Readers familiar with Hari Kunzru’s provocative articles in Wired magazine will be surprised by the historical setting of his dazzling first novel, The Impressionist. At first blush, there seems to be absolutely no connection between an edgy interest in the broad societal impacts of technology and a fascination with the waning days of the British Empire.

Dig a bit deeper, however, and the relationship between Kunzru’s Internet journalism and his novel about the amazing adventures of Pran Nath, a boy with an astonishing capacity to shape himself in order to conform to the expectations of those around him, becomes clear. Kunzru has questions about the whole idea of what it means to be a person.

“We’re being asked to deal with a very complicated networked world using a set of 18th century beliefs about ourselves.”

“The origins of the book come from my interest in exploring the character of Pran,” Kunzru says during a phone call to London, where he lives. “His identity is a function of how he is perceived by others. I’m very interested in our reliance on a Romantic conception of character. . . . We’re being asked to deal with a very complicated networked world using a set of 18th century beliefs about ourselves.”

Kunzru’s method for exploring such a heady set of ideas is unexpected, to say the least. On its surface, The Impressionist is a rollicking tale of a young boy who comes of age at a critical moment in world history. Set in India, England and Africa in the 1920s, the novel follows the strange course of Pran’s life. Born of an almost incidental liaison between an Englishman and an Indian woman, who convinces her wealthy husband that the child is his, Pran lives an empty, pampered childhood. But when his mother’s betrayal is discovered 15 years later, Pran is thrown into the streets of Agra, India, and begins a journey that takes him through a series of identities as he passes from a half-caste Indian boy to a white, Oxford University educated member of the ruling class. Sent to West Africa on an expedition to study the legendary Fotse people (one of Kunzru’s more brilliant fictional inventions), Pran must finally confront the question of who he really is.

“Writing fiction was such a comfort to me during a confusing adolescence.”

Kunzru’s own identity quest led him to fiction at a young age. “Writing fiction was such a comfort to me during a confusing adolescence,” he says. “I remember the joy of being able to escape into a fully realized world when the world around me was uncontrollable and not doing what I wanted it to do.”

After completing a degree in English literature at Oxford, Kunzru “spent a couple of years drifting around doing lots of odd jobs and writing.” He had no luck getting published and decided to return to school for a master’s degree in literature and philosophy. “I ended up going down the corridor and hanging out with people interested in artificial intelligence and networks. I became fascinated with the way technology has an impact on society.”

Through a chance meeting at a party and some shrewd professional networking, Kunzru was able to parlay his interest in technology into a job with the British edition of Wired, where he quickly rose from “tea boy” to associate editor. He stopped writing fiction completely.

When the British Wired folded two years later, in 1997, Kunzru was almost relieved. “It gave me the kick that I needed to actually get back and start doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” Kunzru patched together a series of travel writing jobs (he was named Young Travel Writer of the Year in 1999) and music reviews (he is still music editor for a design and lifestyle magazine called Wallpaper) to support himself, and in 1998 he started researching The Impressionist.

“When your writing is set in your own milieu, you have an awful lot of information at your fingertips—what a kitchen looks like, what your shaving routine is. Instantly all this had to be thought about and researched.”

It was a daunting process. “I wasn’t initially confident that I could control the material or that I wouldn’t get sucked into a vortex of detail. When your writing is set in your own milieu, you have an awful lot of information at your fingertips—what a kitchen looks like, what your shaving routine is. Instantly all this had to be thought about and researched. I became a junkie for photographic material, for the domestic packaging of the era, for anything I could find that was part of the normal textures of everyday life.”

Kunzru also became a regular at the Oriental and India Office Collection at the British Library. “British being British, the Empire was highly bureaucratized and everything was written down and annotated and signed off on numbered chits. Effectively you have the complete administrative records from the 18th century on. It’s a fantastic resource. . . . It was a good morning when I discovered that there was a theory that the sun’s rays interfered with your bone marrow so people wore thick pads under their safari shirts to protect their spines from harm. That’s the sort of peculiar detail I adored. I also got to be a big fan of the secret political files.”

As a result of his evocative details and his highly polished prose, The Impressionist is a remarkably textured, often very funny novel that has generated a vast amount of prepublication buzz, both here and in England. It earned Kunzru a very hefty advance and a place in the constellation of important young British novelists writing about a very new, multiracial, multiethnic Britain.

“I wanted to set the story at a time when the stakes were particularly high for racial identity. . . . I wanted to set this at the very last moment when this enormous system of control seemed possible.”

The Impressionist can be read simply as an adventure story as well as an examination of the very vexing issues of identity, especially racial and ethnic identity. On that issue, Kunzru says, “It’s a book about hybridity, disruption and disjunction. . . . I wanted to set the story at a time when the stakes were particularly high for racial identity. . . . I wanted to set this at the very last moment when this enormous system of control seemed possible. It’s kind of like Elmer Fudd when he runs off a cliff: until he looks down and sees that there’s no ground beneath him, he can keep running. That’s the kind of moment I was interested in.”

For Kunzru there seems to be something of a personal, poignant edge to his interest in such moments. The son of an English nurse and an Indian doctor who immigrated to England in the ’60s, Kunzru was born in England and lived in Essex, just outside of London, until he went to Oxford. “Essex,” he says jokingly, “has the same relationship to London that New Jersey has to New York. It’s known for its tastelessness.”

Throughout his life, Kunzru says, he’s been confronted by the classic question: where are you from? “When I’d say I’m from Essex,’ they’d say, No, where are you FROM?’ Suddenly this world of confusion opens for you.

“Within this material there was something I needed to find out. The act of writing The Impressionist allowed me to discover that. I think the question I turned out to be answering had very much to do with my own cultural identity and with my personal identity as well. I am now able to be articulate about thoughts and feelings I wasn’t able to talk about before. It was also a very practical way for me to think about India, a country and history without which I wouldn’t be here, but which wasn’t really very present in my childhood.”

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

We invite you, dear readers, to peruse the pages of The Crimson Petal and the White, a deliciously Dickensian jaunt through Victorian London that smacks of the city’s seedier quarters. Full of scheming whores, surly servants, simpering society ladies and smartly dressed gents, the book’s as rollicking, bawdy and brilliant a yarn as aught that’s come out of the Empire since Mrs. Brown sat upon the throne. So settle your specs upon your nose, keep a cup of tea by your knee and take up Michel Faber’s tale. We promise Petal will not disappoint.

Indeed, Faber’s newest novel, a large-scale historical set piece that unfolds over 800-plus pages, is (pardon the pun) worth the weight. At once an old-fashioned entertainment and fiction of the highest order, it’s a profound and eloquent exploration of class and gender in Victorian-era society whose implications will resonate with modern readers. The book marks another innovative move for Faber, whose last novel Under the Skin a genre-busting narrative about an alien from outer space was hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Backpedaling a couple of centuries, Petal follows a large cast of classic British characters, at the center of which is Sugar, a smart, seductive 19-year-old prostitute who insinuates herself into the life of a wealthy perfumer named William Rackham. The self-absorbed William, driven by his lust for Sugar, pursues her with an air of lordly entitlement. She soon steals his heart, becoming privy to his business and family affairs.

And what a family it is. Henry Rackham, William’s devoutly religious brother, harbors feelings for Mrs. Emmaline Fox, a scandalously independent, good-hearted widow who ministers to London’s lower classes. And then there’s Agnes, wife of William, the consummate Victorian lady, delicate, nervous, dependent and completely deranged. Faber skillfully juggles these intersecting lives and multiple points of view to create a compelling social novel a narrative bolstered by his uncanny ability to channel female voices and his knowledge of London’s Byzantine streets.

Faber, who was born in the Netherlands in 1960, wrote the first draft of the novel 22 years ago, composing on a typewriter and correcting errors with paint, scissors and glue. But he set the novel aside, fearing no one in the publishing industry would bother with the ragged manuscript. Revising the book after two decades has enabled him to fully explore the complexities of class and custom in an age of ornate social ritual, an era when private desires simmered beneath public facades. BookPage recently corresponded with the author, who says shuffling between bed and computer while at work on Petal has left him disinclined to begin another novel. These days, short stories occupy his time.

The Crimson Petal and the White was recently serialized in the British newspaper The Guardian, which posted each episode on the web. Did it feel odd to send your work out into cyberspace in this way?
Michel Faber: I haven’t traveled into cyberspace to see it. I wrote it for myself, on paper. And I’m sure that if my work is destined to survive, it will survive on thin slices of tree, not as digital impulses flitting around in computers. Giving people a taste of my novel on the Internet is fun, but Bill Gates’ dream of a future where books no longer exist is the sort of folly that only someone who doesn’t appreciate literature could conceive. Books are meant to be held and taken to bed.

You’ve said that Petal combines the richness of Victorian prose with some of the effects that have been rendered possible in modern prose." What modern touches/effects do you feel you brought to the book, specifically?
The pace and density of the prose varies according to how fast I want the narrative to move. If you read Victorian pulp fiction the so-called penny dreadfuls" you’ll find they’re still a lot more verbose and ponderous than the spare, swift narratives of modern thrillers. In Petal, I could move from Dickensian richness to Chandleresque sparseness, as long as I handled the transition so smoothly that it wasn’t obtrusive. Another way in which Petal is utterly modern is in its social, political and psychological perspective. The story maintains the seductive illusion that it’s unfolding in 1875, but a lot of its insights are based on what we’ve learned since then, about feminism, child abuse and so on. Obviously the book is also much more sexually explicit than any Victorian novel was free to be.

You started the novel 22 years ago and put it away. What made you decide to have another go at it?
The first version of Petal was very grim, with Sugar getting crushed under the heel of Fate at the end, like a tragic Hardy heroine. I decided to give her more freedom, to give her a chance to be happy. In fact, I gave all the characters freedom to grow and develop. The original architecture of the book was sound enough to permit this.

Where did the idea of Sugar come from? With her intellect and wisdom, she makes William and most of the other men in the book look foolish.
Like Isserley [the alien heroine] in Under the Skin, Sugar isn’t as clever and together as she imagines she is. She’s sharp and well-read and resourceful, but there’s a lot she needs to learn. Her potential, and the emotional damage that threatens to kill that potential, are among the more autobiographical aspects of the book.

You were born in the Netherlands, moved to Australia and now live in Scotland. How did these moves shape your sense of the world and the concept of home, and how have they influenced your writing?
I don’t feel I have a home anywhere, which may be why some of my characters are so seriously alienated from their environment. Sugar and William are pretty much at home in London, though. If a story requires its characters to have roots, I give them roots. Authors have no right to impose their own screw-ups onto stories where they don’t belong. Each story knows what’s best for it, if the author will only listen.

I spoke only Dutch until I was seven, and in my shock at being dumped in an alien country I probably learned English better than I needed to. However, I think it’s possible to make too much of this idea that having to cope with a language change at a tender age leads one to have certain notions about communication. I think it’s family life, not nationality, that creates your sense of whether communication is difficult or easy, safe or treacherous.

Speaking of communication, we’re curious about your reluctance to do phone interviews. Would you care to comment?
When we communicate by letter/email, we know what the limitations are and we allow for them. Telephones are evil because they encourage you to imagine that you’re having a real conversation, when really you’re hearing disembodied noises coming out of a plastic doodad.

First-time novelist Robert Hough was not the kind of boy who dreamed of running away with the circus. But later in life, after he read a brief biographical sketch of Mabel Stark, the greatest female tiger trainer of the 1910s and 1920s, the circus more or less ran away with him.

"I became a sort of circus aficionado," Hough says during a call to his home in Toronto. In fact, during his research for his fictionalized autobiography of Stark, he traveled with a modern-day circus throughout rural Texas. And even now, two years after The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was published to critical acclaim in Canada, and with his next novel nearing completion, Hough still eagerly anticipates his next trip to the Ringling Brothers Museum in Sarasota, Florida.

"The circus was a wild environment back in Mabel’s day," Hough says, noting that today’s circuses are far tamer than circuses of that bygone Golden Age. Those earlier circuses thrilled locals with their well-deserved reputation for the forbidden. They drew much of their itinerant labor force from local drunk wards and insane asylums. Their infamous "cooch" shows were designed to lure ogling townsmen away from their women and then separate these hapless husbands from their wallets during the gambling, or "grift," that almost always preceded the girly shows. Before reforms required that lions and tigers be castrated, declawed and defanged, the "big cat" acts, which were wildly popular with audiences, often proved fatal to trainers.

"In Mabel’s day, trainers got killed all the time," Hough says. "In fact, Mabel’s big break with the Al G. Barnes Circus came because the woman who had the tiger act before her got killed."

What leads a petite girl from a rural farm in Kentucky to become a big cat trainer? It’s one of the questions that drives Hough’s exuberant and sometimes sorrowful novel. And Hough’s fictional exploration of this and similar questions is so compelling that actress Kate Winslet is eager to play Mabel Stark in the movie version of the novel that is currently under development.

"I think she’d be great," Hough says. "If she’s not the best screen actress out there, she’s certainly in the top three. And it would be a demanding role to play Mabel, because so much of what she’s about is internalized."

Hough reveals Mabel’s inner self by giving her a voice and a way of telling her story that is unique and idiosyncratic. Mabel’s voice, her perspective, her attitude is one of the great pleasures and great achievements of the novel. "I spent a lot of time working on Mabel’s voice, on the way she sounds," Hough says. "And then I just kind of let ‘er rip and wrote the vast majority of the book in one eight-month frenzy of creativity."

The Final Confession of Mabel Stark is set in 1968 with Mabel Stark now approaching 80 and about to be canned by Jungleland, a California amusement park where she had performed with her cats since leaving the circus in the 1930s. She reflects on her life with a mixture of passion and sadness, trying to understand what her life has meant, and particularly how responsible she has been for the accidents, failed marriages and tragedies that have followed her.

Around Mabel’s inner quest, Hough weaves an incredibly energetic story of circus life in its heyday. Mabel knew, but did not always like, the greats of the circus world—John Ringling, Clyde Beatty, Al G. Barnes, lion trainer Louis Roth. They appear here in all their strange and many-colored glory. It’s an exciting and entrancing portrait of life in what was then the most popular public entertainment in the land.

One of the most difficult elements for Hough to write about was the sexual nature of part of Mabel Stark’s tiger act. During research for the book, Hough found a letter from Stark describing in colorful detail her act with Rajah, her most famous tiger. "One of the scenes in the book that I knew I was going to have the hardest time trying to sell was the sex with tigers stuff," Hough says. "I wouldn’t have put that stuff in except that I was duty bound to do so. The book would have been a cheat had I not acknowledged that facet of her personality, and it’s a pretty big thing. Unresolved sexual conflicts are the sort of things that can groom a person’s entire life. And in her case, I’m sure it did."

Hough, who studied psychology at university before undertaking "a less than stellar seven-month advertising career" and then moving on to magazine and story writing, says he is surprised at how Freudian his story of Mabel Stark has turned out to be.

"It was her subconscious that motivated all these problems in her life and caused her to pick a profession where she knew she was going to get hurt. This is a book about a woman whose self-destructive quality gets mixed up with her sexuality, and that’s the tension that informs everything that happens in the book."

Despite all that, Hough regards Mabel Stark as courageous, perhaps even heroic, and he hopes the American publication of The Final Confession of Mabel Stark will bring her the fame she deserves.

"I’m hoping this book gets popular and people discover Mabel Stark so that she’ll go down as one of the best big cat trainers in history."

Alden Mudge, who writes from Oakland, is a member of the California Book Awards jury.

Novelist Robert Morgan focuses on the nation’s first war Rape, murder, disguise, deception the opening pages of Robert Morgan’s new novel, Brave Enemies, have all the elements of a modern-day thriller. But this gripping story actually takes place during the American Revolution, an era when neighbor suspected neighbor and the “wrong” sympathies, whether actual or perceived, could deliver your neck to a noose in short order.

Running for her life from dire circumstances at home, 16-year-old Josie Summers cuts her hair, dresses in men’s clothing and leaves behind the small world of her family farm in the Carolinas. Rushing headlong into a wider world with grave dangers, Josie eventually finds herself in the midst of the crucial Battle of Cowpens.

“I first heard about the Battle of Cowpens from my father,” Morgan says, explaining how the initial seed for the novel was planted years before it grew to fruition. “He was a great storyteller, and I was, of course, intensely interested in the Revolutionary battles fought in the South, being a North Carolina native. And this battle, one in which a smaller, less equipped force defeats a larger one, was fascinating in technical terms.” The original pages of the battle story that would evolve into Brave Enemies sat idle, tucked away for more than 10 years. “I had to put it aside,” he explains, “because even though I knew the events surrounding Cowpens, I didn’t know many of the details that would come later after much research.” Research is key for Morgan, who is known for bringing history to life in his meticulously detailed fiction. In such novels as The Hinterlands, Gap Creek (an Oprah Book Club selection) and This Rock, he has skillfully portrayed the lives of Appalachian mountain people, from 18th century pioneers to 20th century bootleggers.

BookPage interviewed Morgan by telephone from his office at Cornell University, where he has taught for 36 years. “As we speak, I can see cornfields,” he says. “But, ironically, it was here at Cornell that I became a student of my own heritage. I’ve spent many hours in the library studying Appalachia its history, dialects, religions and so forth.” First acclaimed as a poet, Morgan explains that his prose writing style is the result of studied effort. “When I went back to fiction writing about 20 years ago, I was determined that I would not write poetic prose, descriptive and static, but dynamic, dramatic, narrative prose with a plot and tension and character development,” he says. With the American Revolution as its backdrop, an anguished love story at its core and the Battle of Cowpens at its culmination, Brave Enemies is anything but static. The novel began to take shape once Morgan found the fictional narrative voices that would propel the story and give it immediacy and intimacy.

Josie’s voice came first. “I wrote two versions of Brave Enemies that were more in dialect (very much like Gap Creek) but I wasn’t satisfied,” Morgan recalls. “I wanted readers to be intimate with Josie, yet not be conscious of the language, so I decided on a plain, simple style. I wanted the language to be virtually transparent.” And it is Josie, posing as “Joseph,” who carries the story and captures our hearts as she falls in love with John Trethman, a traveling Methodist minister who takes her in. Finding herself simultaneously awakened to a new spirituality and a new sexuality, she winds up tramping through the woods as part of the North Carolina militia and ultimately fighting for her life in a battle that would be pivotal to the birth of a new nation.

The voice of John Trethman, struggling with his own human frailties while trying to minister to others, is also critical. “To my mind,” Morgan says, “the real subject of the story is the moral ambiguity of the era. It was very hard to decide what was right. Keep in mind that if you were a British subject, it was your duty to be loyal to the Crown and obey the laws of England and the teachings of the Church of England. John’s character enabled me to see and portray both sides.” Ardent in his mission to bring “hymnody and prayer and the spirit of forgiveness” to his congregations in the backcountry, and determined to remain a pacifist, John is also ultimately caught in the whirlwind of revolution. When he discovers “Joseph” is a girl, he is at once appalled at her deception and the power of his own desires. At first wracked with guilt, he eventually succumbs to the greater power of love, only to be brutally torn away from Josie and forced into serving as a minister to the British army. Camped on opposite sides, Josie and John are forced to witness the clash of loyalties that would change the course of history.

Morgan isn’t the only well-known author to tackle a fictional story with a Revolutionary setting. Former president Jimmy Carter has also written a Revolutionary War novel The Hornet’s Nest which is due for release next month. “As a matter of fact,” Morgan told us, “I just got back from Plains, Georgia, where I met with Mr. Carter to discuss his new book. Isn’t he amazing?” Morgan declares with evident admiration. “With all his diplomatic work and work for Habitat for Humanity he still found time to write a work of fiction!” His meeting with Carter led Morgan to discover that their books complement one another. “You know, America has sort of been obsessed with the Civil War. [Carter and I] both had a desire to give this incredible conflict, when the country was really born, more literary exposure, and to look at the Revolutionary War through a more Southern lens.” Moral ambiguity may have plagued the colonies but there’s no uncertainty about the drama of the era. Morgan succeeds in delivering both a riveting story of romance and a testament to the notion that in any honorable conflict, both sides can be hailed by the term “brave enemies.”

In the wave of praise that will soon greet Samantha Gillison's near-perfect novel, The King of America, much will be made of Gillison's debt to the story of Michael Rockefeller's life and disappearance. It's a debt Gillison freely acknowledges, both in the novel's back-matter and in conversation.

"I used a lot of the road posts of Michael Rockefeller's life," Gillison says during a phone call to her home about the new novel. Gillison and her husband, a book editor, and their six-year-old son live in Brooklyn Heights, not terribly far from Gillison's good friend and fellow-novelist Jhumpa Lahiri. In conversation Gillison is open, perceptive, enthusiastic and funny. "I sound like such a dingbat," she exclaims happily just after explaining that she chose ancient Greek, her major at Brown University, because she found the material "really really cool."

About Michael Rockefeller, Gillison is also enthusiastic and perceptive. "He was a really interesting guy, a visionary in terms of his ambition and the art he wanted to collect and why he wanted to collect it," she says. "I really do admire him. Of course in a person like him there can also be an arrogance, a sense of I am God-like.' "

Michael Rockefeller, the son of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and a member of one of the wealthiest families in America, disappeared in the Arafura Sea off the coast of New Guinea in 1961 at the age of 22. The young Rockefeller was part of an anthropological expedition doing field work among the tribal societies of New Guinea. He was also collecting local artwork, particularly Bisj poles, elaborately carved poles that had been banned by the governing Dutch and Indonesian authorities because the carvings were associated with headhunting and ritual cannibalism.

Dangerous waters

Rockefeller's disappearance set off an intensive and heartbreaking search. That he was never found has fueled rumors and "confessions" ever since. Not long ago, several aging New Guineans claimed to have killed and eaten him. Gillison does not believe them. "There was certainly headhunting and cannibalism going on when Michael Rockefeller was in New Guinea. But I have been on the sea where he was, and it is a treacherous sea. He was there right at monsoon season. He was a wonderful swimmer, but he had been out all night without food or water. He wasn't jumping in on a clear Maine morning to swim across the bay after breakfast. It would have been shocking if he'd made it to shore. It's much more likely that he drowned or was eaten by a shark."

Gillsion herself was moved by the Rockefeller story as a child living in Papua New Guinea in the 1970s. "I still think it's one of the saddest stories I've ever heard," she says in comments at the end of the book. From the age of six to eight, Gillison lived in a remote New Guinea village while her mother did field work for a doctorate in anthropology and her father worked as a wildlife photographer.

"We were very far from any kind of town, and the only people who spoke English were my parents," Gillison recalls. "I didn't spend much time with them, so by the time I left I was arguably better at speaking the local language than English. I couldn't really read or write until I was about eight-and-a-half. It was a beautiful, amazing place to be, and I really liked the people there. The experience has given me a weird, split idea about home, people, life. Here things seem very much constructed; I see the materiality of things. Sometimes I feel alienated from this view. Sometimes my childhood can come flying back in my face and it can be very hard to negotiate."

Perhaps it is this acute sense of dislocation that is the source of Gillison's beautiful use of language, her extraordinary ability to evoke a place and a people, and her wide-ranging empathy for people unlike herself. Gillison, the author of an acclaimed collection of stories, The Undiscovered Country, and a recipient of the prestigious Whiting prize, first tried to write a nonfiction account of Rockefeller. "I spent almost a year researching and writing it, and it was just bad. Really heavy and really dull. It read like a book report." Writer Peter Carey, who was working his own magnificent transformation of fact into fiction (True History of the Kelly Gang), suggested she turn the book into a novel. Thus Michael Rockefeller transmorgified into the character Stephen Hesse, son of Governor Nicholas Hesse and his first wife Marguerite. And The King of America became an exceptional work of fiction.

Inventive details

Given the history of its development, it is tempting to read The King of America as a roman à clef, a slightly altered biography that uses imagination to fill the gaps in the historical record. But that approach ignores the daring brilliance of Gillison's storytelling, and it does not explain the novel's elemental emotional power. Sure, the outline of this tale is provided by Rockefeller, but the substance, the living details – the family structure, the personal conflicts, the love interests – are all Gillison's invention. Gillison's story is about Stephen Hesse – with his loneliness, his longing to know his distant father, his desire to escape his overbearing mother, his impulsiveness and appetite for life, his unexpected sense of belonging among the Asmat villagers – chasing after his own sad fate. In fact, The King of America is a novel more deeply rooted in mythology than biography.

"One of my models for the character of Marguerite was Medea, who was brought far away from her homeland to be the queen in a strange land and then dumped for someone more suitable' to be her husband's queen," Gillison says, illustrating how her enthusiasm for classical literature works itself into her fiction. "I have Stephen reading Medea at boarding school because I couldn't help myself (I was re-reading that play a lot while I was writing) and also because it was when I first read Medea in Greek that I fell in love with ancient Greek literature." Gillison adds that her love of ancient Greek, particularly Homer, has something to do with similarities between "the way people live in Homer and the way people lived in New Guinea when I was growing up. Everything from fires to the art of war, it all felt very familiar to me."

Luckily, a reader need not be a classics scholar to be greatly moved by the story of Stephen Hesse. Gillison more than succeeds in her wish for "a reader of my work to feel very intimate with my characters – to feel their flaws and sensual awareness and excitement." She does so with remarkable economy – the book is just over 200 pages long – and with prose that is beautiful and clear and so reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald that it is a shock to hear Gillison say, "Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald is the reason I wanted to start writing."

Near the end of our conversation, Gillison talks about her admiration for Michael Rockefeller's openness to a culture very different from his own. "I wanted Stephen Hesse to have a similar openness and connection to the world. I wanted him to have a sense that he was part of something bigger than himself, rather than being someone looking down on someone else," Gillison says. "I do think humans can transcend fear and open themselves up to understanding other people. It's what makes you realize how big life is. It can be so thrilling. You have this short time, but life is so big, it's so wide, it's such a huge experience."

To borrow Gillison's words, The King of America is big and wide, and it is also thrilling.

Alden Mudge, a juror for the California Book Awards and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, writes from Oakland.

Walter Zacharius always dreamed of writing a book. But Zacharius, the chairman and CEO of Kensington Publishing Corp., wasn’t content to write just any old novel. "I wanted it to be a page-turner,"  he tells BookPage.

Songbird, Zacharius’ first and, he says, last novel, the compelling personal tale of a young woman’s struggle against the Nazis during World War II, certainly has the kind of plot to keep you up all night. The fast-paced storyline takes readers from Europe to America and back again, all in the space of less than 300 pages. The action begins in 1939, when Mia Levy, a 17-year-old Jewish girl from a wealthy Polish family, is on vacation when German forces invade her country. She and her family struggle to survive in the Lodz Ghetto and are eventually sent to Auschwitz. Mia manages to escape to Warsaw and makes her way to New York City to live with her aunt and uncle. Once there, she falls in love with Vinnie, a young musician from Brooklyn. But her peaceful life in America ends after Pearl Harbor is attacked. The multilingual Mia is recruited by the government and returns to Europe to work with the French Resistance.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this gripping tale is that it’s based on fact. While Zacharius is reluctant to disclose the identity of the woman who inspired his main character, he assures BookPage that Mia’s remarkable adventures are, for the most part, true. He supplemented the real-life story with research and stories from survivors of the war, as well as with his own experiences. "Part of the book is fiction, but she’s for real,"  he explains.  "When you read the book, you’re really reading history."  

Readers of the novel have noticed. Best-selling author Barbara Taylor Bradford says that Songbird "has such a ring of truth to it that I was haunted long after I’d finished the book."  This endorsement, from a woman he’s never met, means a lot to Zacharius, and not just because it could boost sales.

"I have other wonderful quotes, but this got to me because she’s from England and she’s part of that generation, too. She understood what happened."

Dapper in a sophisticated charcoal suit with lavender pinstripes, Zacharius is tall and fit, and speaks with a brisk New York accent. He’s not reluctant to talk about his service in WWII, which mostly took place within foreign regiments, and smiles as he recalls his participation in the liberation of Paris in August 1944.  "I was 19 years old, and it was probably the most exciting time in my life, because people went crazy,"  he says. In fact, it was a conversation about his time spent in Germany that led him to write Songbird.

"It really all happened many years ago, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, when my publishing partner, Roberta Grossman, asked me about the war. I told her part of [Mia’s] story, and she sort of dared me to write it."   Zacharius accepted the challenge and began a manuscript that would eventually reach 800 pages. After Roberta’s untimely death from cancer at age 46, he put the unfinished novel away in a closet. Twelve years later, when his wife asked him what he was going to do with the manuscript, he picked it up again and realized  "the story I’d written wasn’t the story I wanted to write."  He’d included everything: military maneuvers, scenes from Auschwitz, the history of the world in those days. But the heart of the book was Mia’s life.

"There are many heroes who never got medals, but without them, I probably wouldn’t be here. Can you imagine doing what she did, killing people, sleeping with the Germans, getting information, getting it back to the Allies? Sure she survives at the end, but she’s really giving up her life, and I thought, this is the story I really want to tell."   Telling that story required Zacharius to write from the viewpoint of a young girl. He didn’t consider that an obstacle.  "When I wrote it, I knew some of her feelings [because] I also had those feelings."

It shows: he describes Mia’s life and inner struggles with compassion and sincerity. Though he considers her a hero, she’s not above making mistakes.  "War, in many ways, dehumanizes people. And I thought of things that I saw in the war that had a terrible effect on me for the rest of my life."  In one of the book’s more heart-wrenching scenes, Mia kills someone she thinks is a spy, only to discover that the person was innocent. A recurring theme in the novel is music, one of Zacharius’ great loves. Mia is a pianist, and her American boyfriend Vinnie is a clarinetist. Robert Schumman’s Fantasy Pieces, a piano/clarinet duet, is played at pivotal moments in their relationship. Zacharius himself didn’t learn to play an instrument until 10 years ago, when he took up the piano.

"I gave my son [Steven Zacharius] credit because he played the piano, the organ and everything else. I said, it’s the only thing you ever did I was jealous of. So at the age of 70, I decided I wanted to play the piano. It’s a big challenge, but it’s a tremendous amount of fun."

Challenges have always been fun for Zacharius, whose Kensington Books is now the only independent full-scale publishing house in America. He knew from a young age that he wanted to be a publisher, but had a hard time explaining to his parents just what that entailed.  "I remember being in a library with my mother, and my mother said to me, ok, we’re in the library, tell me: what’s a publisher? I looked at her and pointed at all around the room to all the books on the shelves and I said, somebody makes the determination what’s in those books, and it’s probably the publisher. Of course, years later, I learned the hard way that it was not the publisher alone. Writing Songbird has been another dream come true, and one even longer in the making. It took me 60 years to finally write this book, and I’m glad I did. Now I hope it becomes a big bestseller. "

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.”