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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lacey Galbraith is a freelance writer based in Nashville.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Last November, T.C. Boyle stood on the roof of his house in Montecito, California, garden hose in hand, prepared, if ill-equipped, to battle the conflagration known as the "Tea Fire" as it swept down the Santa Ynez Mountains. Only a last-minute westerly spared Boyle's home from joining the 230 homes ultimately destroyed in the blaze. Compared to other concerned neighbors (Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bridges, Rob Lowe), Boyle's anxiety was tenfold: the house he and his family have been restoring for the past 16 years, a 1909 Frank Lloyd Wright original known as the George C. Stewart house or "Butterfly Woods," was just weeks away from marking its centennial. The celebration would coincide with the publication of Boyle's 12th novel, The Women, an artfully playful rendering of the life, loves and, yes, the two headline-making fires at Wright's Taliesin home that stoked the creativity of America's foremost architect. Mere insurance could never restore such a loss.

"I thought, this is hubris!" Boyle recalls. "I was hysterical. This house is entirely made of redwood, so it would have been terrible."

Fire—destruction as prelude to construction—is as much a leitmotif in Boyle's latest and most ambitious historical novel as it was in Wright's personal life, the details of which were highly flammable indeed. Wright abandoned his first wife, Catherine "Kitty" Tobin, and their six children to run off to Europe with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, the wife of a client and neighbor in Oak Park, Illinois, the cradle of Wright's Prairie School of architecture. Though they were both married, Wright installed Mamah at the newly built Taliesin in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where she would ultimately be brutally murdered along with seven others by a deranged servant in 1914. Wright would again outrage the citizenry by living out of wedlock with, before marrying, second wife Maud Miriam Noel, a Southern belle and closet morphine user. He would similarly replace Miriam with his third and final wife, Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff.

Although Boyle envisioned tackling the larger-than-life Wright from the moment he set foot in Butterfly Woods, it was the master's scorched-earth love life rather than his architectural genius that ultimately sparked The Women.

"My editor jokes that we should eventually do a boxed set of my books about the great American egomaniacs of the 20th century, with the last book about [sex researcher Dr. Albert] Kinsey (The Inner Circle), the Kellogg book (The Road to Wellville) and Wright," Boyle chuckles. "There is a lot of appeal in these figures for me.

"All three were dynamos of the 20th century who changed the way that we live in radical ways, but each was a narcissist in the clinical sense of the word. That is, they had a scheme and that scheme was all-important; you and I and anyone else weren't really individuals who had lives or needs of our own, we were simply figures in their design. It comes to a head with Wright, who not only designed the furniture but in some cases the clothing that the housewife was to wear. These figures are fascinating to me because, of course, novelists are like that."

A less inventive writer might have been content to render the Wright stuff with a simple chronological narrative; certainly the historical facts in this case need little embellishment. But Boyle, never one to retrace his steps, nimbly reverses the order, introducing us first to Wright's last wife Olgivanna, then Miriam, and concluding with Mamah's tragic death. The effect lends a spirit of parlor comedy with a whiff of ash to the proceedings as each woman in turn falls for Wright and feels the inevitable sting of her predecessor's wrath.

To further pique our curiosity, Boyle leaves the narration to Tadashi Sato, a Japanese apprentice and devotee of Wright, as translated from the Japanese by his great-grandson. Tadashi's own story moves forward in time, a novel within a novel, slipped in primarily in the section introductions and droll footnotes. Credit Boyle's mastery with keeping this circus moving and easy to follow.

"I wanted not simply to do a kind of melodrama but to do something almost in the way that Nabokov would have approached it, something that is amusing and ironic in some ways, but also is complicated structurally and has many layers of narration," Boyle says. "The structure allows you always to question who is writing this book and how deeply they are representing a given point of view and whether or not that view is true. I guess we're having fun in a postmodern way, not that I really thought about it as I was writing it. I'm just always seeking to find something new."

Boyle willingly cops to a few similarities with the mercurial Wright.

"He was like me in the sense that we're control freaks and we have an agenda and this is our world; I write these books as a cautionary tale to myself," he admits. "But he's also very unlike me in that he only seemed to be able to create when all hell was breaking loose, when he was being sued by creditors and pursued by lawyers and divorce lawyers and women and cops. I can't work unless everything is perfect and quiet."

Although Boyle turned in the finished manuscript in July 2007, he says publication was delayed, first due to the publication of Nancy Horan's novel Loving Frank, which centers on Mamah, then to avoid being lost in the drama of the 2008 presidential election. He's pleased that the book's publication now coincides with the centennial celebration of his own piece of Wright's legacy.

"I thought that living here would give me an extra charge or thrill while writing the book in this house, and it did to a degree, but not as much as you would think because it's my house; I've lived here for a long time and I've written many books here. And yet it gave me great satisfaction to learn more about this particular house and more about his work."

Jay MacDonald writes in the Prairie style from Austin, Texas.

You seem to have an enormous correspondence on the Internet. How many folks are you in contact with, and how often are you online either answering email—pesky interviewers, especially—or participating in the online literary forums?
Well, I have accounts on CompuServe and AOL. I keep AOL mainly because there are several areas on AOL with “folders” discussing my books—in the Writers Club Romance area, in the Science Fiction Realm, in the Book Nook (under Fiction Romance and Historical Fiction), in Book Central (there’s a “live” Outlander discussion group starting up in their Cafe Books), and probably a few I haven’t heard about yet.

I try to drop in on the folders dedicated to my books, at least every few days, and answer questions as best I can.

CompuServe is more or less my electronic “home,” though; I got onto it by accident some 10 years ago (in the course of a software review I was writing for InfoWorld), and never left. The conversation and the company are stimulating—great depth and sophistication—and it is in fact where I made the contacts that eventually got me an agent and a publisher (I told you all that stuff, I’m sure).

Anyway, I’m now “staff” on CompuServe; I’m co-section leader of a section in the Writers Forum, called Research and the Craft of Writing; we address esoteric questions like how deceased animals are disposed of in Great Britain (just what do you do with a mad cow? You evidently don’t just get out the backhoe and bury it in the back yard), or whether striped peppermint candy was available in the American colonies in 1793, or what kinds of voice substitution are possible for a person with a tracheotomy, or exactly what would happen—in physical terms—to the body of a person who had cut their wrists in a cabin in the woods in high summer, who wasn’t found for several days…and also questions concerning writing technique: what are the advantages and limitations of telling a particular story in first person vs. third person? What’s the best way to introduce backstory without boring the paying customers?

Occasionally people will put up brief snippets of work (not long pieces; we have formal workshop sections for those who want critiques of stories or chapters) and ask whether X works, or if anyone can see why Y doesn’t work, or can anyone suggest what to do about Z?

To get back to your question—I average maybe 80-100 e-mails (that’s private correspondence) on the two services per week, plus as many threads (topics of conversation) as I have time to participate in on the public areas—I probably post 50-60 messages a week in public areas. E-mail reaches me through the Internet, as well as from the online services. Normally (as though there was such a thing), I spend about an hour online in the morning answering mail and minding my CompuServe section, another in the late evening, before I start work. I’ll log on from time to time during the day—to CompuServe—but just to collect messages and read them as a short break; I don’t normally take time to respond then.

Has the Internet played a role in your ever-increasing popularity?
Yes, I’m sure it has. As my editor is fond of saying, “These have to be word-of-mouth books, because they’re so weird you can’t describe them to anybody!”

There’s no better means of spreading word-of-mouth than the various pathways of the Internet. I’ve often “eavesdropped” on sections of AOL that I don’t publicly participate in, and found people recommending my books to their friends, for example. It’s also very common for people who drop by my CompuServe section to enjoy the conversation, then ask if I have anything published, and when I say yes, and describe it, to go out and get one of the books. And as a publicist at Delacorte once told me, “If you can get anybody to read the first one, it’s just like pushing drugs–they’re hooked!”

Drums of Autumn seems to me a gentler book in some ways than its predecessors: Jamie and Claire are basically together, Jamie wants very much to put down roots (that’s a very moving scene in which he points out that despite his age, he doesn’t even have a place to call home). Yet, the undercurrent of violence that is a part of the times is there: the threat of the Indians, the pirates, the Redcoats, and the simple rigors of living in a wild place. What are your thoughts about including such graphic scenes? They do make harrowing reading.
Well, it was a violent time, though the violence was often sporadic and unexpected. Daily life on a small homestead was frequently pretty dull—except that a bear could easily come by during the night and scare your pig under your bed. Or an Indian could stop by and die of measles in your corncrib.

My husband tells me that the books overall have something of the rhythm of daily life; not that I necessarily give a rundown of every detail of the day (it just seems like that sometimes), but that you get the feeling of interest in small details — the salamander that runs out of the wood in your fireplace, the ticks that bite you while you sleep, the difficulty of taking a bath—underlying the more dramatic events, throughout.

That is of course deliberate, and one of the characteristics that causes people who write to me to say that the stories are so vivid, they feel as though they’re actually living in another time and place. It’s a technique I call “underpainting,” and it’s very tedious to do—but worthwhile.

However, while the detailed background and sense of daily routine is the mortar that holds the book together, the interest of the storyline as a whole—the dramatic “shape”—is dictated by the more startling events and interactions.

As to harrowing…(shrug). If something happened, I just describe it. It would, however, be wrong—aesthetically—to gloss the more unpleasant events, while giving every detail of the pleasant ones. None of the scenes you mention are gratuitous; all are integral to the story, and in several cases, there’s an underlying literary purpose, beyond the dramatic.

That’s what usually bothers me about sex/love scenes in most novels (spy thrillers as well as romance, though it’s naturally more prevalent in romance novels)—in most, the acts described could be taking place between any two persons with the necessary genital arrangements. Not in my books; any such act could only take place between these specific individuals—consequently, it’s the interaction and relationship between the characters (and how it affects them) that’s important; not titillation contingent on spinal-cord reflexes.

Ditto (re: literary purpose) the priest’s execution by the Mohawk. You’ll notice that Jamie remarks that he has seen precisely similar acts performed by French (i.e., highly “civilized”) executioners—the only thing he finds shocking is the subsequent step of cannibalization.

And in Dragonfly in Amber, the hangman, M. Forez, gives a harrowing, step-by-step description (much more graphic than this “hearsay” description of the Mohawk torture) of the same process.

What we’re doing here—and it’s stated earlier, in more explicit terms, during their first encounter with the Tuscarora—is pointing up the fact that “civilization” is largely a matter of perception.

Your books are romantic but not romances; thrilling but not thrillers; historically rich but not history. If you had to categorize your books, where would you shelve them?
How would I categorize these books? I wouldn’t. I didn’t have any genre or category in mind when I wrote them—and they’re all different from each other, in terms of structure, approach, and tone. While it was a sensible marketing strategy to call them “romance” in the beginning (they do have a lot of romantic elements; they just have a whole lot of other things you don’t normally find in romance novels), that label is both limiting (insofar as a lot of people wouldn’t even look at something called “romance,” feeling that they know exactly what that sort of book is, and they aren’t interested) and misleading (I get a lot of romance readers, who write to me, figuratively bug-eyed, saying, “But you can’t do that in a romance!”).

They sell under any number of classifications: I’ve found them shelved under Romance, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, History (nonfiction) [Really. Foyle’s, in London, keeps them in the nonfiction History section.], General Fiction, and—on a few memorable occasions—Literature.

I see Ingram is listing Drums of Autumn as General Fiction (defined as “any book that does not fall into another specific category”), which seems OK to me. I suppose I might call them “Historical Fiction,” just to make it clear that they do have a historical setting.

Who’s your favorite character? Why?
Goodness, I couldn’t pick one—I love them all (including Jack Randall and Stephen Bonnet), or I couldn’t write them.

Where do you write? Have you written all your books in the same place and way?
Anywhere (I have a laptop computer), but most frequently in my office. I used to write where my desktop computer was (before I had a laptop)—either in my University office (on lunch-hours), or my home office (a converted garage.) After I sold Outlander, though, we bought a new house, which has a real office). I’ve written on planes, in hotel rooms, and sitting in the middle of Discovery Zone (one of those places you take kids and turn them loose), though.

After all your research into the 18th century, would you want to return to that period?
Nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

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

RELATED CONTENT
Diana Gabaldon's website
Diana Gabaldon's YouTube channel

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