Usually it’s the diva author who breezes in late for an interview. This time it’s the interviewer, offering a multitude of apologies, who calls 40 minutes late. In the face of myriad technical difficulties, Irish novelist Emma Donoghue couldn’t be more sympathetic and generous. "No problem!" she says in her lilting accent, adding almost apologetically, "but can we be done by 10:30? I have a photographer coming to take a picture of me."

With a new book hitting the shelves, a media whirlwind is already disrupting Donoghue’s routine. The interest in her latest work follows the critical and popular success of her third novel Slammerkin. Reviewers called it "a roller-coaster ride through the 18th century" (The Baltimore Sun) and "an intelligent and mesmerizing historical novel" (Publishers Weekly). Thousands of readers were drawn to the provocative cover, making the book into a word-of-mouth bestseller.

In Slammerkin, Donoghue turned the true story of Mary Saunders, a poor servant girl who turns to prostitution, into absorbing fiction. With her latest book, Life Mask, Donoghue returns to 18th-century London, but this time her characters are the wealthy and privileged. The author says she enjoyed delving into the world of lords and ladies "after writing about chamber pots" in Slammerkin. "These characters wouldn’t even have noticed the servants of Slammerkin," she says.

Like the story of Mary Saunders, Life Mask is based on real-life events. The author found a snippet of gossip about three famous characters of the era Lord Derby, a supremely wealthy but ugly aristocrat; Miss Eliza Farren, a popular comedic actress; and Anne Damer, a widow, sculptor and rumored Sapphist and couldn’t resist piecing together their story. History tells us that Anne Damer and Miss Farren, despite differences in ages and rank, became fast friends. Their close relationship revived the old gossip about Anne’s sexuality, and the ensuing scandal threatened Miss Farren’s career on the public stage and, more importantly, her long, chaste courtship with Lord Derby. "I was fascinated by the love triangle," says Donoghue. "I’m not sure why I’m drawn to stories based on real people. I guess I enjoy filling in the gaps."

She also uses that talent to create rich, full characters. Stifled by the rules of propriety, even the era’s richest lords and ladies often hid their true thoughts and feelings. However, these "life masks" are not necessarily a bad thing, says Donoghue. "I enjoyed peeling back the layers of the characters." She felt a special affinity for Anne Damer’s struggle to accept her sexuality. "I related to Anne’s fear of people finding out," says the author, who had her own coming-out in Dublin in the 1980s. Despite having loving family and friends, Donoghue says there was always a "what if they find out?" fear that hung over her youth. The author now lives in Canada, a country she says is a "very safe place for gay couples," with her partner and nine-month-old son, Finn.

Donoghue’s empathy for the characters gives the novel added depth, but it is her love of research that recreates the time period with astonishing detail. The author admits she has a hard time dragging herself out of the library to sit down and write. Donoghue immersed herself in the turbulent decade of 1787 to 1797, an era of extravagant balls, social intrigues, cockfighting and, perhaps most of all, cutthroat politics. The reader gets a front-row seat inside an English Parliament threatened by the bloody French Revolution. Fearing a similar revolt among English peasants, the government had cracked down on civil liberties.

Threats of attacks hung over the country, and the word terrorism was first coined. The similarities to today’s political climate are hard to miss, something that surprised Donoghue. "I never set out to do that," she says. "But I’ve also never been as interested in politics as I am now." After Life Mask, Donoghue has decided to give modern-day interests her full attention. Next up? A contemporary novel set in Ireland and Canada.

Like many women, Geraldine Brooks was inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which she first read as a girl in Australia. Though her mother, whom Brooks calls one of the world’s great cynics, advised her to take it with a grain of salt (“nobody in real life is as goody-goody as that Marmee”), Brooks had a strong reaction to the book and its heroine, the irrepressible Jo March.

“I thought she was fantastic,” Brooks recalls during a call to Australia, where she’d just spent the year with her husband, writer Tony Horwitz, and their eight-year-old son. “This really powerful girl character who’s struggling to find her way creatively and to fit into the social restrictions that were so overwhelming . . . my situation was so different on the other side of the world and a century removed, but it just fired me up.”

The events of Little Women take place while Mr. March is off serving in the Civil War. The original ending of the novel finds him safe at home with his family but says next to nothing about his wartime experiences. “It’s like Jane Austen and the Napoleonic Wars; it’s just not the business of her books, but that was the background of their times,” explains Brooks. While Horwitz was researching Confederates in the Attic (1998), his best-selling book about the Civil War’s legacy in the modern-day South, Brooks found that she had unwittingly become something of an expert on the War Between the States.

“When he was writing that, a tremendous amount of our lives was consumed with Civil War trips. And I wasn’t crazy about this for a long time. But suddenly somehow the stories of the individuals started to work on my imagination.” Brooks became fascinated by the moral debate that took place in Waterford, the Virginia town where her family now lives, which was settled by Quakers in 1733. “These pacifists were passionate abolitionists, yet were part of the South. And then one day this light bulb went off in my head, and I was thinking, gee, Alcott’s Little Women was really one of the first Civil War novels, and how would that [conflict] have played out for a man like March?”

March is the incredible result of these two converging trains of thought, though the novel “touches only tangentially on Little Women. I wouldn’t have the hubris to attempt to rewrite Louisa May Alcott, so I’ve just taken the bit of the story she didn’t want to deal with, for whatever complex, psychological or Freudian reasons,” Brooks laughs. Her fascinating and meticulously researched novel imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, whom she based on Alcott’s own father. Brooks’ March is an idealist and a man of faith whose convictions are challenged by the horrors of war.

Faith in crisis is a topic that particularly interests Brooks, who wrote about an English village devastated by the plague in her first novel, Year of Wonders. “It is a theme I keep returning to. I’m intrigued by people who have strong beliefs, because I don’t. I’m a spiritual quester, but I also think that you have to work very hard to make the ethical choice rather than the expedient one.”

Deciding that the cause of abolition is worth the necessary evil of war, March enlists as a chaplain. He expects hardship, but the reality of battle is almost more than he can bear. March struggles to keep the disillusionment he feels from his daily letters home to the girls and Marmee, which are a marked contrast to the honest and, as a consequence, graphic, scenes of wartime life masterfully depicted by Brooks. These experiences are interspersed with March’s recollections of his youth spent as a traveling salesman; his passionate courtship of the intelligent, fiery Margaret May (Marmee); and their married life as prominent citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, who rubbed elbows and exchanged thoughts with Emerson and Thoreau.

March’s character is skillfully drawn through his own thoughts and actions, but Brooks rounds out his portrayal in the few brief chapters told through Marmee’s eyes. Her practical voice is a marked contrast to that of her visionary husband, and she has difficulty accepting that March has concealed much of the truth of his experiences.

Idealistic men and their pragmatic female counterparts have appeared in both of Brooks’ novels: is she making a larger statement about men and women?

“That hadn’t occurred to me, but I also think it’s very true, and something that comes from my experiences of being a foreign correspondent in the Middle East [for the Wall Street Journal]. You’d have these fiery-eyed Islamic preachers like the Ayatollah telling everybody how it had to be, and then you’d have women actually having to feed their families and keep them safe through the consequences of that,” she says. “Even in our comparatively luxurious circumstances, even in my own life as a writer, you might have a male novelist who feels free to go into some kind of, don’t disturb me, I’m in my ivory tower out in the woods thing, but as a mother, the kid has to be dressed. So you’re always tied into the practical world, and I think that’s a good thing.”

Brooks is content with her life in the practical world. Her family spends time each year (“ideally it’d be half-and-half”) in Virginia and Australia, despite the 24-hour journey. “The only good thing about it is after you get used to coming back and forth to Australia, every other plane flight seems short!” She’s working on another historical novel. “It’s sort of insanely ambitious. It’s the story of a [real-life] Hebrew manuscript that was created in 14th-century Spain and still exists today. I’m tracing it through the hands that held it. I love finding these stories in history where you know something, but you can’t know everything, and so you’ve got the license to let your imagination fill in the voids.”

And she’s looking forward to readers’ responses to March. “I hope that people who love Little Women will see it as a respectful homage to Louisa May books find new lives and new readers all the time.”

Some of the best books find their author instead of the other way around. It's as if certain stories, so compelling and brimming with appeal, lie in wait for a writer with the proper voice, temperament and personal experience to come along and bring them to life. Think Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Or Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. Add to these Robert Hicks' The Widow of the South, a Civil War page-turner that comes out of left field from a Nashville music publisher who couldn't say no to the truth.

The Widow of the South is a fictional account of a real-life figure: Carrie McGavock, whose Tennessee home at Carnton Plantation was commandeered into a field hospital during the bloody Battle of Franklin on Nov. 30, 1864, that left 9,000 dead, 7,000 of them Confederate soldiers. McGavock became an angel of mercy for the wounded that day, but it was only the beginning of her extraordinary tale.

Two years later, when a neighbor prepared to plow up a field that contained the remains of 1,500 Confederate soldiers, an outraged McGavock and her husband John dug up the bodies and re-interred them in their backyard, creating the only privately owned Confederate cemetery. Carrie carefully arranged and recorded the name and regiment of each soldier in her book of the dead, and walked daily among her memories. She was well known as the Widow of the South until her death in 1905, but largely forgotten afterward.

The McGavock family moved on, and the subsequent owners eventually deeded the dilapidated house and cemetery to the Daughters of the Confederacy. The Carnton estate likely would have remained a little-known footnote in Civil War history, had its aging directors not coaxed Hicks, a Franklin resident, into serving on their board in 1987.

"I had to dress in a coat and tie and sit in these board meetings where they talked about buying staples for the stapler or if the director could possibly do what their mama did and fold the corner of the paper over and tear it," Hicks recalls. "But I was falling in love with the place."

Though he didn't know it at the time, Hicks was uniquely qualified to be the unlikely caretaker-designate of Carrie McGavock's strange garden. A son of the South, he spent summers in nearby Hicksville, now an incorporated suburb of Jackson, Tennessee, that bore the family name. His father, who at 46 reinvented himself and went from rags to riches as a cofounder of the Culligan company, used to drive Robert and his brother on road trips through Dixie just to catalog all the towns whose welcome sign included the watchwords, Where the Old South Lives. En route, he would recall similar drives with his own father, who experienced the Civil War as a boy.

"My grandfather would describe fields with all their layering of history," Hicks says. "Yes, this is a cotton field right now, but this is actually where Grant's army came across on their way to Shiloh. He could remember when the Union army came to the house and took all the horses including his pony, and he came out with a little penknife to try to saw the rope off his pony. The union officer gave him back his pony."

Following college in Nashville, Hicks did graduate study in philosophy in Lausanne, Switzerland. Upon his return to Music City, a friend advised him over beers to consider music publishing. "I said, really? What do they do? And he said, I don't know but I think you'd be good at it." He was. In fact, he was already a big fan of country music, a rarity among young people in the late '70s, even in Nashville. He remembers the night in the alley behind the Ryman Auditorium when he found his calling.

"It was Lynn Anderson who made me fall in love with country music. She was there in the alley, beating the tar out of her husband Glenn, and he was beating her back. I think infidelity was one of the themes. And this kid sticks his head out the back door and says, Miss Anderson, you're on in five minutes. And they both stopped, she turned to Glenn and said, help me with my makeup, and 15 minutes later she was on the stage singing 'I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.' I said, you know what? I like these people."

The more Hicks learned about Carrie McGavock, the more he wanted to help lift Carnton out of the waste bin of history. He brought in top experts on period paint, furniture plans, wallpaper and mid-19th-century gardening to restore the home to its glory. By 1996, it dawned on him that all the work would be in vain without an endowment to sustain the home. He had already put what little he knew of McGavock's life into a pamphlet. To share her story with the world would take filling in the blanks with a novel. Hicks limbered up to write The Widow of the South not with Faulkner, but with Pasternak and Tolstoy.

"My first step was to read every Russian novel. It seemed like Russian novels were always about the people Dr. Zhivago, War and Peace. It was always about how these people were tossed about," he says. "What I strive for is about transformation: how people are transformed by each other, by circumstances, by loss or gain." If early buzz pans out, The Widow of the South could do for Carnton what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did for Savannah. However it fares, Hicks believes the story of Carrie McGavock will live on.

"I am a Southerner and there is always that sense of responsibility," Hicks says. "I don't know if I was destined to do this book but I think that somebody was destined to do it."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Oxford, Mississippi.

Myla Goldberg’s debut novel, Bee Season (2000), was a word-of-mouth hit that garnered the kind of critical praise not usually bestowed on first-time novelists. Her quirky and intimate look at the life of a nine-year-old spelling bee champ climbed the bestseller list and was a finalist for several literary awards. Readers eager for a follow-up finally get their wish this month with Wickett’s Remedy, Goldberg’s fictional account of the 1918 flu epidemic. Clearly imagined and lovingly told, Wickett’s Remedy tells an epic story the way it was lived, through the voices that laughed, cried and echo still.

Young and unaccountably brave, Lydia Kilkenny sells men’s shirts in a Boston department store. There, she meets the painfully shy, well-to-do Henry Wickett, who woos her with flowery love letters and Friday lunches. Their marriage inspires Henry to quit medical school and create Wickett’s Remedy, a patent medicine sold by mail order. But a ruthless business partner steals the remedy, just as "Wilson’s War" and the flu epidemic steal Lydia’s hopes. As the flu’s grip on the city—and the nation—tightens, she signs on as nurse in a study of how the flu is transmitted, and begins to discover that the things we are meant to do are often the very things that make no sense to those around us. BookPage recently talked to Goldberg about this remarkable novel.

BookPage: How did you become interested in the 1918 flu epidemic?
Myla Goldberg: About five years ago, I came across a newspaper article that listed the five most deadly plagues of all time and the 1918 flu epidemic was one of them. I consider myself an amateur disease nerd and I’d never heard of the 1918 flu, which meant that I immediately had to learn everything about it that I could.

BP: The margin notes, which are the whisperings of the dead, highlight the flaws and lapses of memory. What inspired those voices?
MG: One of my all-time favorite books is Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a novel essentially written in annotations. I knew that I wanted to write a book in which the text misbehaved in some way, and when I realized that I was writing a book about the unreliability of memory it occurred to me that marginal voices were a great way to approach this idea.

BP: You started this book before Bee Season (soon to be a film starring Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche) was published. How did the success of Bee Season influence your work on Wickett’s Remedy?
MG: Bee Season’s success didn’t particularly influence me, partly because Wickett’s was already underway when Bee Season started doing so well, but mostly because the expectations I have for myself and the pressures I place on myself have always been so extreme that nothing the outside world serves up can possibly compete.

BP: Lydia seems driven to do the unexpected, in a time and place when good girls from good, close families didn’t do that. What sparks that desire?
MG: Good girls from good, close families still don’t do that. Lydia is driven to do the unexpected for the same reasons someone would be now—by her innate ambition, motivation and especially her curiosity, qualities fairly rare in any age.

BP: The right details transport the reader, just as the pneumatic tubes in Gilchrist’s department store magically carried the customers’ change to the waiting shop girls. How do you find the key details that bring a long-gone place to life?
MG: I love research. I read all sorts of books about the flu and about the period. The details I chose to use in the book were the ones that painted pictures in my head when I first came across them.

BP: You’ve written about a Jewish family in the 1980s and an Irish-Catholic girl in South Boston early in the past century. What time and place beckon next?
MG: I’d like to try my hand at the present day, for a change. Writing about the present is a scarier prospect for me then writing about a period that has already passed because your entire readership is made up of experts who will know immediately if something rings false.

Leslie Budewitz lives in Montana and is a legal consultant for writers.

Author photo by Jason Little.

A World War I-era photograph of Boston socialite artist Anna Coleman provided the spark for Jody Shields’ new novel, The Crimson Portrait. "It was a black-and-white picture of Anna holding a paintbrush to a man’s face," Shields says from her home in the Soho district of New York City. "The caption said she was an artist who painted masks for men with injured faces. I was immediately captivated."

With this real-life character as her starting point, Shields has created a lushly descriptive novel based on little-known events of World War I. Her willingness to gambol in the ambiguous fields between historical fact and imaginative invention also marked Shields’ widely hailed first novel, The Fig Eater, a detective story based on Sigmund Freud’s groundbreaking case study "Dora." And as was true in that first novel, Shields in The Crimson Portrait is after something more than historical and psychological veracity. She is interested in the relationship between the shiny seductive surfaces of the known world and our notions of personal identity, grief and love.

As it turns out, the real Anna Coleman went to France with her husband, a doctor – before the United States entered World War I – as part of the Harvard Medical Corps of volunteers. Also among the corps was a dentist named Anton Kazanjian, who had fled Armenia as a boy, come to the U.S., worked in a mill, and eventually enrolled in Harvard Medical school at the age of 30, the oldest student in the school. In the novel, these two artistic outsiders form an intense bond, and when Kazanjian is transferred to England to work at a hospital devoted to the reconstruction of wounded soldiers’ faces, Anna follows and finds a new calling using her art in service of medical science.

"I hadn’t anticipated that Anna would turn into such a central character," Shields says, sounding genuinely bemused. "And I didn’t imagine that there would be a relationship between her and the dentist. But that’s fate. You just can’t plan everything. But what fun would it be if you could?"

Kazanjian and Coleman end up working at the country estate of Catherine, who in profound mourning over the loss of her young husband in battle has given over their grand house for use as a military hospital devoted to the new science of reconstructive facial surgery. The hospital is run by the tough, philosophical Dr. McCleary, and one of its more appealingly vulnerable inmates is a faceless young soldier named Julian, with whom Catherine eventually falls in love.

Through her dramatization of the bonds and antagonisms that exist among these central characters, Shields is also able to convey an astonishing amount of information about such things as the history of religious controversy surrounding plastic surgery, the mythological gardens of 18th-century English homes, the incredible properties of human skin, the moral and emotional impact of the human face, and, of course, the brutal horrors of war.

"The face is so small," Shields says, almost wistfully, "yet even though you can live without a face, I found an account from the period that said when someone’s face was blown off on the battlefield, he was injected with enough morphine to kill him because while they would try to save men without legs or arms, they just thought a man without a face wouldn’t be able to live as a human.

Shields later adds: "I write about what I find completely fascinating and interesting. It’s a kind of archaeology. I love the tension of research: You can’t plan what you’re going to find. It’s happenstance and luck. And I love spending time in libraries. When I travel I always go to libraries, just to see what they’re like. . . . The challenge is not to burden the book with too much research that doesn’t feel like it fits the story."

In fact, Shields’ deft interweaving of her vast historical research into The Crimson Portrait does not intrude upon her narrative. But it is her enviable descriptive powers that impress throughout. This is perhaps unsurprising, since Shields, who grew up in Nebraska, was a visual artist before becoming a writer; a fashion editor at Vogue before writing All That Glitters, a history of costume jewelry; and design editor at the New York Times magazine before becoming a screenwriter, first, and then a novelist. If not by training, then by instinct, it seems, Shields bedazzles us with the colorful skin of experience, then asks us to consider what lies beneath.

Tademy plumbs family history for glimpses of a violent past Lalita Tademy’s journey to Red River began long before she left the corporate world and her prestigious job as vice president of Sun Microsystems. It began before she wrote her much acclaimed debut novel Cane River, which became a bestseller and an Oprah Book Club selection in 2001. It began when she was born a Tademy, a name that carried with it responsibility and inspired respect, a name that originated in the Nile Delta and was reclaimed by her ancestors.

To say that Lalita Tademy’s family history is rich and complex would be an understatement. As anyone who read her first novel Cane River knows, the author comes from a long line of strong women. In her debut, Tademy traced her family history on her mother’s side. Now, in Red River she turns her attention to the Tademy men and relates a disturbing, and until now, obscure chapter of American history. On one of her research trips to Louisiana, Tademy stumbled upon something that would alter the course of her genealogical research, and her life. She found herself in the small town of Colfax, near the center of the state, standing before a monument dedicated to three white men, Heroes, who died in the Colfax Riot of 1873. There is no mention on the monument of the 100-plus black men and boys who were slaughtered or their families who were terrorized and displaced afterward. No mention of how, on that Easter Sunday, white supremacists massacred blacks as they tried to protect their hard-won voting rights by taking a stand in the courthouse.

During a phone call to her California home, Tademy talked about making this shocking discovery. She says that initially, she was angry and perplexed; it was far removed from any way of living that she knew from her life in California. This is some anomaly, a wrinkle in the fabric of American life, Tademy recalls telling herself. She says, I did not want to be disrupted from my own life . . . [it was] something I would have preferred not to have happened. She felt strongly, however, that the task had fallen to her to tell this story and offer a different perspective on what took place on that fateful day and during the weeks that followed.

I could imagine the time, and that is what I try to do when I write. I try to transport both myself and a reader into the time . . . not as if you are looking backward but really as if you are there. With her powerful writing and attention to detail, Tademy accomplishes this, which makes Red River both a hard book to read and a hard book to put down. It is, at turns, heart-wrenching and transcendent.

Trying to get myself into that space was difficult, it still rankled, Tademy says, but as painful as the process was, she felt it was imperative for her to write about this episode in Reconstruction history. As Jackson Tademy, one of the heroes of Red River , tells his grandson from his deathbed, Names of men you never gonna know lay buried in the ground for you. . . . No matter how much time pass . . . you not allowed to turn your face to the wall, throw up your hands, forget. We need reminding, says Tademy. Younger generations don’t know that there was a time when we couldn’t vote. Getting information about what happened during and after the battle turned out to be more problematic than Tademy expected. She thought it would be as simple as asking people, but no one wanted to talk about it. She did, however, have a wealth of family stories to draw upon which were lovingly shared by surviving relatives. Tademy also did a lot of research in the public sphere, drawing on newspaper accounts and official documents, which, of course, were written by segregationists. She says it was a challenge trying to recreate a story, events, where there were certain things that you knew, and filling in all of the shading. Asked if she came across any surprises during her research, Tademy says that she made a jarring revelation. Late in the process, too late to include it in the book, the author discovered that her maternal great-great-grandfather was at the siege of the courthouse, fighting on the white side. Narcisse, who appeared in Cane River, is one of Tademy’s white ancestors who was a slave holder and a complicated figure. It was a challenge to try to write this and keep multiple points of view, she says. Narcisse did such harm and good at the same time. Though Red River focuses on the men in the Tademy and Smith families, the story begins with the voice of Polly, Sam Tademy’s wife. Tademy says Polly’s voice came easily to her. It was there, it was very strong, she was a strong young woman, and she was a strong old woman. She stresses that though women occupy a less central role in this book than in the last, they are there, they are the rock. When Tademy left the corporate world and began work on her genealogy just over 10 years ago, she assumed it was a singular personal attachment to finding out these stories. She was gratified to discover that so many readers would be drawn to her stories. I do think this is American history, and I am very proud to be able to offer American history with a different point of view, she says.

Though the characters in the book endure great suffering, Tademy was determined not to portray them as victims. One of the things I was mindful of was that I did not want there to be a victim mentality in this book, because these were people who went through unbelievable hardship and obstacles and they kept going. And they not only survived, they thrived. Her novel reveals the horror of racial violence, but also the strength of the human spirit. Particularly when it’s family pulling family and community pulling community, you get beyond, you move forward, and you get to the point where you can rise. It’s a book about a tough period of time, but it’s very redemptive to me, and I draw an enormous amount of strength from these people. Tademy’s readers will undoubtedly draw strength from them, too. Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock.

Nothing is more miserable—or more exhilarating—than a good case of lovesickness. But what does it mean to be lovesick? Is it high school puppy love, dreamily doodling the initials of a crush? Or is it something much darker?

In Peony in Love, the elegant and haunting follow-up to her extraordinarily successful novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), author Lisa See explores the true phenomenon of lovesick maidens: privileged but cloistered Chinese girls who fell under the spell of a romantic opera and literally wasted away.

The Chinese government actually censored the 1598 opera, "The Peony Pavilion," believing it to be dangerous. The opera tells the story of Liniang, a young woman who meets her lover in a dream, and upon awakening is so lovesick that she dies of a broken heart. In the end, her lover brings her back to life. The opera was revolutionary in its time, because it depicted a young woman choosing her own path.

In 17th-century China, the setting of See’s Peony in Love, it was customary for the wives, concubines and daughters of wealthy men to live their entire lives behind the gates of the family villa. Young women were promised to men they didn’t meet until their wedding night, when they were transferred like property from their natal family to their in-laws. Even if the girls were allowed outside the "inner chambers" of their homes, the disfiguration caused by their bound feet—an indication of good breeding and wealth that rendered women unable to do the hard work that should be left to servants—made it impossible for them to travel far.

These well-educated but sheltered girls who died in the name of love intrigued See.

"These girls were living more or less totally confined lives," See says in an interview from her home in Los Angeles, where she was preparing to embark on a 15-city book tour. "They never met their husbands. A lot of them never went out. They thought that in emulating Liniang, maybe they, too, would have some choice in their lives. Maybe true love would bring them back to life."

That fate doesn’t await the doomed 16-year-old in See’s new novel. Peony meets her soul mate during a forbidden late-night walk on the outskirts of her family villa. She sneaks away again the next night to meet him while her family is engrossed in a local production of "The Peony Pavilion." But Peony knows she is destined to marry a man she’s been promised to since birth. Soon, she finds herself obsessed with the very opera that has condemned so many other girls to their deaths. She sets off down the same dark path as she awaits her wedding day.

At its heart, Peony in Love is a ghostly coming-of-age novel.

"Peony learns the way we all learn: She makes horrible, stupid mistakes," See says. "Her heart is always in the right place but like all of us, sometimes that isn’t enough."

See uses her book to explore the mythology and beliefs that still linger in her own Chinese-American family, including the tradition of honoring the spirits of family members after they die. Although she and her grown sons are thoroughly American, See still identifies with the culture and customs of her ancestors.

"I have red hair and freckles," she said. "I don’t look Chinese, and (my sons) look even less so." But, she says, most of the some 400 relatives they have in Los Angeles are fully Chinese.

"When my kids think about family, that’s the family they envision," she said. "Those people, they were my mirror."

Writing is another tradition that runs in the See family. See’s mother, Carolyn See, is an accomplished novelist and book reviewer who taught her daughter to commit to her writing.

"Ever since I was a little kid, she was saying, ‘Write a thousand words a day,’" See recalls. "She also taught me to not be afraid to go to some pretty dark places in my writing."

Although See is able to disconnect from her work at the end of the day ("I still make dinner and go to the dry cleaners," she laughs), being immersed in such intense projects does affect her.

"When I write, I don’t have dreams," she says. "The first six weeks after I finish a book, I have the most vivid dreams. I think in some ways I’m doing my dreaming during the day, and by the time I’m done writing for the day, I can wake up."

It might have seemed to See that she was dreaming when Snow Flower—which now has almost a million copies in print—became a bestseller. See keeps on her desk a photo she snapped of a Snow Flower promotional poster she saw in a Paris Metro station.

"What happened with Snow Flower was and still is such a shock and a surprise to me," See says. "Of all of my books, I thought, no one is going to read this. I thought, if I’m really lucky, 5,000 people will read this book. But they’ll be the right people."

Part of the novel’s magic was See’s fascinating depiction of two nearly forgotten Chinese customs: the secret women’s language of nu shu, and foot-binding, a gruesomely painful custom in which mothers would break their daughter’s feet to reconfigure them in a smaller, daintier shape. See likens the practice to our society’s current fixation on breast enhancement.

"Breast implants are now a big high school graduation gift," she says. "It’s that same thing. Who’s giving that gift? Mothers to daughters. At its core, it’s to make her more marriageable. I live in L.A., so there are a lot of men walking around with women with these big plastic things on their chests."

Having already uncovered the lost worlds of nu shu, foot-binding and lovesick maidens, what’s left for See to explore? In her next book, she’ll write about the Chinese-American experience through the eyes of two girls sent to California from Shanghai for arranged marriages. See views it as a chance to write about the rapidly disappearing Los Angeles of her youth.

On a recent visit to L.A.’s Chinatown, she discovered that the community in which she grew up is already changing, with shops and buildings closing or being demolished.

"They were so much a part of my identity and who I am," she says wistfully. "In five to 10 years I won’t have any more ties to Chinatown. I’ve been kind of reeling from it, actually. This book is about people and places that disappear."

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

Author photo by Patricia Williams.

Jonis Agee didn't intend for her 10th book, The River Wife, to become her first historical novel. Instead, she set out to tell a more contemporary story of life in the heartland, as she had done in her 1993 novel Strange Angels, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and in her highly praised short story collections Acts of Love on Indigo Road and Bend This Heart. But sometimes a book has intentions of its own.

"I was in despair often," Agee says of her efforts to keep the novel recently named both a Book of the Month Club and a Literary Guild selection on track. She spoke about the particular challenges of writing The River Wife during a call to her home in Omaha, Nebraska. Agee and her second husband, to whom the new novel is dedicated, moved there this year, returning to the city of her birth after years in Iowa, New York state, Los Angeles, the Twin Cities and Ann Arbor as an itinerant student/writer/academic. Agee now teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "I'm one of those writers who have to be in a place that works for me," she says. "I love Ann Arbor, it's a truly great university, but I felt like I was in an upside-down Tupperware bowl there. I had to leave. I like places that are not peopled. I need that immensity of space and that ability to feel small so that other parts of life can expand against that openness."

But Agee's compositional struggles had less to do with place and space than with the novel's back story. In the background of the work-in-progress lingered an alluring tale, based on a true account, of a young girl pinned under a fallen rafter and abandoned by her family during the catastrophic 1811 New Madrid earthquake, an event of Katrina-like proportions that changed the course of the Mississippi, destroyed nearby towns and altered a way of life.

"I couldn't get rid of the idea of that girl," Agee recalls. "Sometimes before I'd go to sleep, I'd figure out ways to rescue her. That story stayed with me for a couple of years, and my agent and my editor kept asking why I didn't tell it. But I resisted that stretch into historical material because I thought I didn't know enough. Finally I decided I had to try, and once I did, it just began working. Then it became a matter of paring things down, because I ended up writing a 700-page novel. That's the way it is for me: once the door opens, things just come flooding."

From that flood of imagination emerged the character of Annie Lark Ducharme, whose ordeal and eventual rescue in the aftermath of the earthquake is told in riveting detail in the opening chapter of The River Wife. Her rescuer and soon-to-be husband is a French fur trader named Jacques Ducharme. He is the magnetizing force of the novel, a soul-distorting mix of love and unbounded acquisitiveness that quickly transmutes him into a violent, rapacious river pirate and sets off an enduring contest of wills between Annie and himself, a conflict that reverberates through successive generations of Ducharme "river wives," through whose eyes we see and feel the action unfold, as recorded in the "family books" they keep.

The River Wife, with its familial conflicts, dark mysteries, regional history and evocative use of language, has the flavor and tone of a Southern gothic tale. This might be because Agee has always drawn inspiration from her "literary forebears" William Faulkner and James Agee, who is also a distant relative. But it is equally possible that she draws from an understanding arising from her own family history.

Agee's parents, she recounts, had a storied romance, meeting in third grade in a small Missouri town, falling in love despite the abiding hatred that existed between their two families and secretly marrying in high school, a fact their children learned only after their parents' deaths, which occurred within two days of each other.

"I grew up with a lot of family history, the way many Southerners do," she says. "You're told a lot of stories. There's a lot of gossip and there's always a little mystery involved: little entanglements adults won't explain, dropped sentences, suggestions. It isn't the sense of family that probably a lot of other people have. In every generation there is somebody responsible for keeping the family books, continuing the research, keeping the story going. I think I ended up writing this novel, which is historical, because in some way I am always working my way back."

Agee illustrates and enlivens The River Wife with vivid sensory detail. To achieve that depth of detail, she did large amounts of research, traveling through the region often, then surrounding herself in her workspace with old photographs and artifacts Civil War bullets, old handmade bottles dug from Mississippi River mud, pieces of stone, cotton gathered from the roadside during harvest near the site of New Madrid.

"Those tactile things kept me anchored to the work," she says. "I really wanted to enable my readers to bring their bodies to that place and time. I think one of my jobs as a writer is to preserve a time and a place like a historian. But a writer is also preserving more of the world than a historian. We're archivists not just of history, but of the physical and psychological and sociological world."

"I've always felt that our world is so endangered that I want to put as much of it in my books as is possible, so that we never lose it completely," Agee says. " I hope that if someone happens to read this book 50 years from now, they will be able to feel they are in the place and time, as we feel reading the novels and plays of other times."

Alden Mudge is a juror for the California Book Awards.

For author John Burnham Schwartz, it was the bittersweet sense of what might have been, that first sparked his imagination and spurred him to write his new novel, The Commoner.

The book is the story of Haruko, a fictional Empress of Japan who is the first non-aristocratic woman to marry into the Japanese monarchy. "Because she and the rest of the royal family will never get to speak for themselves in any fashion," says Schwartz, "it's the novelist's job to give voice to the voiceless, to get in there and imagine what it might be like to be in those circumstances."

Schwartz is the author of three previous novels, the critically lauded Claire Marvel, Bicycle Days and Reservation Road, which was adapted into a film released last fall. In The Commoner, certain characters bear a striking resemblance to today's real-life Japanese royal family, but Schwartz's empathetic imagin[ings] are all his own. They had to be, for the society portrayed is one of the most secretive monarchies in the world. Everything within is tightly controlled, and in the novel, when Haruko marries the Crown Prince, the accompanying rigidity and suspicion are such a cruel shock to her that she eventually suffers both a nervous breakdown and the loss of her voice. Says the author, "However bad it may seem in the novel, it's worse in real life."

Schwartz claims to have been haunted by the work. "I kept thinking about the story," he says. "There was this idea that you have a normal childhood of some kind. You have parents and you have friends and you have all of the things we go through. But then, at a certain age, you cross over and it's as though you enter into a world that is many things, but it's not life. . . . It doesn't even resemble life. Every single thing is controlled for you. You're not allowed to visit your parents. You're not allowed to make phone calls or write letters on the spur of the moment. Every single thing is monitored and every single thing has a protocol.

"It's as though you've been walking along and suddenly fallen down a well that's 5,000 feet deep. And for those at the bottom of the well," Schwartz says, "the past is their only connection to the real world. All you have of your own identity is what you brought with you: your memories, your feelings, whatever it is that made you who you were at the moment you crossed over."

In the novel, Haruko's own memories of life outside the monarchy are what help sustain her, and once she becomes Empress, they play a decided influence in the difficult decision she must make regarding her son, the Crown Prince, and Keiko, the woman he is desperate to marry. Schwartz's renderings of the royal family a group so completely and totally cut off from the world are not only believable but absorbing. The reader is drawn in, mesmerized by the grace and subtlety of his writing. Small truths appear on every page.

Speaking from his home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife and their son, Schwartz makes it clear that he takes the job of storyteller seriously. "I tend to throw out 400 or 500 pages a novel," he says. "This has been true for every book." Though he wishes he could find a more direct way, it's this time and care that make his work what it is.

His novels have been translated into more than 15 languages and he's written for such publications as The New York Times and the New Yorker. Recently, he tried his hand at screenwriting, translating his 1998 novel Reservation Road into a script that attracted acting heavyweights Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Connelly and Mark Ruffalo.

Filmmaking proved to be a learning experience for Schwartz. "It's a very, very different form of writing," he says. "I sort of enjoy it. It's a different part of the brain. It's not as much in any way about the language. It's about solving certain structural problems. I'm a novelist; if you're writing a novel, you're lucky if you solve three big problems a year."

Problems arising from writing in a voice so foreign from his own are never an issue in The Commoner. Schwartz conducted an immense amount of research, and once he began to write, he went through seven drafts before he felt the book was ready. Such dedicated efforts were rewarded, for The Commoner is a well nuanced and tightly executed dance between trying to make the things that are not said have as much resonance and tension as some of those things that are.

As Schwartz explains, "One of the things I had to develop from the start was a relationship with reticence. So many of the decisions I made in the book during the writing have to do with when to stop, when to let a certain silence be and when to go on. It's a balance, because you don't want the story itself to be reticent. It is this difference between seeking a dramatic reticence as opposed to a reticent drama."

In The Commoner, every character trait, every descriptive detail in every sentence, matters. Schwartz invokes the image of a Zen garden, something that is absolutely a part of Japanese culture. The whole point is that each thing carries more weight because the things around it have been stripped down.

A moving portrait of women living the most interior of lives, The Commoner offers resolution tinged with a glimmer of hope. Schwartz says it's here that fiction and history radically depart. In this case, history seems not just cruel, but impoverished. For him, the answer to what should happen to his characters was clear. "That's part of the reward," he says. "You get to write a history that seems organically possible. It changes their horizons."

Lacey Galbraith is a freelance writer based in Nashville.

There is a moment in Pat Barker’s excellent new novel Life Class when Paul Tarrant, a conflicted young artist serving in France in the ambulance corps at the outbreak of World War I, stares admiringly out over the slanted village rooftops from the attic room he has rented to use as a painting studio when not on duty. It is a moment that comes vividly to mind as Pat Barker describes her own writing space.

"I write at a desk in front of the window straight onto a laptop," Barker says during a call to her home in the northern England city of Durham. "My room is on the top floor so I look out over the roofs of the houses at some trees in the distance. And although it’s not a rural, rural view, there’s a lot of greenery, and, actually, I’m extremely fond of it because of the different angles of the roofs, especially when it’s raining and the colors are brought out. It’s very beautiful in a strange kind of way. It’s very much the view that if I were a painter I would absolutely love to paint."

In normal times, Barker would sit at her desk with its beautiful view and blast out a minimum of 1,000 words a day (and often 2,000-3,000) in a very rough draft that is so "filled with typos that it doesn’t look like it’s written in English. All the right letters are there," she says with the sharp-witted humor that seems typical of her conversational self, "it’s just that all the other letters are there as well."

Unfortunately these are not normal times. Barker’s husband is gravely ill and she is his fulltime caregiver. The couple’s daughter, whose first novel was published last year, lives close by, and their son and his young family live outside Liverpool, on the other side of the Pennines. At the moment, Barker says, her writing room "is completely chaotic because it’s filled with things like disability aids." Then there is the recently discovered gift from one of her two cats—a dead rat lovingly deposited beneath her writing desk. "A decomposing rat on top of everything else is not a good thing," Barker adds wryly.

This unflinching directness revealed in her conversation also happens to be one of the many pleasures of Barker’s fiction. Her novels are slender and swift but live vividly in the mind’s eye and resound with moral force. Barker is best known for her Regeneration Trilogy, which centers on the experiences of the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon during World War I. The trilogy includes Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and Ghost Road, which earned Barker the Booker Prize in 1995.

In Life Class, her 11th novel, Barker seems drawn back to writing about World War I. Except that she doesn’t quite see it that way. "I feel this book is not linked to the trilogy so much as it’s linked to Double Vision," her previous novel, which is set in post-9/11 England. "One of the things Double Vision is about is how you represent real horrors in a way which isn’t exploitative, or disrespectful of people’s suffering, or damaging. While I was writing that book, I was very aware that the people I didn’t mention in earlier books were the people who painted the landscape of the Western Front. I wanted to continue with that theme. You know Susan Sontag’s book about representing the suffering of others? I’m dealing with those sorts of themes, I think, in both Double Vision and in Life Class."

The new novel focuses on the artistic and romantic entanglements of Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville, three young students who share a life-drawing class at an art school called the Slade in the spring of 1914. As she has done in her previous novels, Barker draws deftly from the historical record and populates her fiction with real-life figures such as Lady Ottoline Morrell and Henry Tonks, "a teacher of genius" at the Slade and a doctor who would become known for his pioneering work in reconstructive surgery of facial wounds during the war.

"The essential thing if you’re going to make some of your central characters with historical figures is that you oughtn’t to know much about them," Barker says. "It gives you blank areas of the canvas in which you can project." But the projection stops "at the bedroom door. It’s as simple as that. If it’s a real person, I don’t probe into the most private areas of their lives."

With her fictional characters, however, Barker is far less constrained. Her characters live fully both in their heads and in their bodies. "The human body and specifically the male body is at the center of both parts of the novel," Barker says. "It’s the kind of hinge on which the book turns since the function of the body in the first half is so radically changed in the second half."

Barker says she remains fascinated by this generation of young artists whose lives were so dramatically altered by World War I. "It was one of these curious collections of very talented people in one place at one time. Which sometimes happens. It has to be purely coincidental, though the fact that Tonks was a great teacher also helped to establish a kind of creative ferment within the class. But you had English aristocrats and really, really dirt-poor Jewish boys from the East End of London who were there on scholarship in the same classroom. A considerable proportion of them were really talented."

In fact, Barker hopes to restore order soon to the chaos in her workroom, reclaim her beautiful view and get back to work on another novel about this period. "I don’t want it to necessarily be a second volume or a sequel," she says with renewed enthusiasm, "but, yes, some of the same characters will appear, obviously with new characters. I’m quite interested in the hospital where Tonks did his plastic surgery and in the conflicts of identity which arise with the loss of the human face."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

On June 24, 1913, 12 men reached a verdict in the trial of Anna Dotson, the first woman in Tennessee history to face possible hanging for murder. It was a case that fascinated the public, and nearly a century later it grabbed the attention of Kip Gayden, a judge of the First Circuit Court in Nashville. The judge began poring over local newspaper accounts of the case. "The thing that hooked me most was that every article I read got more interesting," Gayden recalls. "The story was just surreal and no historians that I knew had ever heard of this case."

Gayden, who's been presiding over court cases for more than 30 years, was so fascinated by the events and people enmeshed in this century-old romantic triangle that he decided to turn those newspaper stories into his first work of historical fiction, Miscarriage of Justice. Writing is a familiar activity for the judge; in the past he's produced magazine articles on Tennessee judicial cases, a novel about a POW and a biography of former Nashville Mayor John Bass. Turning for the first time to historical fiction, Gayden decided to devote his limited time away from the bench to imagining what reporters hadn't covered in Anna Dotson's story. And for the next five years, that's what he did. "I had been looking for a subject and I am drawn to historical stories," he says. "I've found it stretches one's imagination, lets one's mind wander. I used to paint a little, and writing is like that. You go into another world."

It was a friend researching his genealogy who first came across an article about Dotson. Knowing Gayden's interest in history, especially as it relates to the law, he suggested the judge check it out.

Dotson was a prominent and popular socialite in the small town of Gallatin, Tennessee, who shot and killed her lover, Charlie Cobb, while he was cutting hair in a Nashville barbershop. Saying she had already ruined her life by having the affair, Dotson confessed to authorities that she killed Cobb to prevent her husband from doing so. Dr. Walter Dotson was a pillar of their community; Anna Dotson said it was better that she, not her husband, suffer the consequences of killing Cobb. To his surprise, Gayden found himself feeling compassion for the 32-year-old woman. "When I first got into the story, I was of the opinion that this woman did a terrible deed, and she did. Killing someone is wrong and can't be justified. But I really got into the head of Anna Dotson in writing the book. She was in a vise, a terrible vise, and took that way out. As you'll notice, my book ends up by saying 'you be the judge' because I have a different feeling about it than when I started the story."

Part of the vise in which Anna Dotson found herself were the restrictions society imposed on its female population in 1913. Women were still seven years away from ratification of the 19th amendment, which would allow them to vote. Higher education, career choice, winning custody of children in divorce cases, access to birth control, inheriting family property—all were difficult for women because of laws or social stigma. And according to Gayden's research, getting Walter to find time for his wife was especially difficult for Anna. "He [Dr. Dotson] was a workaholic. He was extremely active politically and received President Taft in Gallatin, as a matter of fact. He was head of the Lion's Club, he was a lecturer for the Masons, a city alderman. He was a doctor and did surgery in Nashville as well as Gallatin. I don't know how the guy even went home—and sometimes, apparently, he didn't," Gayden says with a laugh.

Gayden not only immersed himself in newspaper reports of the crime, he also turned detective, sleuthing for additional sources of information from city archives and stories passed down from people who'd known Anna Dotson. But no one proved to be more revealing, or to tell the tale better, than the woman herself. "One of the interesting things about it was that she got up on the witness stand and wrote my book. She didn't pull any punches. I'm sure her lawyers were telling her, shut up! But she just told the whole story."

The story, yes. The novel, no. Gayden feels it's the responsibility of any writer of historical fiction to be as accurate as possible, with the understanding that conversations, emotions, reactions and other subjective occurrences are the province of the author. "Just about everything in the book is either true or reasonably based on the characters and the events as they would have happened," he says. "I think you have the responsibility to stick to the truth as much as you can."

In 1913, women were not allowed to serve on juries, which meant there were 12 men deciding Anna Dotson's fate, including the possibility of the death sentence. Suffragettes attended the trial, wearing the yellow roses that were a symbol of their support for passage of the 19th amendment. The debate over whether women should have the right to vote, thereby also gaining the right to be on juries, became a subplot in Miscarriage of Justice. "I think the men [on the jury] had to go through an osmosis in a short period of time in their thinking," Gayden says. "It's reasonable to ask if Walter Dotson had killed him [Charlie Cobb], what would they have done to him? I think they believed she [Anna] killed Charlie to spare Walter."

Having developed his own feelings of sympathy for Anna Dotson, Gayden was surprised by how many of his advance readers disagreed with the jury's final verdict. So did the trial's judge, A.B. Neil, who later became chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court. Neil called the verdict a "miscarriage of justice," which gave Gayden his book's title. Gayden's goal in writing Miscarriage of Justice was a simple one, he says. "It is historical fiction I wanted to make into a mystery, to set up a jury trial in such a way that it would be a one-two punch to the reader." Did he accomplish that goal? To quote the final line in his book, "I invite you to be the judge."

Formerly host of "The Fine Print," a public radio program of interviews with writers, Rebecca Bain currently reads for work and pleasure at her home in Nashville.

Here’s a classic tale: the well-meaning but gullible innocent, seduced by corruptors into a morally murky enterprise, must question everything he holds true in order to redeem himself. In Clyde Edgerton’s ninth comic novel, The Bible Salesman, 20-year-old Henry Dampier hitches a ride from a smooth Clark Gable look-alike named Preston Clearwater, point man for a car-theft ring working the backwoods of North Carolina following World War II. Clearwater cons Henry into becoming his accomplice by convincing the boy he’s actually an undercover FBI agent moving vehicles in America’s great chess game against communism. When Henry eventually wises up, it’s a safe bet there will be blood.

The provenance of Edgerton’s latest novel is worth exploring, if only to gain a glimpse of how this idiosyncratic humorist, longtime professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and lead singer of the Rank Strangers routinely produces magic from mayhem. With Walker Percy long gone and T.R. Pearson AWOL, few writers today mine the rich Southern idiom like Edgerton. Who else can so seamlessly weave scripture-quoting housecats into a rural Tar Heel narrative and make it fly? Or explore existential themes of uncertainty and impermanence through the lens of a "Jesus Saves!" bumper-sticker salesman whose handiwork washes away with the Carolina rain?

Trouble, or at least literary mischief, sauntered Edgerton’s way when two Southern dark humorists, William Gay (Twilight) and Tom Franklin (Hell at the Breech), approached him to write a short story in tribute to Flannery O’Connor for a Southern Review anthology. Edgerton responded with "The Great Speckled Bird," a story that throws together two archetypes from O’Connor’s work: the Bible salesman from "Good Country People" and the misfit from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Intrigued by the resulting interplay between these two borrowed characters, Edgerton decided to expand the short story into a novel. A really long novel. "In my early draft, I took Henry from 1930 to 2000. It was a life story of this character," he recalls. "As I started to work, I realized I was going to be unable to finish a book that big, so I decided to stop at 1950." Even as Edgerton was tailoring back his tale, he imbued in young Henry his own lifelong quest to understand the confounding and sometimes contradictory nature of Scripture.

"The first 18 years of my life, I was a fundamentalist Christian who believed that every word in the Bible was inspired by a knowing, present God. I gradually began to doubt that, and did not have the insight that it was possible to throw out the baby with the bath water; that Christianity was a little more complicated than a belief in the literal interpretation of every word in the Bible," he says.

Edgerton, who admits he tends to follow his interests first and then worry about how to fit them into his fiction, became particularly intrigued by two translations of the 23rd Psalm.

"One of the inspirations for writing this book was stumbling on that last line of the 23rd Psalm, in which the Greek translation, which was from Hebrew, said ‘and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’ OK, that indicates a life after death. The Hebrew Bible on the other hand, the source of that Scripture, says ‘I shall dwell in the house of the Lord down to old age.’ There’s an astounding difference; the difference between those two passages is infinity!"

Such biblical puzzles have Henry stuck literally on page one of the Old Testament, trying to figure out two conflicting versions of the Book of Genesis. His earnest efforts throughout the novel to talk through and resolve these Bible brainteasers with anyone who will listen, be it Clearwater, his cousin Carson or his girlfriend Marleen, ultimately help him recognize the jam he’s in and make the split-second decision necessary to save himself.

So what’s with the Scripture-spieling housecats? Edgerton issues the chuckle of a lad caught skipping Sunday school.

"Wow. I’ll tell you what’s up with cats. I did a lot of reading of different translations of the Bible and biblical commentary and scholarship, the differences between Jewish traditions and Christian traditions and the melding of the two, so I had a lot of notes and information. I ended up having no way to use that information because I didn’t have any theologians as characters to discuss it. In my case, the only way I could get it in was through these damn cats," he explains.

"Near the end, maybe two or three drafts from the last draft, those cats talked for pages and pages, Old Testament and New Testament, Christianity and Jewish arguments. My editor didn’t understand any of it and advised me to cut it, which I did. I think the book is better as a consequence. I knew I couldn’t solve the centuries of disputes between Jews and Christians in one novel."

Unlike most of his previous novels, from Raney (1985) to Lunch at the Picadilly (2003), The Bible Salesman reveals little about the man behind the mischief, theological felines notwithstanding. Edgerton chalks that up to having started with Ms. O’Connor’s archetypes in developing his characters. "Henry and Clearwater and the situations were more made-up than any novel I’ve ever written," he says.

Edgerton hopes to continue that trend in his next project, an exploration of ’60s music and race relations that centers on "seven white boys who try to do James Brown’s Live at the Apollo album from the first note to the last note verbatim."

"I wouldn’t mind a different direction," Edgerton admits. "I just kind of follow my nose. In my first eight books, I used a lot of stuff from my life and people I’ve known; it’s all been a translation from real life to fiction. My guess is, starting with this book it will be more whole cloth than before. I find myself counting on and wanting to just make up more stuff."

Jay MacDonald writes from the Bible belt in Austin, Texas.

Like other gifted writers of his generation, James McBride has the enviable capacity to enlarge and complicate his readers’ understanding of what it means to be human. McBride amply demonstrated this ability in his first book, the lyrical, transcendent memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996). He proves it again in his first novel, Miracle at St. Anna. 

"I’m always looking for that connective tissue that binds one piece of humanity to the next," McBride says during a call to his home in New Jersey. "I really live in that gray space between black and white. Because that’s where the truth lives."

Based on a little-known factual episode of World War II, Miracle at St. Anna tells the story of four black soldiers from the segregated 92nd Division during the campaign in Italy in the final year of the war. The narrative focuses mainly on Sam Train, a hulking, otherworldly, Christ-like innocent from America’s Deep South who finds and cares for a traumatized Italian child who was a survivor of a Nazi massacre in the village of St. Anna di Stazzema.

"That was the best part of the book to write," McBride says. "Because you had these two creatures who in many ways typify innocence and yet are so culturally, physically and humanistically different. I loved that relationship."

The inspiration for the novel, as McBride states in his acknowledgements at the end of the book, came from the stories his Uncle Henry, a World War II veteran, told at family gatherings in New York. Because of those stories, McBride says, he was always curious about the role blacks had played in World War II. "After The Color of Water became a success and I had some creative freedom, I decided to write a book about the black soldiers who liberated a concentration camp in Hungary. But it just didn’t work. It wasn’t the story I was put here to tell. Eventually I realized I didn’t want to write a book that just glorified war, because war is not a glorious thing. The whole business was just a futile act of human madness. So I started to research this piece and began to construct my story and seek the characters that would inhabit it, and I essentially became very depressed for several months. From this outrageous hurricane of tumultuous events I had to find something that had some meaning."

To research the book, McBride moved himself and his family to Italy for the better part of a year. "You can’t reach the kind of detailed knowledge you need by reading a book; you have to go there. You have to eat it and live it. My research process is always very extensive. For The Color of Water I interviewed friends that I grew up with because they remembered details of my life as a child that I had no recollection of. In Italy, I interviewed everyone I could."

The result is a vibrant portrait of a rural, war-torn Italy that will be unfamiliar to most American readers. "There’s another world in Italy that is much deeper than what Italians usually allow outsiders to see. The land is just haunted. They believe that God shaped the mountains with his finger and that witches live in the hills. "

In Miracle at St. Anna the Italian villagers and the black American soldiers develop a special bond, a relationship McBride says is based on historical fact. "Every single black soldier I talked to who was in Italy just loved the Italians. German soldiers and white American soldiers disdained the Italians. Black soldiers knew what that felt like. They had enormous compassion for the Italians. They respected them. And the respect was mutual."

McBride, who delivered a beautifully nuanced portrait of racial relations in his memoir The Color of Water, brings the same humanity and understanding to his exploration of the complicated relationships between black soldiers and their white commanders in this novel. "There was a tremendous amount of distrust between the soldiers and the officers who commanded them," he says. "You also had Northern officers and Southern officers who were at odds over how blacks should be treated. It’s easy now to look back on these officers and say they were bad, but we were basically asking these men, normal men, to do an extraordinary thing — greet America’s civil rights movement with open arms while at war. We funneled our civil rights problem into the hands of four or five hundred officers of the 92nd Division. Some of them were up to the task and some of them weren’t."

According to McBride, the two military campaigns his four protagonists participate in have been viewed as failures by military historians because black soldiers cut and ran, refused to fight or became disorganized. His own research and recent work by military scholars have challenged this assessment

But McBride’s purpose isn’t really to rehabilitate reputations or glorify war. "I wrote the book because I think war is a bad thing," he says emphatically. "I plan to make that very clear whenever I talk about the book." And, indeed, the novel is sometimes brutal and tragic; McBride’s warriors suffer.

They also transcend. A deeply religious man, McBride says he wanted Miracle at St. Anna to also "speak to the miracles that happen if you believe in God. I sort of skirt the mythical. I just scrape the top level of suds off the beer mug, just enough that you can suspend your disbelief for a moment."

Reflecting on his own life, McBride says, "I’m at the point where I realize that the only things keeping me from being wormfood are the tiny molecules dancing around in my body; to me that’s a kind of miracle.

"I’ve come to believe there’s no such thing as control or safety," he says. "I love America. My family is a living example of what is possible in America, and so am I. But American society has become in many ways the moral equivalent of cardboard. We have all these fancy gadgets that keep us materially comfortable. We feel we have the technology to make other people suffer and keep ourselves immune from suffering. But there is no safety. . . . That’s why everyone is so upset right now. No one is immune from suffering. We will all suffer someday. So the deeper question is how do you want to live? We can live in fear. Or we can live as sharing, caring people. In that way, I think it’s a good time for Miracle at St. Anna to come out."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.