Alex Haley is one of the best-known and most widely read authors in the world. His book Roots, published in 1976, and the television series based on the book, which aired in 1977, were not only critical and commercial successes, they were also unique cultural events. James Baldwin wrote about the book in The New York Times: "Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one—the action of love, or the effect of the avsence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can't but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us."

Among other honors, Mr. Haley was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for Roots, a work he calls "faction," a combination of fact and fiction. Earlier Mr. Haley had won critical acclaim for his authorship of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

And now Alex Haley has a new book A Different Kind of Christmas, that will appeal to readers of all ages. The novella follows a young Southerner who becomes an agent for the Underground Railroad and helps mastermind the escape of slaves from his father's plantation on Christmas Eve, 1855. Editor Roger Bishop recently interviewed Mr. Haley at the author's farm in Norris, Tennessee. The conversation centered on the new book with occasional discussion of other subjects. What follows are the excerpts from the interview:

RB: Mr. Haley, your new book, A Different Kind of Christmas, is a powerful story that should appeal to the widest possible audience. Without giving too much away, would you describe the story?

AH: Somebody wrote in USA Today that it is a story wherein a white college student had become self-influenced to join the Underground Railroad and organized an escape of slaves. That's in essence what happens.

In a broader sense, I have always been intrigued how we as a culture tend to have tunnel-vision images of things and don't include facets of it. For instance, slavery, which I researched a great deal in the course of Roots. I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true. But it’s always intrigued me that amidst the group called slaves there were individuals who were extremely able, who were extremely colorful, who were powerful personalities, who by no means fit the usual images of slaves. They were people who, through their personalities and abilities, were very respected in the community where they lived by both black and white. Such a person was Chicken George out of Roots. You couldn’t think of Chicken George as some anonymous cipher. He was Chicken George. And so with this in mind, in this book I have created the character Harpin’ John. Harpin’ is because he was a very expert harmonica player together with which he was a very expert barbecue man. Now in the South, today and then, anybody who is really a virtuoso on the harp and at the barbecue pit is somebody to reckon with. He was a major character in his slave community, and he was a slave—but he was also Harpin’ John. Another thing I enjoyed about his name is that it sounds like hoppin’ john, the food.

The principal character is a young, white college student, Fletcher Randall, at The College of New Jersey (what we now know as Princeton University). It’s set in 1855. His father is a senator from North Carolina and a large plantation owner. At that time many young, Southern men were sent to school up North because their parents thought they would get a better education in the Yankee country, although they despised the Yankees. And some of them, like this boy’s father, covered it by saying to know what the Yankees were up to they had to send their boys to Yankee schools. And it is there in college, that Fletcher, a Southerner by birth and trend, begins to question the mores of his heritage and culture.

RB: Although A Different Kind of Christmas is fiction, were there actual incidents that you were aware of when you wrote?

AH: Oh yes. Everything in it is to be found. White converts to the antislave belief made the Underground Railroad work. Only the whites had the power to subvert slavery. The Quakers, as a religious group, were one of the main forces. They forbade any member to own slaves, so many Quaker men who had owned slaves simply released them into freedom. Everything in the book has happened and has happened many times. Many slaves, like Harpin' John, were agents. The most famous being Harriet Tubman, who was called the general, because she went back so many times to get so many people out.

RB: You write of the strong bond between the black slaves in the United States in 1855 (the time of your story) and the American Indians. Would you please speak about that relationship?

AH: By that time the Indian Removal had occurred, and there were not many Indians left, but there were pockets here and there. It was a very close bond and not too much is written about it. Anyway, here you have two groups of people who were disenfranchised. They were both thrust outside of society—both rejected and wanted in that they were both used. The Indians had been used worse than the slaves in that their land —everything—had been taken. But they were still living around in enclaves hither and there. There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European, and most of us are some part Indian. In my own family, we are part Cherokee. There was a lot of marriage both directions, but mostly Indian men and slave women.

RB: You have said that you have never lost your love for the South despite the region’s history of slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination. Here is a direct quote from you: “There’s more substance here, so much more to write about. I don’t know anything I treasure more as a writer than being a Southerner. I love to write about the South and try to convey the experience of it, the history of it. It has been pointed at negatively in so many ways, and so few people for a long time appreciated the physical beauty of the South.” Perhaps that says it all.

AH: Well, I would only reiterate most of it to say the thing I find I love so much here is the culture which is comprised of people who tend to have been raised better than people in the North. We all grew up as children who learned how to say yes mam and no sir and mean it with respect for elders. And somehow, it seems to me that in the South, at least as I know it, you could go up in that yard and find you a grasshopper to follow, or you could go and get your grandmother’s spool she’d used all the thread off of, notch the edges, get a rubber band, and make you a little tractor. Everywhere you turn there is something that with a little thought, ingenuity and a whole lot of precedence you could do to entertain yourself. There are so many, many more things that are the South—the music. The South has more detail to write about. We have so much more grass for one thing, and all the things that happen in the grass are denied to those people who, for the most part, live in the Northern cities. Just the grass alone is an arena to deal with. I feel very close to the South. I am of the South. And the racial prejudice that which is so strongly associated with the South is not unique to the South. The North had racial riots—one after another—which were all deflected in the finger pointing at the South. What we are dealing with now is the new South which is a very different place.

RB: In your essay, which serves as the Preface to The Prevailing Past: Life and Politics in a Changing Culture, you write about the black Republicans in Henning, Tennessee, then you say: “It is poignant how little attention history has paid to the fact that from the early years of Reconstruction, in many Southern localities, the Republican Party’s principal custodians were these and similar groups of blacks who voted in each national election as an act of holy ritual, no matter what obstacles were thrust into their paths, including physical threats.” Would you speak about these Republicans?

AH: The fundamental reason for these Republicans was Abraham Lincoln, who was seen as the great emancipator, and because he was a Republican, the black people just flocked to that party and stayed with it very loyally right on up to FDR. He was the man who turned the tide for the Democrats. And the reason was obviously the Depression. People were down to their last whatever, and it wasn’t just the blacks but the whites as well. And when FDR came along with his alphabetical government and all the things it offered—the CCC, the NRA and various other programs—he was a revolutionary for a whole culture, it wasn’t just the blacks. But for black Republicans he was as dramatic as Lincoln had been earlier. Here was a world in which black women, at least in Henning, Tennessee, were all domestics. They found jobs more quickly than black men. Now when that was the way the world was then and along came FDR with these programs which, for the first time, allowed men to get jobs and be paid 7 or 8 dollars a day instead of 1 dollar (which was standard at that time), it just altogether changed their thinking. So, it was these influences, which were very practical influences, which caused the blacks to go Democrat.

RB: In A Different Kind of Christmas your main character has his Christian conscience challenged and comes to the aid of the slaves. Are there any generalizations that you can make about individuals such as Fletcher Randall?

AH: Fletcher manifests my feelings how as Christians we should behave. The only reason the Underground Railroad really existed was because there were a lot of Fletchers. Some who were innately against slavery, and some who, like Fletcher, gradually came to be and who, having come to be, took some activist role. Society ought to be led by its Christian leaders, not by political leaders, at least in the areas of morality. For instance, the drug thing we’ve got today, it’s not just an annoyance, it’s a dire thread to this nation. Years ago, had somebody been positively identified in the community as selling drugs to any of us as children, I think he would have probably been found one morning—well, you know. And I think more probably it would’ve been done by the deacons and the stewards of the churches. And the reason is that they simply would not have allowed that in their community. but now we simply allow it. You know it could be stopped, of course it could be stopped. We just simply permit it to go on. If the public said no, it would really be all over it. And maybe one day we will before it will have done us in.

RB: Before your international recognition with the publication of Roots you had achieved a distinguished career as a journalist and the author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. You conducted the first interview with Miles Davis in the Playboy magazine interviews. You went on in that series of interviews to interview Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X which subsequently led to your authorship of his autobiography. As one who interviewed both Dr. King and Malcolm X, and grew to know the latter so well, could you speak in a general way about those two men—how they were alike and how they were different in your experience with them?

AH: The thing that has always intrigued me about Dr. King and Malcolm was how easily either of them might have been the other. Now if you had taken Malcolm in the eighth grade, precocious youngster, living in Michigan at the time, an outstanding student in his class—sharp, articulate. If that Malcolm could have then gone to the top black high school where Dr. King went in Atlanta, and from high school to the Boston College School of Theology, think of what a minister and leader we would’ve had.

If Dr. King, age eighth grade, entering that high school and had instead been told, like Malcolm, it was ridiculous to think about being a lawyer, so why doesn’t he become a carpenter. He was so popular in school that proves that white people would hire him to do carpentry. That’s what Malcolm’s class advisor told him. Had Martin Luther King, age eighth grade, gone instead to his aunt’s home in Rockville, Massachusetts (suburban Boston) and learned to hustle—and was taught by a guy who called him homeboy because he was from the same area—was taught first how to hustle shinning shoes. (If you’re gonna shine shoes, let the rag hang limp so it would pop louder for a quarter extra tip). Then learned how to sell marijuana and to do the things that’s hustling. And when he had become a pretty able hustler, go for (what Malcolm called) his graduate studies and get on a train and make it to Harlem where he could get into crime and into this and that and the other. Dr. Kin would’ve made a tremendous hustler. And Malcolm would’ve made a tremendous theologian. Both of them were great powers in their own way. And so to me always the intrigue has been the two men are a case of “…but for the grace of God…” And as a matter of fact, not enough recognition is given to the fact that Malcolm was most helpful to Dr. King. The way I mean it is Malcolm scared people. And what it did was shake people enough so that when Dr. King came along, speaking of turning the other cheek and the Ghandi principles, he was a lot less threatening. So preceded by Malcolm, Dr. King went forward.

RB: Are you engaged in any other writing projects at the moment?

AH: My next book will be called Henning, Tennessee. It is a book about the people and events in the little town where I grew up 50 miles north of Memphis. with any kind of luck it will be out next September. And then will come a book about Madame C.J. Walker who was an absolutely fantastic personality.

In her riveting memoir about her hardscrabble childhood, The Glass Castle (2005), Jeannette Walls described being severely burned while boiling hot dogs when she was three years old.

“I used to think being burned was my earliest memory,” Walls says during a call to the home she shares with her husband, writer John Taylor, in Culpepper, Virginia. “But I also remember going to a cafeteria with [my grandmother] Lily and her standing up, pointing to me, and shouting to the entire place: SHE’S ONLY TWO YEARS OLD AND SHE’S DRINKING FROM A STRAW! SHE’S A GENIUS!”

The loud, irrepressible and ever-resourceful Lily Casey Smith, who in later years took pleasure in brandishing both her “choppers” and her pearl-handled pistol in the air, is the subject of Wall’s captivating new “true-life novel,” Half Broke Horses.

Lily grew up in the vast, still-unpopulated reaches of the Southwest. As a child she helped her rancher father break horses. In her teens, she left home to become an itinerant schoolteacher, riding 500 miles to her first job on horseback. She later lived for a while in Chicago, where she worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family and was seduced and wedded by a bigamist. Chastened, she returned to the Southwest and married Big Jim Smith, and together they managed a spacious ranch in Arizona. Hers is a story that evokes an American way of life that no longer exists. Lily died when Walls was only eight but her she left an indelible imprint on her granddaughter.

“She was a leathery woman and she would just pick you up and toss you in the air. She’d always yell. She’d enter a room and say HERE I AM! She loved to dance. Every time we’d go someplace where there was music, she’d just grab some guy from his seat and start dancing with him. She was always driving us around in this great big station wagon. She thought she was a brilliant driver but she was really quite reckless. There were always cars sort of crashing and screeching around us. But for all her sort of wild recklessness, she was very orderly,” Walls remembers.

“She had all these rules and was very bossy. My mother and she would clash very badly. My father and she would clash even worse. When I was growing up, my mother told me on a regular basis that I was just like her mother, and I don’t think she meant that as a compliment. Lily glommed onto me at an early age. She sensed a kindred spirit. She was a lot tougher and ballsier than I ever was, but I do think we’re similar in a lot of ways.”

Among the obvious similarities are Walls’ own loud, embracing laughter, a gift for storytelling and the sort of indomitable spirit that enabled Walls to overcome the dysfunctional childhood she describes in The Glass Castle.

These similarities explain why Walls found it so easy to slip into Lily’s unusual voice in Half Broke Horses. “I remember Lily so vividly,” Walls says.  “I found it was much easier when I wrote in her voice than when I wrote in third person trying to capture her voice. When I was writing in the third person about Lily, I was just writing in my own voice.” As she explains in an author’s note in the book, Walls’ decision to tell this story in her grandmother’s distinctive voice rather than as an objective historian is one of the reasons she decided to call her book a “true-life novel.”

“I’ll bet most people in America have similar ancestors,” Walls says. “The details might be different but the overall story is the same—some tough old broad or tough old coot who came to this country and did what had to be done to survive. I think most people are tougher than we realize and that we have this inner strength and resilience that we’re not aware of. One of the ways to get in touch with that is to look at our ancestors.”

But for Walls, writing Half Broke Horses was also as least as much about gaining an understanding of her own difficult, free-spirited mother, Rose Mary Smith Walls, as getting in touch with her ancestors. “When I was on book tour,” she remembers, “readers of The Glass Castle would often ask me why, with a college education, my mother would choose the life she did. At the time I didn’t know the answer. But writing about your parents and your ancestors is like going into intensive therapy. You really get at the roots. I now see that the time when she was growing up on the ranch without electricity and running water was the idyllic time of my mother’s life. She’s always tried to recreate it, the wildness and lack of discipline. Her life is very much a search for that freedom she had as a child.”

Now at age 75, Rose Mary is living in a mobile home a hundred yards away from her daughter and son-in-law, surrounded by the menagerie of rescued dogs, feral cats and horses her daughter and son-in-law have collected since abandoning a tony life in New York City for a semi-rural one in northern Virginia. Rose Mary’s vivid stories of her childhood and about her parents’ lives in the Southwest 50-some years ago helped define her daughter’s new book.

In fact, Walls interviewed her mother extensively for Half Broke Horses. She says with deep satisfaction, “My mom gave me these stories without reservations.” And, she adds, “She is not a normal mom, whatever the heck that means. But she’s a fascinating woman and she’s given me a great deal of joy.”

Among the most moving stories Rose Mary shared “so passionately and tenderly” with her daughter was the story of half-broke horses, the wild horses captured on the range that were only half broken by her father’s ranch hands. “Hearing her describe their plight and the love and affinity she had with these creatures that don’t belong anywhere really struck me,” Walls says. “Mom really does see herself that way, as a creature who is a little too wild for civilization but broke enough, civilized enough, that she can’t survive in the wild.”

Reflecting on the experiences of her grandmother and mother, Walls says, “It’s a bit of an anachronism, but there’s a lot to be said for the tough pioneer spirit and the untamed wilderness. I think it’s important that we don’t forget our roots. And our own half-brokeness.”

Half Broke Horses is Walls’ evocation of that American legacy.

Alden Mudge writes from Berkley, California.

September always brings a wealth of much anticipated events: a fresh start to college classes, new shows on television, another chance for a winning gridiron season. But this year, millions of fans around the world are focused on a different September experience—they’re finally getting to scratch their “what happens next” itch with the release of An Echo in the Bone, the latest book in Diana Gabaldon’s extraordinarily popular Outlander series.

It’s Gabaldon’s seventh installment of adventures starring the feisty Englishwoman Claire Randall, who was accidentally transported 200 years back in time to 18th-century Scotland. There she met and fell in love with a kilt-wearing Highlander named Jamie Fraser, and the two soon became nearly as star-crossed a couple as Romeo & Juliet.

Speaking from her weekend home in Santa Fe, with her family’s two dachshunds (Homer and JJ) curled up at her feet, Gabaldon is more than a little gleeful at the response she’s sure the new book’s cliffhanger ending will elicit.

“This is the fault of all the people who read A Breath of Snow and Ashes [the previous book in the series] and then wrote to me in droves, whining and moaning about how they were so sad this was the last book and they would miss them so much and wouldn’t I reconsider and do another book, causing me to write back in each case, saying ‘Why do you think this is the last book? Does it say ‘thrilling conclusion’ on the back of the paperback? Of course it’s not the last book!’ Which they all to a man replied, ‘But you tied everything up so neatly.’ I said okay, nobody’s going to reach the end of this book and think that.”

In An Echo in the Bone, Claire and Jamie leave their mountaintop home in North Carolina in 1779, to return to Scotland, a perilous journey made even more difficult by the Revolutionary War raging all about them. Jamie is one of the few survivors of the Jacobite Rebellion’s brutal defeat by the British at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Weary of war, he hopes to fight for America’s liberation from England through his printing press, now stored in Edinburgh. After all, someone must be brave enough to publish the incendiary opinions of the fiery zealots advocating independence from England. People like Thomas Paine—who turns up briefly in the book.

But inevitably Jamie and Claire, and Jamie’s nephew, Ian, are swept up in the conflicts around them, including the two battles at Fort Ticonderoga. They are finally able to leave the colonies by escorting the body of Brigadier General Simon Fraser, one of Jamie’s relatives, back to Scotland for burial.

Mission accomplished, the couple next return Ian to his parents, a vow made in Voyager, the third book in the series, when the 15-year-old boy was abducted from Scotland by pirates and taken to the West Indies. But Ian is no longer a boy; he is a man who has experienced things his parents could never imagine. When Claire gets an urgent request to return to the colonies to operate on a grandchild (Henri-Christian, offspring of Jamie’s foster son, Fergus), Ian accompanies her. Not least of his reasons to return is the love he feels for a Quaker lass named Rachel. Grave matters, however, force Jamie to remain for a time in Scotland, so the couple is separated by an ocean for the first time in many years.

The events related here barely make up a third of the book’s more than 800 pages—a length shared by all seven novels in the series. Characters crop in one book, disappear, and then return two or three books later. Someone barely mentioned in an early book may become pivotal in a later one. Likewise, small events barely touched upon previously often assume much greater significance in a later novel.

Despite the 18-year span since Outlander was published, Gabaldon seems to have little difficulty remembering and retrieving characters or events from the nearly 7,000 pages of prose she’s devoted to Jamie and Claire.

“I don’t write with an outline. In fact, I don’t write in a straight line. I write when I can see things happening. What I need on any given day to start writing is what I call a kernel. A line of dialogue, an emotional ambience, anything I can sense very concretely. I write very painstakingly in these little disconnected bits.

“But as I write these disconnected pieces, and I continue doing research and of course thinking about the book all the time, they begin to stick together. They develop little connections. And I will write something and think, ‘Oh, this explains, finally, why it is what I wrote four monthsago happened.’ Then I can see what has to happen next.” 

One of the great joys of reading Gabaldon’s Outlander series is its “history made easy” aspect. Readers not only learn of the pivotal occurrences of the time, they also painlessly absorb the smaller details of life in the 18th century. Gabaldon gleans her major events from the usual sources: history books, biographies, contemporary accounts of the period. But she has also found another source of information in her travels to historical sites.

“I go to national parks and battlefields, partly because the bookshops offer such a selection of historical esoterica. These little national park service book stores sell not only the mainstream titles that deal with that period, but also books privately published by local people who are writing their families’ memoirs or who have great-great grandfather’s account of that particular battle which they’ve chosen to publish. Or an amateur botanist who’s written a treatise on all the local plants which grow or have grown around this particular spot. You can pick up these really weird little things that you won’t find anywhere else.”

She’s also on the lookout for any particularly fascinating quirks sported by the historical characters she brings into each novel. An example is the daily nude “airing of the skin” taken by Benjamin Franklin in An Echo in the Bone.

“That was one of those little kernels that I ran across in my research, and I said, ‘Oh, I have to use that.’ My imagination isn’t good enough to make up something that wonderful.”

One of the most popular storylines in Gabaldon’s series revolves around Jamie’s and Claire’s daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their two children, Jem and Amanda. Brianna followed her mother back to 18th-century America in an attempt to save her parents’ lives. Roger followed Brianna; they married, and might have stayed in the past until a health issue with their newborn daughter necessitated a return to the 20th century. Gabaldon continues to weave their now 1980s story around the events taking place in the late 1770s in An Echo in the Bone. One reason, she says, she took them ‘back to the future’ was to more fully illuminate what that past/present journey had meant to each.

“It was very interesting, both Roger and Brianna had some difficulty adapting to the past. So I was thinking, having struggled so hard to fit in to the 18th century, if they’re not in the 18th century anymore, can they still use those skills, or will it be all different? As to Roger, he actually found what he thought was his destiny in the 18th century. And so now he has the carpet yanked out from under him yet again, how’s he gonna deal with that? And if I’d left him in the 18th century, he would always, in some extent, be in Jamie’s shadow. I want to see if he can find himself spiritually in this new life as well as he did in the old one.”

Gabaldon says that by the time she was eight years old, she knew she wanted to be a writer. However, her father had different ideas.

“I did come from a very conservative family background, and my father was fond of saying to me, “Well, you’re such a poor judge of character you’re bound to marry some bum, so be sure you get a good education so you can support your children.”

A bachelor’s degree in zoology, a master’s in marine biology and a Ph.D. in ecology fulfilled her father’s edict, but Gabaldon still had the desire to write. She began working on what would become Outlander as a literary exercise, to improve her skills. She posted some of it online and the response to what she’d written was so positive, she contacted an agent. The book sold in three days, and her literary career was launched.

Now, 18 years later, with over 17 million books in print, there’s no doubt that Diana Gabaldon was destined to be a writer. As she’s said, she has no plans to wrap up the adventures of Jamie and Claire anytime soon, as the “now what happens?!” ending to An Echo in the Bone clearly demonstrates. Nor are her legions of fans likely to let her. History, both on and off the page, has proven that regardless of how many ‘loose ends’ she’s tied up, Gabaldon always leaves them wanting more.

Rebecca Bain lives in Nashville.

Author photo © Jennifer Watkins

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Although it’s been eagerly anticipated as a debut, the epic novel Roses isn’t the first outing for author Leila Meacham. In the mid-1980s, Meacham wrote and published a handful of romance novels. But it wasn’t a process she enjoyed much. At the time, she was teaching English, and the solitary process of writing took her away from preparing lesson plans, learning about new techniques and enjoying hobbies like gardening.

“I guess the difference is the years. I had other things I wanted to do,” Meacham says from her San Antonio home during a recent telephone interview. “I just didn’t want to spend the time cooped up.”

But after retiring, Meacham ran through her list of retirement goals. She and her husband traveled. Thirteen years into retirement, at age 65, she was left with a question: Now what?

The answer was Roses.

“One day I was in bed, drinking my cup of coffee, and I just thought to myself, ‘I’ve got so much to offer somebody somewhere or something. I just don’t know what to do with the rest of my life,’” Meacham recalls. “I will defend this to my dying day: A voice in my head said, ‘You will get down Roses and you will finish Roses.’ I like to believe that’s a divine inspiration.”

Meacham had begun the novel in 1985, when a bad case of pneumonia forced her to temporarily resign from teaching. As years passed, the typewritten pages of the novel were stored in a box in a closet, almost abandoned as Meacham and her husband moved from one house to another. “My husband said, ‘Oh, go ahead and take it. You’ll regret it if you don’t.’ ” Six years ago, his suspicions proved accurate as Meacham pulled the box off the shelf and resumed writing.

The novel traces nearly 70 years in the history of the Toliver family, owners of a cotton plantation in a fictional Texas town. When patriarch Vernon Toliver dies, he entrusts the land to his daughter, Mary, because he knows she will love and care for it. His wife and son are outraged.

That decision and the stubborn love that motivated it determine the course of Mary Toliver’s life. She’s unwilling to compromise anything that would negatively affect her beloved Somerset plantation, whether it means sacrificing her fair complexion to work in the field or the man she loves because he won’t settle for second place in her heart. The decisions Mary makes, and the lies that accompany them, alter the history of the Toliver clan and its relationships with the town’s other founding families, the department store-owning DuMonts and timber magnates the Warwicks.

Through a series of flashbacks—first Mary Toliver’s, then Percy Warwick’s and finally Mary’s great-niece Rachel’s—Meacham reveals just how much Mary lost by dedicating her life to the land, and why she has sold the land in her determination to save Rachel from the same fate.

It’s only appropriate that this 600-page epic took Meacham five years to write. The narrative sprawls across geography as much as time, stretching from the fictional Texas burg of Howbutker to Lubbock, Dallas and points between. (“The two together—cotton and timber—you don’t find that in the same state” anywhere but Texas, Meacham says.)

The five years Meacham devoted to the story were filled with as many interruptions as the book has plot twists. “But I persevered because I felt like I promised God I would complete this book,” she says. “Just as sure as I’m talking to you, I was assured from the get-go, you write the book and I’ll take care of the rest.”

Now the 71-year-old Meacham is not only anticipating book signings to support the book, she’s also hard at work on another epic novel, this time with a more modern focus. So what happened to the woman who so disliked the solitary nature of writing?

“I didn’t like the confinement, the frustration of trying to get your thoughts on paper,” Meacham recalls. “Oddly enough, I’m happiest when I’m writing now. And I’m all by myself and anything in the world can come out on the page.”

“What this has done for me has made me aware that I can write. Now, I don’t know if you’ll agree with me. But I feel that I can write. I can tell a story.”

Carla Jean Whitley reads, writes and lives near three generations of her family in Birmingham, Alabama.

Elizabeth Kostova’s gripping debut novel, The Historian (2005), explored the legend of Dracula, undoubtedly contributing to the cultural craze that has now evolved into full-blown vampire mania. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, focuses on French Impressionism, which raises the question: should readers brace themselves for all-out Monet madness? Probably not, but one thing is certain: The Swan Thieves will keep readers entertained and inspire them to reflect on some profound subjects—like the nature of genius, the power of romantic love and the purpose of art.

Kostova’s lush second novel ranges across two centuries in its exploration of love and madness.

Andrew Marlow, an amateur painter and accomplished psychiatrist, lives a solitary, structured life—until he begins treating renowned artist Robert Oliver, who was arrested for attacking a canvas in the National Gallery of Art. Marlow’s quest to understand this troubled genius leads him into the lives of the women Robert loved, including the enigmatic dark-haired beauty who haunts him.

This hefty novel travels from the East Coast of the U.S. to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th. In a recent interview from her home in the mountains of North Carolina, Kostova, in a quiet, measured voice, discussed the challenges of writing a novel that spans time and place.

“I haven’t written much about American places before this, and it was really wonderful. . . . It’s surprisingly challenging, I think, to write about your own time and place. I know that’s what most writers do, but I had somehow shirked it for years.”

Also difficult, says Kostova, is writing about visual art. “It is a very challenging subject, and as usual, I didn’t make it easy for myself, but I like these challenges.” She adds, “It’s so hard to convey a painting in words, and you’re partly relying on your reader’s recognition of certain styles and images.”

Asked what it was about French Impressionism that so captured her imagination, Kostova explains, “I was really drawn to it. And again it’s just one of those topics, like Dracula, that we’re so familiar with that I wanted to see if I could make something fresh out of it. I know that, personally, I had the experience of getting really tired of Impressionist painting because we see it everywhere, and it looks so pretty and tame, and it’s poorly reproduced on all kinds of objects, so I thought this might be interesting to go back and really look at some of those paintings again. And when I started going back to museums and seeing these paintings in the flesh, I was so overwhelmed by them. They’re so wonderful in real life, and Impressionism is so textured that you really have a sense of people working with the brush when you look at the originals that you don’t with reproductions.”

Kostova’s research took her to Paris and Normandy and into museums and libraries. In addition, she says, “I studied a lot of art history in college and that helped me, and I talked with art historians, and until I was about 15, I really loved to paint.”

She gleaned details from artist friends, who helped with the technicalities of painting, and her own sensory recollections. “I had memories of the way oil paint smells and the way you rework a canvas. More importantly, I have several close friends and family members who are very gifted visual artists, and they let me pick their brains and watch them paint and go to their studio classes.”

To help craft her characters, Kostova pored over biographies of artists and painters. “Sometimes . . . I think of this book as basically a biography,” she says. And her characters are so believable, so fully fleshed out, that it feels that way for readers as well.

Kostova also makes astute observations about the allowances made for genius, a theme, she notes, that has “plagued art and art literature since it began.” She says, “With The Historian, I liked the idea of writing about a supernatural topic and trying to make it human, and with this book I think I was really intrigued with the idea of writing on these rather time-worn subjects, the partly mad artist and the subject of genius and what genius is allowed to do and not allowed to do.”

Asked if she identifies with Robert’s obsessive nature, Kostova says she sometimes envies that kind of single-mindedness, but adds, “I also love to live in the world. A lot of other things are very important to me, like family and friends and social service and just the ordinary parts of life.” She says of Robert, “He can’t live properly in the world . . . in a way that sustains other people.”

Marlow, she explains, is challenged by Robert because he doesn’t seem to care about being cured or healed. Kostova muses, “I think in the person of Robert he’s faced with his life choices.”

As in The Historian, Kostova’s affinity for letters as a literary device lends a sense of immediacy and intimacy to the narrative (in a way reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s Possession). “We all would love to read other people’s mail if that were permitted, right?” she laughs. “There’s this sense of a letter that takes you right to the heart of somebody’s life, and that’s not really true in our era, but it’s a very direct way to convey character.”

The intriguing title of Kostova’s new novel alludes to the myth of Leda and the swan, but its deeper meaning lies at the heart of the novel’s mystery—one that keeps readers turning the pages (all 576 of them). “I’ve always loved Greek myths . . . and swans are such emblems of beauty and grace; they’ve been so important in painting and sculpture, and we still have this reverence for them even in contemporary life that I think is very interesting. . . . Swans are a funny thing, they’re kind of like dragons: once you start thinking about them you see them everywhere culturally.”

In the novel, Kostova describes Marlow’s experience upon seeing one of Robert’s paintings: “At any moment something might happen; that was the remarkable thing. He had caught the instant of shock, of total change, of disbelief. . . . She was inches away from me, breathing and real, in the second of unreal calm before complete distress, and I knew myself powerless. I realized, then, for the first time, what Robert had accomplished.” Much like the paintings she brings to life in The Swan Thieves, Kostova’s eloquent prose possesses the power to both transport and inspire.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of The Historian
5 Questions with Elizabeth Kostova on The Book Case

Just when you think you’ve read every possible take on World War II, along comes a story like The Postmistress. Though the effects of that worldwide conflict permeate every page of Sarah Blake’s second novel, she takes on the war from a different angle: the home front. Set in 1940, just before the U.S. entered the war, The Postmistress is a subtle, nuanced portrayal of the impact war has on three women: Frankie, a British journalist covering the Blitz; Emma, a newlywed whose doctor husband brings her back to his New England hometown; and Iris, aka the postmistress. These three very different women are ultimately connected by a letter that brings an unwelcome truth back to their small town—and by the shared hardships of a world forever changed by conflict.

Blake, a poet and essayist as well as a novelist, took some time to answer a few questions about the book, her favorite historical novels and the one secret she couldn’t wait to share.

The Postmistress is set during World War II, but there are no battlefield scenes. What inspired you to keep a WWII novel entirely on the home front?
Towards the middle of the book, Frankie Bard writes, “We think we know the story, because there’s a man and a woman sitting together in a funk hole in the dark. There are bombs. It’s a war. There was a war before, and we’ve read the stories; but every story—love or war—is a story about looking left when we should have been looking right.” I wanted to try and write a story about women in war, and one that wasn’t about waiting for the men to come home, or about picking up a weapon and fighting, but about making it through the gauntlet of chance that war, it seems to me, thrusts upon human beings. When war is part of daily life, as it was in the Blitz, and as it was in Europe, what does the daily look like?

That daily life is often as harrowing as a battlefield scene would be, with Frankie dodging bombs and Harry looking for German U-boats off the coast of New England. It's a sharp contrast to today, where we are fighting wars but see little to no impact on our day-to-day lives. What do you think about this shift in attitudes?
Ironically, though we have access to almost instantaneous news, I do feel that so much information buffers us from what is happening. To a certain degree I think that hearing news over the radio—through the medium of someone’s voice—or reading the news in a newspaper—by its nature a slower means of apprehending information than merely seeing a visual image—may have been a more potent, more immediate means of getting the news. It’s hard to buffer yourself from the sound of fear, or of sorrow in a radio announcer’s voice as they describe what they saw, or as they record the sound of someone telling you what happened. As always, single human witnesses have a profound impact. I think, for instance, of all the cellphone dispatches that were sent out last spring during the Iranian protests, and how electrifying their impact. To a certain degree, those were a return to the kind of radio broadcasts you might have heard during WWII. I think of Edward R. Murrow’s nightly greeting, “This is London.”

Your novel follows a linear narrative, but the story is carried forward by different characters at different points. How did you approach writing a novel with multiple narrators? Was it a challenge to make sure each woman had her own distinct voice? When did you decide that this was a story about not just one woman, but many?
The novel began many years ago when I had a sudden picture in my head of a woman in a small post office looking down at a letter in her hand and thrusting it into her pocket rather than in one of the mailboxes she was clearly in charge of. Who was that? And what was she doing? And whose letter did she not deliver? That’s how Iris came to be. And then the town of Franklin, and Will and Emma grew out of answering those questions. The novel kept growing, sideways and backwards really, as I tried to get myself to the point at the boxes when Iris holds onto a letter for Emma. Then, about 100 pages into that early draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus. I had no idea what she was doing there, just that she was a reporter and had come from Europe. What happened to her in Europe? So, then I went back and wrote that. My challenge at this point was not in keeping the women distinct, but in keeping them together. In some senses I wrote three different novels all of them aiming at that moment of Iris’ at the mailboxes, but it wasn’t until I began to weave the stories together by moving back and forth on the radio broadcasts that I started to see how the three women’s stories could intertwine. And then at that point, I have to say that I had the benefit of a truly gifted editor. Amy Einhorn was able to see how the stories could combine and move in and out of each other, all the while moving forward.

What kind of research did you do for the book?
I spoke to a lot of people; and often their memories or information guided the novel in a new direction. Though I had been researching the presence of German U-boats along the coast at this time, it wasn’t until I spoke to a 90 year-old resident of Provincetown, Mass., that I understood the palpable danger people felt at the time. It was she who told me that there were some inhabitants who felt certain the Germans could land on the Back Shore and march up the Cape to Boston. And when a German bread-wrapper washed up on shore, clearly having fallen off a U-boat, the town grew a bit more unified. I tried as hard as I could, in many drafts, to use that bread-wrapper, but couldn’t in the end find a place for it!

For a couple of years I read as much as I could about the history of World War II, trying to understand the timeline of events as much as the cultural and social attitudes at the time. And I visited the Holocaust Museum, the National Postal Museum, and the Museum of Radio. At the same time, I watched movies made between 1939 and 1941—Bette Davis in The Letter, being a little-remembered but wonderful discovery—paying attention to clothing, hairstyles, and slang; and I read novels written during that period, trawling for diction and rhythms of speech. Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Robert Penn Warren’s All the President’s Men were favorites.

At the beginning of the novel, it’s acknowledged that a postmaster not delivering the mail was far more serious in the 1940s than it would be today. What are your views on social media in the 21st century (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.,)? Do you think letters will ever be replaced?
I have to confess to being a bit of a Luddite in terms of social media. I eddied out at email, not following in the rush forward into Facebook, or Twitter, though I do have a Facebook page now, which I approach gingerly. I do think it’s fantastic to be able to be in touch with people right in the very moment, it allows for a kind of global dailiness. But there is nothing like the physical presence of a handwritten letter. I think that being able to hold something in your hand that traveled to get to you, that holds the person writing it in his or her handwriting is very powerful, and for the time that it takes to read the letter, you are with that person who wrote you in a way that email or Facebook cannot replicate. I think, sadly, that this kind of connection will vanish, if it hasn’t already. With it goes too, the art of letter writing, a wonderful mix of personal essay and meditation, gossip and humor.

The Postmistress has already received some rave reviews from readers. As a reader yourself, what are some of your favorite historical novels?
Oh, there are so many! I just finished reading Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, and remain slightly in a Tudor daze—it’s a wide, fantastically made tapestry, an incredible feat that wears its scholarship invisibly. I return repeatedly to Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, which, like the Mantel, utterly absorbs you in another place and time, though this time, improbably, through the sense of smell. And perhaps one of my favorite historical novels—though I’m not sure if it qualifies as such—is Colm Toibin’s The Master, about the inner life of Henry James. But then, I came to love reading through the novels of the 19th century. And I return there. I repeatedly read and reread the Brontes, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

There are a lot of secrets and information that is withheld in The Postmistress, but in the end, there is no stopping the truth. Do you have a secret you’d finally like to get off your chest?
Yes! That I’m so thankful to have this book out in the world. It has been the secret passion, obsession, joy and trial that I have been living with for the last 10 years. I have been tied to these three women, listening to them—as if I’ve had my ear against a safe waiting to hear the click that would pop the door to set them freely walking and talking, the sign that I had cracked the code on their story at last. It’s been a tremendous process writing this book, and I am so grateful that Iris and Frankie and Emma are out into the world, and no longer talking to me in my head!

What are you working on next?
I am in the very early stages of a novel about an old money WASP family that finds itself at the end of its old money. It takes place over the course of two summers, 1959 and 2009, and moves back and forth in the same old house in Maine, between those time periods and across three generations of women.

RELATED CONTENT

Review of The Postmistress

Review of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall

Review of Colm Toibin's The Master

Under the Poppy takes place in the 1870s—was there anything in particular about that decade that specifically ignited your fire to tell this story?
I came to historical fiction the way I pretty much come to all my novels: led by strong images and intrigued by the varied places these images may eventually take the story.  Though I can never really pinpoint the absolute genesis of any of my novels, each has a sparking-point, and I remember very well writing a sticky note that said "les mecs," as I saw in my mind's eye the four puppets who come to the Poppy: lovely Miss Lucinda, the solemn Bishop, the ultra-bawdy Chevalier, and the ur-provocateur Pan Loudermilk. And with the mecs I saw Istvan, and . . . away we go.

This novel is filled with so much drama! There are brothels, love triangles and puppet shows, just to mention some of the elements. Was it hard writing a novel with so many lively elements?
It was a BLAST.  It was like a fantastic, long-running, multimedia show, and I got to see it all from backstage, so to speak.

Brussels is well known for its history of puppet shows—have you ever had the opportunity to visit the city and perhaps take in a show?
Not yet—I would love to go there, and to Prague as well. The history of European puppetry is a magnificent one and it would be fantastic to see some of it  firsthand.

And speaking of puppets: It's interesting that to call a human being a "puppet" means to imply that that person is weak, controlled by someone else's power. But what I found in my research was that a real puppet is unpredictable, funny, mysterious and always slightly dangerous—or more than slightly. I find puppets' inherent lawlessness to be very appealing. And they make fearless actors, of course, if you let them. 

Alongside all of the interpersonal excitement that occurs in the novel, there’s also a good deal of historical drama that acts as a backdrop (and sometimes a catalyst) to the personal struggles of the characters. Do you think there are certain common pitfalls that are part and parcel of historical fiction?
Being new to the genre, I can only hope there are common mistakes I didn't make!  What was exciting for me as a writer was having that panorama of the past, the politics, the fashion, the language, the little daily details that make up so much of the bedrock of life, available for my wonderment, learning, and use. And the social attitudes that are so different from our own: For one quick example, there's a moment when the character Lucy catches a little boy smoking in the theatre.  Instead of being horrified that he's smoking at all, she boxes his ears for putting the props at risk! 

Seeing the world in this novel through that scrim of history, an imaginative recreation of what that time, the feel and smell and texture of those days, might have been like to those who lived there, was fascinating. What I tried not to do was put in every single buttonhook and chamber pot—it's a real temptation, because hey, I wouldn't be writing about this world if I wasn't interested in it, and I'm interested in all of it.  But I tried to keep only what the story demanded.

One striking element of this novel is the fact that along with an omniscient narrator, there are also several first-person accounts scattered throughout. What was it like inhabiting so many characters and giving them all distinct voices?
In a word, fun. I had a tremendous amount of fun writing this book—being able to tell the story from so many different angles, through so many sensibilities, was a great treat. We see the world we inhabit through others' eyes as well as—and sometimes better, more clearly than!—our own, and I hope this multiple-viewpoint narrative enhances not only the story itself but the reader's experience of the story, too. 

When you strip back the many layers in this novel, what do you feel was the core story that you were trying to get at with Under the Poppy?
Love and faithfulness, what it means to really be true: to a person, a vocation, through tremendous struggle and unavoidable pain. Under the Poppy is at its deepest heart the love story of Rupert and Istvan.

You’ve long been an enthusiastic proponent of writer workshops, citing the Clarion Workshop as the real turning point in your career as an author. Some people have been rather pessimistic about sessions and programs aimed at those who dream of writing and being published. To you, what makes these programs so valuable?
For me Clarion was an experience of recognition: other writers, both my peers and the workshop's professional writers-in-residence, accepted me as a writer, took me seriously as a writer, treated me like a writer, and that dispelled any chance for self-doubt.  And once I saw myself as a real writer, recognized that I belonged there, reading, writing, critiquing—I started to act like one.  Being known for what you really are is a very powerful thing. Now, when I teach workshops, especially for young writers, I bring this mindset and this memory, and establish at once that we are all colleagues, and we must treat each other accordingly.

That said, certainly not every workshop is equally valuable to every writer, or to any writer.  The ones that seem to work best are ones that are seriously respectful and seriously honest in equal measures: being told that your work is good, if it is good, is one thing, but being assured that your mediocre work is peachy-keen helps nobody and sets you up for severe disappointment later on. 

Prior to this novel, readers may be most familiar with you in terms of Young Adult (YA) fiction. However, lately it seems like many YA titles are showing a lot of cross-generational appeal. Do you think that this is a function of certain elements within the genre changing, or would you say that readers are simply becoming more open-minded? In your mind, is there a clear division between YA fiction and that meant for an older audience?
I'd hope that every reader would come to every book with an open mind, but it's true that the genre label is sometimes used as a way to pigeonhole a book and so pass it completely by.  Though we each have our individual tastes in fiction, it's beneficial to keep adding delicious new stuff new to the menu.  And who doesn't love finding a new writer, a new voice, to enjoy? 

Life of Pi is a great example of a book that works well cross-generationally, and I would hope some of my own YA fiction—books like Going Under and Headlong and Talk—could make that leap to older readers, too. 

Your previous books have been published by a variety of publishers, such as Farrar, Straus & Giroux as well as Bantam Dell. What was it like working with Small Beer Press this time around?
As everyone who reads knows, publishing is a fairly fraught arena these days, so having the chance to work with an editor and publisher who are as passionate about making books as Kelly Link and Gavin Grant was both a comfort and a thrill.  I knew from day one that my vision for Under the Poppy was shared and respected, and I've had the satisfaction of watching the novel go from file to real live book in the best company possible.  Gavin and Kelly are true writers' publishers and there is no higher compliment than that. 

Under the Poppy has one of the best book trailers I’ve seen in a long while. The trailer really seems to capture the seductive energy of the novel as well as its aesthetic vibe. Did you play any part in the creation of the trailer? What do you think about book trailers as an element of book promotion?
They've become quite necessary, I think, a direct and immediate way for a reader to get a taste of a book, especially online, and so I'm justifiably proud of the creative team I assembled to make the trailer for Under the Poppy: director Diane Cheklich, puppeteer/compositor Al Bogdan, motion graphics artist Aaron Mustamaa, and musician/composer Joe Stacey—superlative artists and superlative work. (A shout-out to our human actors Madison, Julanne, and Jon, and Fred and Randy, our auxiliary puppeteers!) I was involved in the making-of in a few ways—from getting the team together to storyboard assistance to helping out with the puppets (I'm no good at all with an X-Acto knife, but I do OK with a rod-puppet).

And this seems like the right place to note that Under the Poppy is also making the leap to the stage: I've adapted the novel for an immersive presentation involving live actors, live music, film, and, yes, puppetry, that will be mounted at the Chrysler Black Box Theatre at the Detroit Opera House in 2011.  Diane Cheklich, Aaron Mustamaa and Joe Stacey are already involved in that project, as is designer Monika Essen, and we're having a marvelous time reimagining the story in 3D. 

If a reader loves Under the Poppy and can’t wait for your next novel, do you have any suggestions for other authors or titles they might want to seek out?
Two books I'd suggest at once are Sarah Waters' Affinity and Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford: engrossing historical novels (Victorian and Elizabethan eras respectively), passionate narratives, and both tremendously, gorgeously well-written.  Do yourself a huge favor and get them both. 

To complete his hugely ambitious trilogy of historical novels about the 20th century, Ken Follett has set himself a punishing writing schedule. Lucky for us. Because readers who compulsively turn all 985 pages of Fall of Giants, the gripping first book in the Century Trilogy, will not want to wait long for its sequel.

“If at all possible, I want to publish these books at two-year intervals,” Follett says. “So I work six days a week, and for the first draft I try to write six pages a day, which is 1,500 words a day.”

That means Follett hardly has time to enjoy his beach house in Antigua, where he is taking the call from BookPage, he says, in his library, “a white room with white bookshelves and very large open windows that look out onto the beach.”

“You get a different kind of understanding through your imagination, with the help of the author's imagination, of why people did the things they did."

Follett is there with his wife Barbara, who was for 13 years a member of Parliament and was also the minister for culture in the recently defeated Labour government of Gordon Brown. Back in England, the couple has a townhouse in London and a larger house, a converted rectory, 30 miles north of London, where they can host a tribe of children, stepchildren and grandchildren. Each of those houses also has a library where Follett writes.

“I do find it pleasant to be surrounded by books,” Follett says. “It’s very nice just to be able to reach out for the dictionary or the encyclopedia or something I use quite a lot—a reference book about costume at different periods of history so that I can describe people’s clothing. Books also remind me of the enormous culture to which I owe most of what I know and understand.”

The library in the country house, Follett says, pays special tribute to that cultural debt. In addition to books, its walls are lined with drawings and illustrations of well-known writers, among them a Picasso print of Balzac, which has pride of place over the fireplace. “I like the robustness of Balzac’s writing,” Follett says. “He’s not afraid to confront the dark sides of human nature. Obviously my work is not perceptibly affected by the Modernism of Joyce or Proust. However, I’m not unusual in this. Almost all the books you see on the bestseller list are basically novels in the Victorian tradition, stories with plot, character, and conflict and resolution.”

Perhaps. But not many of those bestsellers match the epic scale of conflict and resolution Follett deployed in his bestsellers about seminal events in England during the Middle Ages, The Pillars of the Earth (1989) and World Without End (2007). If anything, the Century Trilogy is even grander in conception than these fictional predecessors. The trilogy will follow the intertwined fates of five families—American, English, German, Russian and Welsh—through the tumult of the 20th century. Fall of Giants opens in June 1911 with the crowning of King George V of Britain. On that same day, 13-year-old Billy Williams, who along with his sister Ethel will become one of the most stirring characters in the book, begins his first day of work in a coal mine in Wales. The novel closes in 1924 after the reader has experienced World War I, the Russian Revolution, the beginnings of the women’s suffrage movement and the collapse of an antiquated class system, not to mention the emotional, spiritual and political ups and downs of the book’s central characters. In fact, by page 985, Follett has brought the reader into contact—sometimes glancingly, but more often at some depth—with roughly 125 characters, more than 20 of whom are actual historical figures.

“The research and effort at authenticity is more difficult when you’re writing about history that is within living memory,” Follett says. “One of the features of writing about the Middle Ages is that from time to time you ask yourself or you ask your advisors a question and nobody knows the answer. So then of course, as an author, you’re entitled to make it up. But with the 20th century, if you want to put, say, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary at the outbreak of World War I, at a social event on a particular day in July 1914, you really have to find out where he was on that day. You can’t make it up. Because somebody somewhere knows where he was every day.”

For a book with the international reach of Fall of Giants, Follett, who takes pride in the accuracy of his historical fiction, hired eight historians to read the first draft. These included experts on America, Russia and Germany.

Initially, Follett says, history drove the conception of the book. But as the work progressed, he drew on other sources. A story he heard years ago from a friend whose mother had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia in 1913 underlies Follett’s conception of the Vyalovs, a Russian émigré family in Buffalo whose rise to political power will be important in the trilogy’s second book. And Follett’s own boyhood in Wales informs his portrait of the fictional mining town of Aberowen and the boyhood of Billy Williams.

“My mother’s family lived in a town called Mountain Ash, which is very like Aberowen. We were there probably every other weekend when I was a little boy to visit my grandparents. . . . My descriptions of the steep streets and gray houses that snake along the hillsides and also the way people talk and the comic nicknames people have, that’s all Mountain Ash.”

Follett also credits his mother with his interest in stories and storytelling. “I think my mother was a very imaginative woman. She told me stories and nursery rhymes and sang me songs when I was a baby. I was the first child. First children always get a bit more attention, don’t they? I think my interest in the imaginative life comes from her.”

And it’s that interest in the imaginative life that makes Follett a historical novelist rather than a historian. “If you want to understand the Russian Revolution, one way to do it is to read the writings of Lenin and Trotsky and of analysts and so on,” he says. “But in a novel you try to imagine what it was like to be a factory worker in St. Petersburg, why he would want a revolution, why he would pick up a rifle and start shooting. That doesn’t happen in a history book. You get a different kind of understanding through your imagination, with the help of the author’s imagination, of why people did the things they did.”

Fall of Giants, Follett says, is about a period of history that “people find baffling. Most people don’t know why we had the First World War. They know that it started with an assassination in Sarajevo but they don’t know what caused the war. I want readers to understand it, but I didn’t want to give a history lesson. My mantra while writing Fall of Giants was ‘they don’t want a history lesson.’ So I had to find ways in which all of these developments were part of the lives of characters in the story. That was probably the major challenge of the book.”

It is a challenge Follett has met—and surpassed.

Ron Rash believes that “almost all of the great books are regional books.” What, he asks, “could be more regional than James Joyce’s Ulysses,” which unfolds during a 24-hour ramble through Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904?

So Rash bristles—in a modest, gentlemanly sort of way—when people use the word regional to pigeonhole, diminish or dismiss fiction like his, which roots itself in a particular place—Appalachia, and especially western North Carolina, where his family has lived since the 1700s.

“It’s an important issue to me because I think there’s a difference between regional and local color,” Rash says during a call to his office at Western Carolina University (WCU) in Cullowhee, North Carolina. “Local color is writing that is only about difference—what makes this particular place exotic. Regional writing is writing that shows what is distinct about a place—its language, culture and all of that—yet at the same time says something universal. Eudora Welty says it better than I can. She says that one place understood helps us understand all other places better. That’s been a credo for me. I think that if you go deep enough into one place, you hit the universal.”

A point in his argument’s favor? Ron Rash’s novels, especially his recent bestseller Serena, are popular in France. He’s been invited to read his fiction in places as far away as Australia and New Zealand. His books sell well in China. And his short stories and novels have been nominated for national, not just regional, awards.

Still, there is his sense of loyalty to his place of origin. On a 10-city book tour in France, for example, Rash, a charming storyteller with a strong regional accent, remembers that “they had me go to a local high school, I think partly [so students] could hear an American speaker. The first thing I told them was not to imitate me; they certainly would not be understood in New York City if they sounded like me!”

"Landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world."

A regional setting and universal themes are definitely hallmarks of Rash’s atmospheric new novel, The Cove. Set in the small western North Carolina town of Mars Hill at the end of the First World War, The Cove uses a little-known historical incident as a stepping-off point for a haunting narrative about intolerance and redemptive but illicit love.

“Obviously I love to read about the region’s history,” says Rash, who is the first person to hold the endowed Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies Chair at WCU. “But a few years ago I was doing some research and I was amazed to find that [there had been] a German internment camp near where I live in western North Carolina during [World War I]. And this camp was not for POWs. It was for German civilians who happened to be marooned in the United States when the United States entered the war. That was fascinating to me. And it became even more fascinating to me when I started reading about the Vaterland, which was the biggest ship in the world at that time and was much more elegant than the Titanic, and these guys who ended up in Hot Springs [North Carolina] had been on the Vaterland.”

Then Rash read an account of the internment camp that mentioned in passing the fact that one and only one German prisoner had ever escaped. “Wow! I thought, boy, what I can do with that. To me there was just this incredible story here that even a lot of people in the region did not know about. At the same time, because of some things that were happening in the United States, contemporary issues, I thought there were interesting connections.”

But Rash, who customarily writes between 12 and 14 drafts before completing a novel—usually while sitting in front of his fireplace with his two dogs at his feet—could not get his story of a German escapee to fly. Not, that is, until he realized that the real emotional center of his book was Laurel Shelton, a young woman who has lived all her life in a sheltered cove near Mars Hill and who longs to escape from a life blighted by the superstitious beliefs and confining scorn of most of her neighbors. Her dilemma threatens to split her apart from her brother Hank, who has returned to the family’s hardscrabble farm in the deep shadows of the Appalachian mountains after being wounded in the war.

“To me,” Rash says, explaining his intense interest in describing the ghostly place in which his characters rise and fall, “landscape is always a character. And I would say the cove itself, the landscape, is in some ways as dominant a character as any other character. . . . It’s hard for me to completely articulate but to me it’s like landscape is destiny. The environment you grow up in has to have some kind of effect on how you perceive the world. I would argue that The Great Gatsby could only have been written by a Midwesterner because the kind of expansiveness Gatsby could imagine fits a Midwestern sensibility; looking out on this endless expanse gives you a sense of endless possibility. The same might be true of someone who was born at the ocean. But if you live in mountains—I’ve seen this in my own family—two things can happen. One is that you feel protected by the mountains, almost like it’s a womb that protects you from the outside world. But the other thing that can happen is that the lack of light does something physically to people who live in a cove. There’s always a sense of your smallness, your puniness and insignificance compared to these mountains that have been here millions of years and loom over you. The result can be the kind of fatalism I saw even in my own family. I think The Cove is my strongest attempt to show that.”

Though based on historical research and set almost 100 years ago, The Cove is artfully layered with Rash’s concerns about the present. One of his most persistent concerns is how easily we turn other people into enemies and go to war against them. In a remarkable way, The Cove dramatizes a hope that loving, reasonable sensibilities will prevail—and a fear of the tragic consequences if they do not.

“I don’t want to be a propagandist, but I hope the reader senses that this is in the story. Certainly there are questions of what it really means to be patriotic, what it means to go to war. You kind of lay it out there and let the reader make the connections or not.”

Then Rash returns the conversation to his interest in discovering the continuities of past, present and future. While researching his previous novel, he reports with delight, he discovered that the house he owns about three miles from the WCU campus had been in his family roughly 230 years ago. And the future? Well, he says with some pride, like his wife and himself, his 24-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son have chosen to become teachers. “At least we didn’t run them off from the profession.”

CORRECTION: Updated to reflect the fact that the setting of Mars Hills is an actual town in North Carolina, not a fictional one.