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.”

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.