant families in this country, believed in hard work and sacrifice as much as they did in God.

They were devastated when, in my second year of college, I realized that no matter how proud medicine made my parents, studying it made me profoundly unhappy. So I signed up for a creative writing class on a whim and began my journey as a writer.

There was never much of a question that I would write about my mother. She was a larger-than-life figure, at turns aggressive, funny and generous. Strong-willed and acid-tongued, she spoke her mind as a matter of principle, and even though she had a tendency to offend, she was incredibly well liked. Her brash, contradictory personality was the source of constant wonder for me as a child. Our fights were legendary, ranging in topic from the mundane to the serious. I didn’t have to do much inventing when I wrote the mother character in my novel. With my own mother as inspiration, the character wrote itself. Nevertheless, What We Lose is a novel of ideas, primarily about how larger forces like race, nationality and gender shape our lives consciously and unconsciously.

However, my mother’s influence and likeness appeared often in my early work. For example, my hair was a constant flashpoint of tension in our relationship. I grew up in the ’90s, and the natural hair renaissance that would take place around the mid-2000s was still a long way off. It was still the norm for black women to straighten their hair with harsh chemicals or scalding-hot irons, both of which usually left your scalp covered in burns, not to mention the permanent damage done to the hair itself. As a tomboy and an A-student, I could see little use for perfectly coiffed hair and would avoid my mother’s straightening sessions and hair appointments like the plague. Of course, this only made her angrier.

Stories about hair have made their way into several of my short stories and my novel. I use these episodes as a way of discussing intergenerational conflict—how race impacts our conceptions of beauty, colorism and gender. Similar arguments arose around my clothes, grades and career choices. They mostly had the same result: My mother would double down on her objections, and I would become increasingly alienated from both her and the rest of my family. My father, an immensely agreeable man, was forced to play mediator during holidays when I would visit home. These visits would always be marked by at least one fight that, if we were lucky, wouldn’t balloon beyond my visit. But often, it did.

Our relationship eased, as tends to happen, when my mother became gravely ill. About six months before she died at 55, mere days after I finished my MFA program at Columbia University, I moved back into my parents’ Philadelphia house to help care for her. This decision in itself was shaped by the gender norms inherent in both Caribbean and South African culture. It is the daughter’s job to take care of the parents. Even though I volunteered, my brother stayed in New Mexico, where he had relocated for work. I missed my brother and felt incredibly alone, and I resented my parents for not placing the same responsibilities on him that they did on me. These gendered cultural expectations—as well as the experience of living in hospitals, caring for her nearly around the clock, my sadness at her impending death—all later became part of What We Lose.

I wrote most of What We Lose after my mother’s death, and in so doing, I was finally able to gain a higher understanding of who she was. By delving into her history, both in her home country of South Africa and in the U.S., I began to realize that much of her behavior in my childhood had sprung out of fear: fear that she wouldn’t be able to succeed in a new country, fear that her children wouldn’t make it. Fear of what harm might befall me as a young, rebellious black woman, and the ever-present fear of raising black children in the United States.

In addition to providing some closure, the stories of our conflicts illustrated how systemic issues play out in our everyday lives. Our fights about my hair were also about the expectations placed on young black women, and how the failure to live up to those expectations would reflect on my mother. My appearance, my friends and my career were all constantly judged by our mostly white community. Growing up and leaving my hometown would only provide bigger dangers, when these choices could impact my ability to find a job, a family and in certain cases (usually involving law enforcement) whether I lived or died. By investigating my relationship with my mother—the years we spent at odds and our short armistice at the end of her life—I ultimately realized how these larger forces shaped my life as well, and how deeply I’d internalized them. To me, this is the most important part of What We Lose, the point from which all of the book’s relationships and drama emanates. The same was always true of my life, long before I even recognized it.

 

Zinzi Clemmons is the co-founder of Apogee Journal and a contributing editor to Literary Hub. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, where she teaches at The Colburn Conservatory and Occidental College. What We Lose, her debut novel, is a poignant exploration of womanhood and identity.

Author photo credit Nina Subin.

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

Zinzi Clemmons explores how her own relationship with her mother inspired her superb debut novel, What We Lose.

Fiction

Exploring a historical what-if

Behind the Book by Terry Jastrow

America wages too many unnecessary and perhaps illegal wars—for example, the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Although it would be foolish to say all wars are unnecessary, if leaders of superpowers are allowed to wage unnecessary wars with impunity, then humanity is destined to be plagued by such wars. I felt strongly that someone had to do something about it. Then I thought, how about me?

I spent three and a half years researching and writing The Trial of Prisoner 043 because I believe it is important for the future of humankind. The more sophisticated and powerful weaponry becomes, the more destructive war will be. The concept of George W. Bush being tried in a globally recognized legal forum to determine if he waged an illegal war enables us to critically consider both sides of an issue that has had ripple effects across human history.

In The Trial of Prisoner 043, I advocate equally for both the prosecution and the defense. To do less would have defeated the purpose of the book. Readers are given all the information necessary to come to their own conclusions. I set out to tell the story in a balanced way so readers could determine for themselves who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist, depending on their point of view, which may or may not shift during their reading of the book.

I have no personal animosity for or vendetta against George W. Bush. In fact, I voted for him when he ran for president the first time. And on a social level, I like him. When we were boys living in Midland, Texas, George and I played Little League baseball against each other. When I was a student at the University of Houston and he was a young oilman in Houston, we saw each other socially. And when he was elected governor of Texas, he invited my wife and me to visit him in the governor’s office. But governance is not a popularity contest.

The plain and simple truth is, there was never legitimate justification for George W. Bush’s war. It should never have been fought. The damage and destruction to human lives and property, incarceration of people without due process of law, and prisoner abuse all constitute war crimes. The Iraq War would never have happened if George Bush didn’t cause it to happen, and he bears the legal responsibility for the death and damage resulting from his war.

Not until leaders of superpowers understand that their actions are subject to scrutiny and perhaps trial at the International Criminal Court will they think longer and harder about fighting wars.

Why would a television sports producer/director be compelled to write a novel? Because I love storytelling. My mentor at ABC Sports was the legendary producer Roone Arledge, who wrote, in collaboration with Jim McKay, the iconic opening to ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”: “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition.” In every sports telecast, our principal goal was to focus on and celebrate the human drama—and to tell a great story.

Some may ask if my novel can make a difference. I hope and believe it will. The voices of artists are the most powerful in advocating for the protection and preservation of human rights, dignity, and peace. It seems evident that governments, militaries, and the press will not oppose unnecessary wars, as each profits greatly from war. Only the impassioned voices of fair-minded people around the world can oppose war and promote the preservation of the common good. The concept of peace, not war, needs to be constantly communicated, and no group can communicate more effectively than artists.

As Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote in 1839, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

 

Terry Jastrow is a playwright, screenwriter and producer/director of some of the biggest sporting events in the world, including Super Bowl XIX, six Olympic Games and 60 major golf championships. He also wrote the stage play The Trial of Jane Fonda, performed in 2016 in London and nominated for Best New Play (Off West End). His new novel, The Trial of Prisoner 043, is a work of speculative fiction that explores what might happen if George W. Bush stood trial in the Hague for war crimes.

Sports producer Terry Jastrow imagines what might happen if George W. Bush went on trial for war crimes.
FictionDebut Fiction

Who was Bonnie before Clyde?

Behind the Book by Jenni L. Walsh

Who knew that the infamous crime figure Bonnie Parker was once a straight A student who liked to sing at church? 

At some point during my adolescent years, I caught the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde on TV. Nearly 20 years later, while brainstorming an idea for a novel inspired by an iconic figure, their names popped into my mind. Interestingly enough, I couldn’t recall too much from the film, or about Bonnie and Clyde for that matter, except that the duo were fiercely loyal to one another. Their story intrigued me, especially what made these partners tick. I was pleasantly surprised to find that their story wasn’t one yet told in a novel, and I dove into research. I was also pleasantly surprised by their backstories, particularly Bonnie Parker’s.

Who knew Bonnie got straight A’s, participated in spelling bees and talent shows, and sang at church? I found an amusing anecdote that Bonnie, at the age of three, stood up in front of a church congregation to belt out a tune. The youngster before her sang “Jesus Loves Me,” but Bonnie, she sang “He’s a Devil in His Own Home Town.” I can only imagine the mixture of muted laugher and out-right gasps that filled the chapel. A picture of Bonnie before Clyde began to form in my mind: an intelligent yet feisty young woman. Still, how did a seemingly wholesome girl end up in a life of crime with a convicted felon like Clyde Barrow? 

While I originally sought to tell Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree story, it didn’t take long before I decided I needed to back up nearly five years and bring Bonnie’s origin story to life. I recently re-watched the film, and Bonnie is portrayed as a young West Dallas woman who is bored working as a waitress and wants to be one of the gals she sees in the motion pictures. From my research, I found this characterization to be pretty on the mark, but I also saw a lot more to Bonnie than what’s generally depicted:

• Prior to meeting Clyde, Bonnie was married to a fella who didn’t treat her right.  

• Bonnie was fiercely devoted to her family.

• She wrote poetry and songs.

• Her father died when she was young, leaving her family struggling to make ends meet. 

• She was a middle child.

• Bonnie was an impressionable young adult during the Roaring ’20s.

Thing is, besides these tidbits of information, not much is known about Bonnie Parker’s childhood or adolescent years. I excitedly rubbed my hands together and got to work, combining limited historical facts with my own imagination to create a well-rounded picture of who Bonnie Parker could’ve been during the era of speakeasies, bootlegs and later the stock market crash of 1929. In Becoming Bonnie, Bonnie’s a girl with stars in her eyes, who also has practical aspirations for her life, driven by the need to be somebody who will make her daddy proud. 

One of the biggest fictional elements of the novel, which has been described as a female “Breaking Bad,” is that Bonnie begins the story with the name Bonnelyn. By the novel’s end, she’s Bonnie, and I’ll give ya one guess who coins her new name.

I’m excited to introduce readers to my version of Bonnie Parker, including how she meets Clyde Barrow and how the infamous duo begins their life of crime. In Summer 2018, I’ll be continuing their escapades in Bonnie, showing Bonnie’s role in their 27-month crime spree across Depression-ridden America.

 

Jenni L. Walsh has worked as an award-winning advertising copywriter for the past decade. She is a graduate of Villanova University and lives near Philadelphia with her husband, daughter, and son. Becoming Bonnie is her first novel.

Who knew that the infamous crime figure Bonnie Parker was once a straight A student who liked to sing at church? 

At some point during my adolescent years, I caught the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde on TV. Nearly 20 years later, while…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Finding Eliza Hamilton

Behind the Book by Susan Holloway Scott

With her new novel, I, Eliza Hamilton, bestselling author Susan Holloway Scott brings to life the story of Alexander Hamilton’s wife, Eliza. Readers will discover a novel of rich and fascinating details—and at its heart, an admirable woman of great devotion and courage.

If you visit the grave of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (1757-1854) in New York City, you’ll see that her simple stone describes her only in terms of the two most important men in her life. She’s her father’s daughter, and her husband’s wife, and that is all.

True, she’s best remembered today as the wife of Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), a Revolutionary War hero, statesman, politician and abolitionist, the first Secretary of the Treasury, a signer of the Constitution, the founder of the American financial system and, perhaps most famously, the only Founding Father to die from a duel.

You might also have heard that Eliza’s husband inspired a certain award-winning Broadway musical that carries his name.

But like so many women of the past, Eliza’s own story has been overshadowed by that brilliant husband. She didn’t help her place in posterity by destroying (or permitting to be destroyed) most of her letters, and thereby virtually eliminating her own words from history. As a result, she’s too often been dismissed by historians, who variously describe her as shy and reclusive, a saint, a homebody and even a victim.

With my new historical novel, I, Eliza Hamilton, I’m determined to change that. I hunted for the “real” Eliza at the Schuyler Mansion, her family’s home in Albany, New York, and the Grange, the house she and Alexander built in New York City, and visited other places in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania that she would have known. I searched for clues to her in historical societies, libraries and museums, poring over the fading ink of 18th-century letters. I was even fortunate enough to see—and touch—the gold wedding ring that Alexander slipped on her finger when they married in 1780.

And I found Eliza, too, in the letters of others who knew and loved her, in portraits, in memoirs and in her charitable work. She was the mother of eight children, who recalled her perseverance and devotion through the most difficult of times. She was a trusted, affectionate daughter and sister in the large Schuyler family. A list of her acquaintances reads like a who’s-who of early American history, including Martha and George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Dolley and James Madison—and those are only a few of those who knew her.

Most poignantly, Eliza’s presence remains in the letters that Alexander wrote to her over the 24 years that covered their courtship and marriage. There’s no doubt that they loved one another dearly, and that that love supported Eliza not only throughout Alexander’s life, but in the long years afterwards.

As a widow (she survived her husband by more than 50 years), Eliza continued a lifetime of kindness and generosity to become an advocate for the poor women and children of New York City. She helped found an orphanage whose mission continues to this day in the social service organization Graham Windham, and she served as the institution’s directress until she was 91.

But all that is only the beginning of what I discovered. Eliza Hamilton was intelligent and resourceful and strong, a woman who lived in the thick of some of the most turbulent and exciting times in American history. Her life and marriage were filled with love, passion, regard and devotion, but also were marred by public scandal and unimaginable tragedies that broke her heart, but not her spirit. I’m honored to tell her story.

 

Scott is the bestselling author of over 50 historical novels and historical romances. Learn more about her book—and Eliza Hamilton—on her website and blog: www.susanhollowayscott.com

Author photo by David Campli Studio

With her new novel, I, Eliza Hamilton, bestselling author Susan Holloway Scott brings to life the story of Alexander Hamilton’s wife, Eliza. Readers will discover a novel of rich and fascinating details—and at its heart, an admirable woman of great devotion and courage.

FictionHistorical Fiction

A woman history should never have forgotten

Behind the Book by Natasha Boyd

Immerse yourself in the milieu of 1700s South Carolina, where 16-year-old Eliza Lucas is left in charge of her family’s three plantations. With her new novel, The Indigo Girl, bestselling author Natasha Boyd draws from the true story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney for a story of ambition, betrayal and sacrifice—and at its core, the secret process of making indigo dye.

Boyd, the author of contemporary romantic Southern fiction and other novels of historical fiction, shares the inspiration behind The Indigo Girl.

People will tell you the Lowcountry begins a slow but irrevocable seduction on all those who venture within its boundaries. For me, it would take several visits, falling in love with a Lowcountry man and ultimately moving there, for the seduction to be complete.

Little did I know it would lead me to writing a book, The Indigo Girl, about Charleston’s beloved Eliza Lucas Pinckney. When you marry a man from Charleston, South Carolina, hearing the name Pinckney sort of settles into the general noise of life. It was a name I heard, but didn’t give too much thought to. I grew up in Europe, so I was used to being surrounded by history and, to my shame, probably took it for granted. Besides, we made our home in Atlanta, not Charleston, so unless we were visiting family I never thought much about it, beyond seeing the occasional sign for the Charles Pinckney historical site.

A move to Hilton Head Island in 2010 would change that forever. Lacking the beautiful architecture of Charleston, Hilton Head has a different sort of charm, predominantly nature-based. Every time you drive onto the island, you cross over Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge, an island formerly owned by, of course, the Pinckneys. But it was at a local gallery exhibit showcasing artists who work with indigo where I first truly heard Eliza’s story. A 16-year-old girl in the 1700s had been left in charge of her father’s plantations? I sidled closer. She was tricked and set up to fail in her attempt at growing lucrative indigo by a man her father sent to help her? I no longer pretended to eavesdrop. I was rapt. She taught her slaves to read in return for them helping her make the dye?

Well, it was a done deal. Almost.

Trying to get Eliza’s story right kept me up at night. There was a story between the pages of the texts and the letters she wrote. There were differences between what she wrote when she was young and how she looked back on her life. That shouldn’t be a surprise, obviously, as like most humans she had grown and matured over the course of her life. But I felt a little bit like an amateur sculptor chiseling away at a valuable block of marble, knowing that a statue of Venus could materialize if I could just work at the right angle. I saturated myself in her letters and all available mentions of her I could find, and then . . . I put them aside.

This will be where the hardcore historians wince. But here’s the thing: The story, her story, was in there, but the constraints of the available texts were like prison bars preventing the “story” from unfurling. There’s an underlying structure to most storytelling that any experienced genre fiction novelist or screenwriter will tell you. As humans we respond to this story structure. If it is done right, there’ll be a feeling of satisfaction upon completion of the story. We’ll sigh when we close the book, whether we’re happy about the ending or even if we’re sad.

We know the hero or heroine will be put upon to start a journey of some kind. There’ll be forces working against them. At some point, they’ll reach a reckoning to rise to their fullest potential, only to have the rug pulled out from under them, for the unthinkable to happen. Then there’ll be a final battle, a test, from which our hero or heroine will finally emerge victorious and be permanently changed into their new, stronger self.

The story of Eliza’s battle with indigo is such a story. And it was a battle. She was thwarted at every turn, either by her own or others’ ignorance, by nature or simply straight malice. She drew upon her inner strength to overcome these challenges. The end result being that her success with indigo overcame a challenge for South Carolina, and ultimately the United States of America. She is, quite simply, a woman history should never have forgotten.

I hope now they’ll remember her.

With her new novel, The Indigo Girl, bestselling author Natasha Boyd draws from the true story of Eliza Lucas Pinckney for a story of ambition, betrayal and sacrifice—and at its core, the secret process of making indigo dye. Boyd, the author of contemporary romantic Southern fiction and other novels of historical fiction, shares the inspiration behind The Indigo Girl.

FictionDebut Fiction

Magical beginnings for a debut novelist

Behind the Book by Emanuel Bergmann

Debut novelist Emanuel Bergmann shares a look behind his sweet and dazzling first book, The Trick, a Holocaust tale with a touch of magic.

I like to think of my novel as a comedy about divorce and the Holocaust. (And stage magic!) Divorce is something I’m very familiar with—I was one of those kids who, at an early age, got to experience their parents’ separation. It left a deep impression. Many years later, after my own marriage had failed, I started writing it all down.

At the time, I hadn’t planned on writing a book. I just wanted to get some thoughts on paper. I had gone to see a circus show for the first time in 30 years, and that triggered one of the key scenes of the book. Suddenly, it all came together.

My ex-wife was a magician’s assistant, and so I decided to set The Trick in the world of stage magic. It’s a world I knew very well; I had spent many, many hours backstage at magic shows, and I felt that magicians were generally portrayed inaccurately in literature and cinema. More often than not, they are depicted as dark, brooding, handsome men. But in my experience, they were—by and large—needy and narcissistic.

That insight led to my main character, Moshe Goldenhirsch, aka the Great Zabbatini, a middling and highly egotistical stage magician. I decided to make him an immigrant, a German Jew who came to America during the dark years of the Shoah. This is another topic close to my heart. In fact, I’ve been known to be able to turn any perfectly normal and pleasant dinner conversation into a lengthy discourse on Holocaust minutiae. But it’s not my fault! I grew up Jewish in postwar Germany. My grandmother was a survivor of the Shoah, and she raised me with constant tales of atrocities. The moral always seemed to be: One day your friends at school will turn you over to the Nazis, so you better eat your spinach, young man!

It’s one of the reasons I came to America—I didn’t want to live like that anymore, one of the last Jews of Germany. But coming here had its own challenges. I was 19 or 20 years old when I arrived in Los Angeles, and I had no friends or family there. The character of the Great Zabbatini allowed me to put it all into words. He’s a lonely man, a stranger in a strange land, a refugee. But he’s also a selfish man, and his only passion is his art, stage magic. One day, he’s approached by a young boy, Max Cohn, whose parents are about to get divorced. Max is convinced that only magic can save his family . . .

After I wrote the first draft of the manuscript, I was surprised how personal the story had become. None of the events in the book are autobiographical, but the emotional foundation is deeply personal. When I wrote it, I didn’t think it would ever be published. There was no plan. But then I decided to send it out—who knew, maybe someone would like it? But no one liked it. After dozens of rejections, I finally gave up on it. The manuscript went into my drawer. Years later, through a series of coincidences, the book landed on the desk of an editor who did like it. To my surprise, seven years after I had written the manuscript, I suddenly received an email from a publisher in Germany expressing interest in it. I ignored the email. I thought it was some kind of prank. But they kept at it. And now, I am grateful that there’s an actual book that people can hold in their hand and flip through, and even read, if they like.

Debut novelist Emanuel Bergmann shares a look behind his sweet and dazzling first book, The Trick, a Holocaust tale with a touch of magic.

Trending Fiction

FictionDebut Fiction

Two turtledoves

Francesca Hornak, Samantha Silva

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Holiday preparations flood our hearts with the warmth of Christmases past—or the echoes of family dinners best forgotten. Wherever your memories lie, two debut works of Christmas fiction are sure to lighten your spirits.

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FictionSpeculative Fiction

Megan Angelo

Cursive, privacy and other things worth saving

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Journalist Megan Angelo has written extensively about pop culture, motherhood, womanhood, TV and film for the New York Times, Glamour, Elle and more. Her debut novel, Followers, is a perfect intersection of her passions that delivers a curious tale of three influencers and their followers, from 2015 to 2051.

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