Given his tendency to experiment with form (in novels such as Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten), it’s probably no surprise that when we spoke with David Mitchell about his enthralling new book, The Bone Clocks, he had just written a short story to be published 140 characters at a time on Twitter.

“It was an absorbing enterprise,” Mitchell said of the story, “The Right Sort,” which is set in the same world as The Bone Clocks.

The soft-spoken English author isn’t typically active on social media and seems unlikely to dive headlong into the Twitterverse. In conversation, he’s almost the opposite of Twitter: thoughtful, expansive, engaged and generous with his replies. Still, he says, speaking from his home in Cork, Ireland, that Twitter “has the potential for beauty as well as anything else.”

That Mitchell would play with a medium known for its brevity and fleeting nature is especially fitting in light of The Bone Clocks, where time and impermanence are key themes.

The novel centers on Holly Sykes, who is a spirited teen when we meet her in Gravesend, England, in 1984. Holly has a huge fight with her mother that leads to another fight with her boyfriend, and impulsively, she takes off. Furious and heartbroken, she hoofs it along the Thames, not sure where to go. As she’s walking, brief flashbacks reveal that when she was a little girl, Holly heard voices—the Radio People, she called them—until she was cured by a mysterious Dr. Marinus. It soon becomes clear that the Radio People and their strange world have not quite finished with her.

For most of its 620 pages, over several continents and into the year 2043, the novel takes place in a realistic world that is recognizably ours. But strangeness lurks in the margins, where a secret war is going on among a handful of immortal beings with a particular interest in Holly Sykes. Without revealing too much, it’s safe to say that these immortals, or “atemporals,” are defined by youth: Some embody it, others feed on it. The battle at the heart of the book comes down to opposing views of the fair price for eternal youth. How far will someone go to fend off old age and death?

The battle at the heart of the book comes down to opposing views of the fair price for eternal youth. How far will someone go to fend off old age and death?

“It’s my midlife-crisis novel,” Mitchell says, only half-joking. He’s 45, and, he says, “these themes are knocking about in my mind a lot.”

“You have to get choosy about your photographs,” he adds, still joking—sort of. “You look in the mirror and your dad’s looking out at you.”

There’s a point about a third of the way into the book where the pace quickens and suddenly teenage Holly is grown: She has gray in her hair, she’s guarded, she’s a mother, her bones ache. You can’t help wanting to slow everything down—having so recently been so close to young Holly, the jump to an older version registers as a palpable loss. It’s extremely effective—the reader’s response is almost physical. But Holly is still Holly. If anything, she’s better, smarter, tougher. Gradually, the point sinks in: Aging scares us, but it isn’t the loss we imagine.

“We live in a youth- and beauty-adoring society that dismisses age as something of no value,” Mitchell says. “It’s almost a crime to age. And this is wrong, this is no good.”

“We live in a youth- and beauty-adoring society that dismisses age as something of no value,” Mitchell says. “It’s almost a crime to age. And this is wrong, this is no good.”

Writing The Bone Clocks allowed him to address the topics of death and aging in a world that prefers not to discuss it. Western cultures, like the U.S. and U.K., “do some things very, very well, but they’re pretty rubbish at death,” he says. “And the longer our life expectancies have become, the more afraid of it we’ve become. Our culture won’t help us with this. We have to do it individually, one by one by one. We have to make a relationship with death. And in a way The Bone Clocks is one step for me along the path of doing that.”

As Holly goes from teenager to middle-aged author to scrappy grandmother, doing her best to forget what she’s seen of the atemporals and their ongoing war, she crosses paths with some characters who will be familiar to Mitchell’s fans. Dr. Marinus made an appearance in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and Hugo Lamb, who had a bit part in Black Swan Green, gets a leading role here.

Mitchell brings his characters back for several reasons. “I’ve lived with the people, of course, when I write them, so they never really go away,” he says. “They fade, but I remember they’re there. . . . I like to do it, that’s one reason.”

Secondly, encountering a character you already know adds a sense that what you’re reading is real: “So if you’ve read Black Swan Green already, and you believed in that world, and in walks this guy, the fact that you believed that Black Swan Green was real makes The Bone Clocks feel a degree or two realer.

“Thirdly,” he says, “it’s vanity, in a way.” Mitchell doesn’t want to spend his entire writing life making one huge Middle Earth-size world in a single book. “I’m too much of a magpie.” He prefers to write all different sorts of books. “However,” he adds, laughing, “I am vain enough to kind of want to. And I’ve realized that’s kind of what I’m doing; all of my books are sort of chapters in a greater überbook.”

Did he have a sense while writing Black Swan Green that Hugo might reappear?

“Never,” Mitchell says. “He was only ever a minor character. I’d started The Bone Clocks and then the vacancy came up and I thought, ‘I know who’s about the right age and who has the amoral, Ripley-esque credentials to fill that position.’ So, I invited him to the interview, and within a couple of minutes had decided that the job was his.”

And rightly so: Hugo, with all his charms and weaknesses, his coldness and his capacity to surprise, is an excellent villain. He’s complex, even sympathetic, and he perfectly embodies the icky wrongness of misplaced youth-worship.

He also provides Holly with a nice foil in terms of gender. Mitchell often writes female characters, though he says he does so “cagily and cautiously.”

“It’s a big divide, is the gender divide,” he says. “What gets taken for granted on one side is not necessarily what gets taken for granted on the other.”

Men are “kind of clunkier observers, I feel,” he continues. “And patriarchy does not do us favors. Patriarchy does not teach us to listen as attentively and observe as acutely as I feel that patriarchy obliges women to listen and see. I’ve got more lost ground to make up, as a man, I think.

“I should read more women,” Mitchell adds. “It should be 50-50.”

His reading habits are largely guided by what he’s writing, he says. Some of his well-traveled novels require months or years of research.

“It depends how far away the fictional world is to mine,” he says. “But it’s not a hardship, it’s highly enjoyable to read well-written books by people who know what they’re talking about.”

“You use a tiny fraction of what you learn, of course,” he adds, otherwise the book becomes didactic. “But somehow you still need to know it even if it doesn’t go in the book. You need to know a lot to know what not to put in.”

The idea that characters continue on after their main story ends—that what we’re reading is just a brief window onto a whole life—carries over into the ending of The Bone Clocks. Without, again, revealing too much, the story doesn’t have the tidy conclusion one might expect.

“It’s quite odd, isn’t it?” Mitchell acknowledges. “Well, I suppose one thing is that life does not end after momentous battles. There’s still years to be lived. In biographies of stars, I’m always interested in what happens afterwards, when the light of fame is fading. What do they do with that? That’s more interesting to me in a way than just the blaze.”

“It’s not an obvious ending,” he says. “But I feel it’s—if I can use this word in a book that is shot through with fantasy and the supernatural—it’s a realist ending.”

Ultimately, he says, the book is about survival: “who gets to survive, and why and how, what decisions do you have to make, what compromises do you have to make, and maybe what crimes do you have to commit to survive.”

Author photo by Paul Stuart

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What sort of research did you have to do to so fully create the post-collapse universe?
Researching this book was a fairly unsettling experience. Early on, I came across a faux-documentary that was produced by the History Channel, which outlined what might happen if a catastrophic pandemic were to hit the United States. The acting was terrible, but I found it quite useful for the practical details of what a societal collapse might look like. There were a lot of details that I hadn’t previously considered, like how quickly the grid would go down if people stop going to work in power plants. I suffered through the acting all the way through and took careful notes.

I also spent lot of time reading survivalist forums, which are exactly as insane as you might imagine. There’s a paranoid, heavily armed subset of the population who are preparing for the apocalypse and, one can’t help but suspect, kind of hoping it arrives soon so that all their years of preparation won’t go to waste. Mostly, I felt sorry for their kids. There were a lot of posts along the lines of “I’m taking my wife and four kids and we’re moving to an isolated location way off the grid, anyone have any suggestions for good homeschooling materials?”

 “Even the most mundane objects become precious when there aren’t going to be any more of them.”

And there were some details that I just picked up from other sources over time. In Station Eleven, cell phones stop working almost immediately. I was basing this on the 2003 blackout in New York City, when everyone tried to place phone calls simultaneously when the lights went out, and the cellular networks were immediately overwhelmed. When I was deep into writing the book, I read Peter Heller’s excellent novel The Dog Stars, which pointed out that automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. I was vastly relieved to come across this detail, because otherwise I might’ve messed up and had something gas-powered 10 years after the apocalypse, which probably would have triggered a few dozen Helpfully Correcting Emails from readers.

As you were writing about life after the apocalypse, did you develop a heightened appreciation for modern-day comforts?
I did. It’s possible that my upbringing left me with a somewhat heightened appreciation for the comforts of modern life—I grew up on a small rural island, and because trees have a way of falling on power lines during storms, it wasn’t terribly unusual to lose electricity for a few days at a time during the winter—but writing this book made me consider those comforts in a much more focused way. We take so much for granted.

You write vividly about a museum inside an airport where survivors collect objects from before the collapse. If you’d been there, what would you have wanted to save?
I’d want to save almost everything I had with me in the airport. Even the most mundane objects become precious when there aren’t going to be any more of them. I mean, imagine looking at a comb or a deck of playing cards and realizing, well, there won’t be any more of these. How beautiful the pennies floating around the bottom of your carry-on bag would seem, if they were the last pennies you were ever likely to come across. Same with your boarding pass, the last receipt you were ever issued at a cash register, etc.

What would you miss the most from your former life?
I think what I would miss the most is electricity, also running water. And everything having to do with transportation and communications: the telephone system, airplanes, trains, gasoline for cars. I live in New York City, and my family lives on the other side of the continent, on the coast of British Columbia. It’s horrifying to imagine a world without airplanes, telephones or the Internet, which is to say a world where I’d never be able to see or speak to them again.

Speaking of which—I finished Station Eleven with a new regard for Canada. What do you miss about your home?
There are several things about Canada that I miss very much: my family, the single-payer healthcare system and gun control. I love my life in New York City, but these are no small things.

The works of Shakespeare play a major role in your book, especially Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Why those specific plays?
The novel opens during a performance of King Lear in Toronto, on a night when a devastating flu pandemic is spreading rapidly through the city. The flu has just arrived, and no one in the theatre knows what’s happening yet. King Lear struck me as an ideal play for that moment, because on one level it’s a play about loss. Lear loses absolutely everything—his kingdom, his family, his dignity, his life. Everyone in the theatre stands on the precipice of losing everything.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sheer entertainment. It appears in the book at a moment when the Traveling Symphony has arrived in a creepy little town that seems to have changed since they last visited. It seemed to me that if one wanted to cheer up a depressing place in the middle of summer, A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be an excellent choice.

So do you think that even in the most difficult of circumstances, humans have a fundamental need to create art?
Yes, I do believe that. For a prime example of this need, one need look no further than the origins of jazz.

A series of graphic novels links several of your plot threads. What was the inspiration for those books inside your book?
The inspiration was a Neil Gaiman book called Brief Lives, a collaboration he did with a graphic artist, and I loved the style.

Something remarkable has happened with Station Eleven—Picador publishes the book in the U.K., and they commissioned an artist to recreate a page from the graphic novels that I write about in the book. It’s an insert in the U.K. edition. The artist, Nathan Burton, executed it in a very traditional comic-book style, which is completely different from how I’d imagined it but, when I saw it, seemed absolutely perfect. I had it printed at poster size and professionally framed, and it hangs above my desk. It’s astonishing to see something that I wrote about brought to life like that.

There are a lot of storylines in Station Eleven, which make it especially fun for readers; it’s thrilling to have those aha! moments when one realizes how it all fits together. How did you organize such a tight and complex plot?
It makes me very happy to think of readers being thrilled at those moments. I made a map of the book in Excel, which was extremely helpful in keeping track of everything. The map was a list of sections and chapters, with brief descriptions of the action and point of view for each chapter, and page counts for each section. I was constantly reordering the book and moving chapters around.

Beyond that, it was just a matter of endlessly revising. My working copy of the Station Eleven manuscript that I sent to my agent was labeled “draft 25.” There weren’t actually 25 complete drafts by that point—when I’m working on a book, I copy the Word file and give it a new draft number every time I decide to make a major change, so that I can backtrack if necessary—but still. It took an enormous amount of work to pull the book together and it was a complete mess for a very long time.

Readers have strong opinions about post-apocalyptic novels. Did you worry that genre fatigue might turn people off?
Yes, absolutely. When I first started writing Station Eleven there weren’t many post-apocalyptic literary novels yet, but by the time the book was done, I feared the market was saturated. I worried that the book wouldn’t find a publisher for that reason. I had visions of editors reading the pitch letter and rolling their eyes, in an “Oh, fantastic, another post-apocalyptic novel, just what the world was waiting for!” kind of way. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the reception so far.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Station Eleven.

A former BookPage editor, Eliza Borné is now the Managing Editor of the Oxford American. 

Author photo by Dese’Rae L. Stage.

In 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert to promote political unity, armed gunmen walked into reggae star Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and began shooting in what was a failed assassination attempt. In prize-winning author Marlon James’ groundbreaking new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, the attack becomes a centerpiece of a blistering commentary on Jamaican society in the 1970s and its inextricable links both to Cold War politics and to the drug wars of the 1980s.

I was in elementary school when both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot, yet I think of those events as seminal to my childhood. Likewise, you were 6 when Marley was shot. Do you remember the assassination attempt at all?
I do remember it as a kind of seminal event. When I first heard he had been shot, I remember thinking, he’s in Jamaica? Because by then Bob Marley was the guy who did things in foreign lands, not here. He wasn't on the charts, or on TV, so he wasn’t a part of daily popular culture. But you could hear it in the tone of adults around you that a line had been crossed. Also this: a sense that if this man, beloved by both political sides could be attacked, then we were all sitting ducks. The event did take the sense of security from everyone, even Jamaicans who never had to think about that before. If neither money nor celebrity could protect him, what was going to happen to us?

What kind of research did you do for this novel?
Tons. Over the four years it took to write this novel I had four researchers helping me. There were so many things, people, events, etc to learn about. The Cold War. The history of the CIA. Third world politics. I went through back issues of High Times, Ramparts, Playboy, Penthouse (for research!) and Rolling Stone. Bob Marley books. Rolling Stones tour books. Artillery specs. 1970s slang. 1980s Police blotters. 1990s crack house investigations. Manuals on how to disappear and build a new identity. Source materials. Interviews with actual drug users so as to distinguish between a heroin and a cocaine high. At one point I worried that had the FBI subpoenaed my laptop, I would have had some serious explaining to do.

Papa Lo and Josey Wales are extremely aggressive and violent characters. Yet they are also described with much empathy. What is it like to create characters like these?
I like difficult characters. As a writer they are the only people I want to spend any time with. Especially in those moments I find them despicable. Which is not to say it was easy at all. It’s never easy writing about brutality and violence, nor should it be. But I was also careful, I think, not to explain it all away with pop psychology. These are just not good men. But they are still complex and contradictory. Sometimes depth means not good and bad, but bad with shades of worse. Either way you have to make your characters three dimensional, regardless of who they are and what they do.

Your previous novel took place in the 18th century, vs. the 20th-century setting of the new book. What are the differences in writing a historical novel when the history is within living memory?
Not much. Both needed considerable research. The problem with writing about an event that you were a part of is that your experience is still only one person’s point of view. Other viewpoints, other perspectives become crucial. Especially if it turns out that the event was something that you have no firsthand knowledge of. And given that I was 6 in 1976, that’s pretty much everything.

"The problem with writing about an event that you were a part of is that your experience is still only one person’s point of view."

A Brief History is very honest about the sexism and homophobia in Jamaican culture. How has Jamaican society changed in this regard?
I would love to say that this has changed, but you’re only one YouTube video or one newspaper editorial away from being reminded that not only have things not changed, but in some ways they are worse.

This story is told by so many different characters—gang leaders, agents, reporters, politicians, girlfriends—yet we never hear from Marley. Why is his perspective not included in the novel?
Even before his death, Bob Marley’s presence in Jamaican life was symbolic. One argument was that this was exactly what made him dangerous, that he now represented an ideal for independence, self-assertion, even nationhood. It was very important that I kept that in the novel, that even on a day-to-day level, Marley was a symbol, almost an allegory. In that sense he had to disappear. Also, we’re talking Bob Marley. He could have easily stolen the show in a book that not really about him.

Music is so obviously key to this novel—if you were making a soundtrack for it, what songs and performers would you include?
There’s a playlist on Spotify! But the book is told in real time, over three decades and actually spans four. It skips countries as well. Crucial to the soundtrack would be what Jamaicans were listening to—not what was on the radio, or on the foreign charts. So let’s start with deep roots reggae without the “rock” sheen: Dennis Brown, Mighty Diamonds, and The Congos. But you would have to go even more “street,” closer to what the characters in my novel were listening to: Big Youth, Dillinger, Michigan & Smiley, U-Roy, I-Roy, Sister Nancy, the beginnings of dancehall. The novel then skips to New York for the beginning of hip-hop, so Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, and Run DMC, but also Cybertron and Man Parrish. Some early dance (M/A/R/R/S), some beat fusion (Eric B & Rakim’s Paid in Full remix), Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance and then a return to Jamaica in time for Dancehall/hip-hop to top the charts: Super Cat, Buju Banton, Lady Saw and Capleton.

What other Caribbean writers do you think American readers should be reading?
Oonya Kempadoo, Pauline Melville, Kei Miller, Sharon Millar, Roland Watson Grant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Louis Simpson, Patricia Duncker,

Marley’s music continues to motivate disenfranchised people around the world. What do you think it is about his music and life that still inspires people?
I think people hear a simplicity in the message of freedom, self-determination and triumph after struggle. Simple enough and universal enough that girls in Kabul can form rock bands inspired by him. That said, it’s also because of these things that people miss just how sly and inventive he was. “Kinky Reggae” is as libidinous as any Stones song about sex. “We and Them” nailed class hypocrisy years before rich kids started to buy the Legend album. But most of us are here for the message and the grooves, and next to Marvin Gaye, Marley was the only artist who figured out how to make hard messages go down sweet.

A Brief History is so intense and so brutal—what did you do to relax while you were writing it?
I read Jo Nesbo.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of A Brief History of Seven Killings.

A version of this article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Rebecca Makkai’s second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is an appealing mix of archival mystery, ghost story and historical novel. Told in reverse chronology, it unfolds as a kind of bookish scavenger hunt set in a former artist’s colony, uncovering clues and putting pieces of the fictional puzzle in place. I was able to catch up with her at Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books, where I attended a panel that featured Makkai, Maggie Shipstead and Bret Anthony Johnston discussing the nature of time in their novels. Afterward, Makkai and I settled in for a coffee at Frothy Monkey, a cozy spot down the street from the Festival and a perfect place to discuss books.

How is the book tour going so far?
The book came out in July, so the proper book tour happened over the summer—I was going to bookstores in July and August. This fall I’ve been going to festivals and conferences—it’s really extended the touring time. I’ve been doing about one event a week, either going to a festival, visiting a college creative writing program or being in conversation with another writer at a bookstore. I don’t know if this true, but they say if sharks stop moving, they die. I kind of feel like that. But I love traveling and seeing new cities and meeting new people. Especially other writers.

The fun thing about something like the Southern Festival of Books is that you get to meet other writers that you might just be Facebook friends with and you already have lots of talk about, plus seeing old friends of course.

The Hundred-Year House takes place in three very distinct times. What kind of research did you do?
The year 1999 I remembered very well. That’s the year I graduated from college and I had very specific cultural markers for it. What I did for the 1920s and 1950s was I bought a lot of magazines off of eBay. I was reading novels, listening to music and watching films from those periods too, but magazines really show you what people are talking about, worrying about, what was on their minds. I also got Sears catalogs for those eras, which was an amazing reference, not so much for ambience but for details, especially what things were called. For examples, sofas were called davenports.

Laurelfield, the estate in the book, is both a private home and an artist’s colony. Is it based on a real location?
I knew I wanted to write about a house that had been an artist’s colony before I actually ever stayed in one. But I was tremendously inspired by staying at Yaddo. I could have imagined what that life was like but I never would have got the vibe or the details right. I also learned a lot about how visual artists worked, which was important to the book. The dedication in my book is for, but not about, Yaddo and Ragdale.

Laurelfield is its own place, but its history is very much inspired by Yaddo, which has been an artists colony since the 1920s. But the physical aspects of Laurelfield are very much like Ragdale. Early on in the research I realized I needed to map out the floor plan of both the house and coach house in Laurelfield. In fact I had to do both floors of both houses three times—for every era. So I had six huge pieces of paper and I drew it all out. Very badly.

I love the idea that it is sometimes only luck that ensures that a document or manuscript makes it into the archival record. Have you ever thought about writing a biography yourself?
No, never. But the one thing I am working on which is nonfiction is about my father’s parents, who had really interesting lives in Hungary. My grandmother was a novelist and wrote about 40 books. My grandfather was a politician and a member of parliament and was both on the right and the wrong side of things politically. I am fascinated by them. I wrote a piece about them for Harper's last summer, and some aspects of their stories, partly fictionalized and partly not, are used in my next short-story collection.

What are you working on now?
I am doing final revisions on a book of short stories called Music for Wartime, coming out in July 2015. It feels really good to be getting it out into the world.

I am also beginning to think about a novel that will be set in the art world against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and a little bit of Paris in the 1920s, although I won’t be moving backwards in time again! More that there’s an older character in the book who remembers back to that time. I am doing a lot of thinking and brainstorming though, I haven’t written anything yet. But I’ll be at Yaddo this January and hope to get started then. 

Dutch writer Peter Buwalda is keenly attuned to the ironies of being a successful novelist. “A successful writer is living a paradox,” Buwalda says from to his home in Amsterdam, where he moved after his gripping literary debut, Bonita Avenue, became a bestseller in Holland in 2010.

“Being successful and writing sort of exclude each other. Before I was a real recluse, and now I am an outgoing person. I have to be,” Buwalda says. “The exterior of my life has changed radically—where I live, the money thing, the people I meet, how those people behave toward me. But inwardly there’s not so much that’s different. How I look at myself  hasn’t changed much. The writing of the new novel isn’t any easier.”

Buwalda says that until he was 34, he worked as an editor and journalist and was “a very fanatical reader.” Then he decided to write fiction and “changed like Gregor Samsa in the story by Kafka into a novelist. For me it was late, so I had to try to write a thick, serious novel at once, without hesitating, diving into the deep.”

The idea for Bonita Avenue, which was published in English in the U.K. last year and arrives in the U.S. this month with a translation tweaked for American readers, began with Buwalda “thinking about the abyss between the younger generation of the 1990s and 2000s and the older generation. For the first time in history, I think, because of the rise of the Internet, people from the older generation know less about the world, maybe even about wisdom, than the younger generation.”

Buwalda realized that nowhere is that abyss more graphically evident than in the world of Internet pornography. “The thought that my grandfather has seen only my grandmother and maybe two or three other women while his grandson could watch all those pictures, all those movies on the Internet, made me wonder—what does this mean for people, for society, for relationships between family members?”

To develop and amplify this idea, Buwalda spent the next five years writing eight hours a day in the cramped kitchen of his tiny apartment in Haarlem, a Dutch city near the North Sea. He recalls that at Christmas the year before he completed work on the book, his brother said, “But, Peter, what if your effort is only a narcissistic dream? And I said, then I will have lost five years of my life and I will try to find a way to laugh about it.”

The finished book is, as Buwalda calls it, a hybrid of a plot-driven novel and a character-driven novel. The action starts when Siem Sigerius begins to suspect that his stepdaughter Joni and her photographer boyfriend Aaron are posting pornographic pictures online.

Sigerius is a fascinating and complicated character. As a working-class youth he became a national judo champion, but after an accident ends his judo career, he discovers he has an innate genius for mathematics and goes on to a stellar academic career. The story—and Buwalda’s deep investigation of his characters’ lives—unfolds through the alternating perspectives of Sigerius, Joni and Aaron.

“I think they’re mutants of my own character in a way,” Buwalda says. “I’ve given all my weak characteristics to Aaron. He’s insecure. He can’t sleep at night. He’s a jealous guy. He makes up things to show off. All the noble things in my character, the one who is ambitious, who cares about justice, who wants to win, I gave to Sigerius.

“And the more vulgar side of my character, the one who wants to earn money, who is easy about sexuality, who is funny, I gave to Joni. I wanted to make her, the girl, the strongest one in this story. She never hesitates, she is the most cruel, she’s not a victim. So I split up my own character—with a purpose, of course, because I wanted to split up the morality of the problem so readers can decide for themselves what is right or wrong.”

Enhancing the sometimes brooding character of the novel is the way time ebbs and flows throughout the book, both within chapters and between chapters. Buwalda says he learned this approach from reading writers like William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez.

“I want the characters in the novel to remember events the way we usually talk about our lives. We don’t start and tell a linear story about ourselves from birth to now. Instead we remember first the most important things, the most painful things or the most happy things. I tried to write the story the way memory works.”

Bonita Avenue, whose title comes from a street in Berkeley, California, where a younger Sigerius and his new family live briefly while he pursues his mathematics career at the university, pulses with other themes and insider knowledge of judo, jazz, mathematics and, of course, pornography.

“One of my goals was that for every subculture I entered in the novel—porn, math, jazz or judo—a reader must think I was a connoisseur,” Buwalda says, laughing. “So, yes, I had to do some research. Not so much for judo because I have a black belt.”

The novel ends with a vividly described, shocking conflagration of violence. Asked about that section of the novel, Buwalda says making it so vivid “was also one of my aims. But I will never have the same experience of it as a reader because I invented it and it took me a year or so to write. It’s a strange act, writing, because it is so slow, while the reader gets through it so fast.”

Like many things in his recent experience, Buwalda notes, “that is also a paradox.”

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Click here to read international praise for Bonita Avenue on Read It Forward.

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If you think you’ve read the story of four friends trying to make it in New York City already, think again. Hanya Yanagihara’s transcendent second novel is much more than its plot summary suggests. A Little Life may be the best book you read this year; it certainly will be the most heartbreaking.

The Condé Nast Travel editor, who grew up in Honolulu, made her fiction debut in 2013 with the publication of The People in the Trees. She’d been working on that novel—which weighs a scientist’s dubious morals against the good his research has accomplished—“for maybe 16 years,” she says during a call to her office in New York City.

All 700-plus pages of A Little Life, on the other hand, were written in just 18 months, after five years of mental planning. “I worked on it very steadily, three hours a day Monday through Thursday and six hours a day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. But I knew where it was going the whole way.”

That’s an advantage the reader of this often-surprising literary tour de force won’t have. As the stories of the four main characters—college roommates Willem, Jude, Malcolm and JB—unfurl over three decades, Yanagihara deftly fills in the separate pasts that have shaped their shared present.

“I was very drawn to the idea of a group of friends,” Yanagihara explains. “My very best friend, to whom the book is dedicated, has a large group of friends who I call the herd of cats. They’ve known each other since high school and college, and I’ve always admired their dynamic and how hard they work at staying friends.”

Like any friend group, the foursome faces ups and downs: romantic disappointments, career successes, drug addictions. Two go into professional careers—Jude becomes a lawyer and Malcolm, an architect—while JB and Willem pursue art and acting, respectively. But it soon becomes clear that the biggest conflict in A Little Life is Jude’s struggle with his past demons, which include abandonment and abuse. While his entire history doesn’t become clear until well into the book, readers will realize early on that it’s not something to be easily overcome—giving a story that might otherwise be essentially a domestic one serious emotional heft, as well as a sharper, more dangerous edge.

“One of the themes of the book is this hope that we all live with: that one other person can save us—and the realization that we really can’t be saved, that the idea of being saved itself is sort of a false conceit . . . “

“One of the themes of the book is this hope that we all live with: that one other person can save us—and the realization that we really can’t be saved, that the idea of being saved itself is sort of a false conceit,” Yanagihara says, citing the “limits of what any one person can do for someone else.”

The reader does indeed feel helpless at times in the face of the cruelties that Jude endured. Yanagihara fully commits to bringing readers all the way into her characters’ lives—the dark spots as well as the bright—with a visceral realism. “A friend of mine called it sort of an emotional horror story in a way, and I guess it is,” she admits. (This interviewer read one scene peeking out between her fingers, which was a first.)

Child abuse is tricky to handle in fiction, but Yanagihara seems drawn to exploring the subject, which was also an element of The People in the Trees.

“I’m interested in how people compensate for some great harm when they were young,” she explains. “One of the great concerns for fiction in general is the fundamental vulnerability of humans,” adding that children represent the most vulnerable group of all.

But while Jude’s trauma may give the book its drama, at its heart A Little Life is a study of friendship, a relationship that “can never really be codified,” says Yanagihara. “With gay marriage, we are seeing a relationship that has always existed between two men or two women get a legal name. But friendship will never have a legal definition.”

She was particularly interested in male friendship, because “men are friends in very different ways than women are friends. Socially—and not just in our society but almost every society—they’re given a much smaller emotional toolbox to work with. They’re not allowed to name, much less express, the sort of feelings that come very naturally and easily to women.” (Originally, she’d intended to have no women in A Little Life, but decided it was “too contrived-sounding” and scrapped the idea.)

Yanagihara’s grasp of the complexities of friendship is masterful and will spark recognition in any reader, male or female. You might say that this book is to friendship as The Corrections was to family.

“Although we have seen depictions of great friendships in books, I don’t think it’s something that as a society we collectively value as much as we should,” she says.

The novel is carefully structured—something Yanagihara says “was as important to me as any of the flashier elements”—into seven sections. The first four are each set five years apart, but the final three sections run together, to echo the way that the experience of time changes througout life. “As you get older—I recently turned 40—time seems to shrink and compress, and it becomes something that is lived less by these sort of big epic milestones and simply by moments,” says Yanagihara.

A Little Life takes place somewhere close to the current day, although the exact time is never specified. “I wanted the book to have a sort of fable-like quality to it,” says Yanagihara.

Fable or not, New York City—currently Yanagihara’s home base—is vibrantly depicted here, from crappy post-college apartments in Chinatown to the SoHo lofts that come with adult success. Also very New York: the way that each of the characters is driven to break from the past.

“Everyone here is sort of looking for another family . . . this idealized set of people who will understand them,” she says.

Malcolm, Willem, JB and Jude find that set of people in each other, and readers of A Little Life will feel a part of it. With this epic and moving story, Yanagihara proves that she is a literary force to be reckoned with.

This article was originally published in the March 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Legendary book editor Jonathan Galassi has been at Farrar, Straus and Giroux since 1986 and is now its president and publisher. So why is his rambunctious, captivating first novel, Muse, being published by a rival?

“Oh, I don’t think it would be kosher for us to publish it,” Galassi says during a call to his office in New York. “It would seem like a strange kind of nepotism. Besides, I’d like to feel that my book is legitimate, that it’s being published because someone liked it, not because they had to.”

Muse is certainly legitimate—and more than likable. In fact, it’s quite funny and revelatory about an almost-lost world of literary publishing. The novel tells the story of a clash of publishing titans—Homer Stern and Sterling Wainwright—waging long-term war over, well, just about everything. But especially over Ida Perkins, a poet as famous as Ernest Hemingway and as enigmatic as J.D. Salinger. The novel’s protagonist is Paul Dukach, a bookish young man who idolizes Perkins and becomes the foremost authority on her life and work and, eventually, a sort of adopted son of both publishers. 

Muse is, as Galassi writes in the preface, “a love story. It’s about the good old days, when men were men and women were women and books were books, with glued or even sewn bindings, cloth or paper covers, with beautiful or not-so-beautiful jackets and a musty, dusty, wonderful smell. . . .”

“They say write what you know,” Galassi says regarding the origins of his novel. “The two old-lion publishers are based on people that I did know very well and admired a lot. They were both very engaging and witty people. And they did hate each other. I thought it was a good setup for a look at the publishing business as it used to be.”

“Big egos have big libidos. Having a big ego makes you insufferable in a way, but it also lets you do things, don’t you think?"

As portrayed by Galassi, publishers Stern and Wainwright are anything but madam-librarian type book people. They are operatic in their competitiveness and their libidos. “That’s all drawn from life,” Galassi says. “Big egos have big libidos. Having a big ego makes you insufferable in a way, but it also lets you do things, don’t you think? There’s something kind of heroic in a monstrous way about it.” His portraits of these publishers are, Galassi says, “part of the swashbuckling, lovingly satirical, comedic tone of the book.”

Although he doesn’t quite admit to it, the milder, more diplomatic character of Paul Dukach probably arises from Galassi’s own sensibilities. Galassi is often described as the most gentlemanly editor in the business. 

The poet Ida Perkins, however, is pure invention, a character that Galassi clearly loved imagining into life. Muse includes a puckishly inventive “concise bibliography” of Perkins’ work that will make an unsuspecting reading wonder why he has not read any of these inspired works of poetry. It also includes a selection from Perkins’ final collection of poems in which the novel’s protagonist discovers “an onion skin atom bomb” that will alter the balance of power among his contending father figures.

“There’s chutzpah involved in writing those poems,” Galassi admits. “But the thing about the book is that it’s not meant to be realistic. Of course those poems would not be the greatest poems of the century, but there is something that makes them plausible. I loved writing them. They’re not my poems. They’re her poems. They’re in her voice. Part of the fun of it was trying to ventriloquize. It’s all part of this pastiche of literary life, literary culture.”

Galassi, by the way, is a well-​regarded poet himself and an accomplished translator of Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He was poetry editor of The Paris Review for a decade. His most recent volume of poetry, Left-handed, is a semi-​autobiographical exploration of the emotional disruption a middle-aged man experiences as his long-term marriage ends and he falls in love with a younger man.

Galassi says that after finishing Left-handed, “which has a kind of narrative arc,” he felt he should try writing a novel. “I’d always thought I could never do that. I work with all these people who write novels. I admire what they do, and I wondered, are they really a different species from me? So I thought it’s now or never; why not try. It was a challenge to myself.”

Thus in his mid-60s Galassi began to write fiction every day “for as many hours as I could. And then I’d put those pages away and never look at them. I did that for a month. And then I put it away for a year. And then I looked at it a year later and decided I had something to work with. I was going against my own editorial faculty that might have prevented me from letting loose.”

And then the editor got edited. “Robin Dresser, my editor at Knopf, was very critical and very demanding. I found that I had the most difficulty cutting. I didn’t want to let go of this; I didn’t want to let go of that. I had to go against my desire to have pages. But what matters is not how many pages you have but how good they are. This,” Galassi says with a wry laugh, “is what I tell my writers all the time.”

Toward the end of the conversation, the discussion turns to the future of the book, a topic of concern in Galassi’s novel and for Galassi himself. He says that the tsunami of eBooks once predicted to wash away printed books has abated. “eBooks are a big part of our business. But they’re not the whole thing. . . . Books are still books. Many young people really want books as physical objects because book culture is not just about content. It’s an atmosphere, a world of its own, with a physical component. People talk about the ‘erotics of books.’ If you came to my office, you’d see shelves and shelves of books that I’ve worked on and that we’ve published over the years in all their different colors and sizes. Books are beautiful things. They really do furnish a room.”

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kate Walbert has always been a keen transmitter of women’s voices, from conforming suburban wives in the 1950s or British suffragettes during World War I. Her new novel, The Sunken Cathedral, offers a complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a city  transformed by radical climate change, tragedy and new wealth. 

We asked Walbert a few questions about her luminous new novel—and her own relationship with New York City.

What was the initial inspiration for this book?
I lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York for many years, and after I moved uptown I missed it so much I guess I wanted to imagine my way back. I suppose I could have hopped on the subway . . .

What is the significance of the title?
The title refers to the Debussy prelude “La cathedrale engloutie,” sometimes translated as The Engulfed Cathedral and sometimes translated as The Sunken Cathedral. Debussy’s prelude was inspired by the medieval legend of the Lost City of Ys, a fabled city off the coast of Breton that—due to the devil and an evil daughter (naturally)—is destroyed by a tempest and sinks into the sea. The story goes that on especially calm days its cathedral bell can still be heard. In the book, a character peripherally inspired by my best friend’s mother, Jane, who for more than 20 years took daily painting classes at the National Academy, works on a painting she titles The Sunken Cathedral, as Jane once did. It was Jane, always the smartest person in the room, who later told me the legend behind the title, and the origin of the Debussy prelude.

I was in New York last month, after not being there for several years, and it was amazing to me how much of the city I remembered was gone. What is your New York, and is any of it left?
This is such a great question. I love the concept of “your New York,” because I think anyone who has spent any time here has one, or several. There’s something so personal about the experience of the City because of the chance interactions, weird juxtapositions, abrupt encounters that happen here—all of which are somehow both banal and profound. You bump into someone on the bus and it’s a story. You see something unfold on the street and it’s another story, and then all these stories accrue and become your New York. Maybe it’s because the City moves at warp speed and is constantly changing that you write your history in these small daily encounters—that’s where the humanity of the place comes through. I think New Yorkers are the friendliest people in the world. They have to be. It’s almost a miracle we all survive together. But that’s not really answering your question, is it?

My New York has a lot to do with where I’m living at the time and the stage of my life. For instance, for the first year of graduate school I lived in a rent-controlled studio on Grove Street in the West Village, one of those quintessential Woody Allen New York streets that smell of wood-burning fireplaces on cold winter nights. How I got to live there at all involves a shady philosophy professor at NYU and his scheme to make a little extra cash but that’s a different story (and a different New York). What I remember best is the wisteria that grew up the front of this place, a brownstone painted pink, and how, if I left my window open during a sunny day, the tendrils would snake into my studio and wrap around the closest thing they could find. So that’s one New York that’s mine. And then when my girls were very young, my New York was the various downtown playgrounds—seal park, circle park, Bleecker Street park, the beautiful park in Battery Park City with the granite slide straight from the Albany quarries—I can still rattle the names off like a mantra. I haven’t been to these playgrounds in years but if I were to walk by them today they would be filled with other mothers, fathers, nannies; maybe this is the point.

Many of your male characters are veterans or are serving in the army. Both Simone and Marie’s husbands served in WWII, and one of the footnotes explores, briefly, a moment in the life of a minor character’s great-uncle in Korea. What is your interest in the military experience?
I’m not a military brat but I should have been—my father, who served on the frontlines of Korea—was a chemistry professor at West Point when he and my mother married. She convinced him to leave the Army (he took a job with DuPont) but the Army always loomed large in our house. We went to Army – Navy football games. Dad taught us what it meant to eat a “straight meal,” explained the rituals of hazing at VPI, where he went to college, and generally extolled the military life. The one thing he kept to himself was the experience of his time in Korea. Growing up, I never knew his brothers, but I knew they were in WWII (one in the Infantry, at Omaha Beach, the other a bomber pilot over France), and that his beloved cousin, Charlie, who had lied about his age and enlisted at 16, was one of the last soldiers killed on Iwo Jima. All the family details around the military have always fascinated me—especially for the history left unsaid, the stories untold.

By the end of the novel, most of the characters have left New York, yet the city continues on. Do you think of the ending as pessimistic or optimistic?
I think so much of a reader’s experience of reading is what she brings of her own life into it, whether a city dweller or not—so that’s a difficult question to answer. The city does continue on and that’s ultimately hopeful—think of those mothers and fathers in the playgrounds. I ended with the church bells from the General Seminary in Chelsea, the ones that, when I was there, marked the passing of the hours and other things, such as the anniversaries of 9/11, the moment of that morning when the planes hit the towers. It only occurred to me after finishing the book that the experience of hearing church bells ring, marking occasions both happy and sad, is universal and somehow outside of time and place.

Why did you choose to use to put vital information about your characters in footnotes? How do you think separating out parts of the text impacts story?
I believe there’s an increasingly fractured way of being in the world, our lives barreling forward on many parallel tracks, our focus constantly interrupted, redirected. This is what I came to understand the footnotes to be: the things we don’t say, the history, the regret, the stories that are submerged (to keep the water metaphor) and yet constant. Vital information, yes, but not necessarily of the kind the characters would put forth easily, or readily if they had more time. I’ve come to understand that the footnotes carry what is left unsaid but always present.

A lot of your work is about the restrictions that were or are put on women. Do you think aging releases us from some of those limitations?
And leads us to others, she said, laughingly.

Perhaps. But I guess I would also say that in our culture if age releases us, it may do so for the wrong reasons—we move (or are shoved) out of the sphere, the whirlpool of everything. We are suddenly invisible. I could say this gives us a greater freedom to do whatever we’d like, as if we’d suddenly gone underground and can get away with murder, but that doesn’t feel entirely right. Yes, it’s great progress that Joan Didion is the new face of Celine, but let me get back to you about this question in a few more years.

Your novels take place in Japan, England and the United States, and span periods from the 19th century to the current day. Is there a time or place you haven’t covered yet in which you are interested?
I never start out knowing where my books are going to go—I don’t write from an outline, or with any clear plot or story in mind. I follow the voice, the sentences that seem to carry a certain pressure, a particularity that suggests secrets, complications that may prove interesting to explore. It’s the voice that dictates—that gives the clues to the setting and the situation. For instance, A Short History of Women begins “Mum starved herself for suffrage, grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far.” When writing those “mums” I knew I had to be in England, and clearly in the early 20th century, but I hadn’t planned on any of it and so had to feel my way along from there. Who was this speaker? Who was her mother? Her grandmother? Why suffrage? Why England? In other words, it’s anyone’s guess where the voice might take me next.

Who are some of your favorite writers? For inspiration? For curling up and reading?
There are so many writers to admire. In the past five years, Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy has been my constant recommendation—and I find the work of Hilary Mantel enormously inspiring for the clarity of the point of view and the way in which she constructs these amazingly idiosyncratic sentences that seem to speak directly from the characters’ hearts, not just the brilliant and wildly popular Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, but others as well—The Giant, O’Brien one of my particular favorites.

What are you working on next?
I’m completing a collection of short stories, most of which are set in New York City (but not necessarily Chelsea!).

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Sunken Cathedral.

Todd Aaron has been institutionalized at Payton LivingCenter since the age of 11. Despite occasional thoughts about living back home, Todd is mostly content at Payton, where he’s something of an ambassador to new residents. But when a series of events shakes up Todd’s quiet life, returning home takes on a new urgency.

In his fourth novel, Best Boy, Eli Gottlieb channels the voice of a middle-aged autistic man with uncanny authenticity and power. We asked the author a few questions about his remarkable new book and its unforgettable narrator.

You have written that your first novel, told from the point of view of a teen with an autistic brother, was somewhat autobiographical. Are there autobiographical elements in Best Boy as well?
Yes, the book is loosely inspired by my childhood with my brother, who has been institutionalized for autism since he was 11 years old. It’s also informed by the many years I spent visiting him in his various therapeutic communities.

Todd’s narration is shaped by his autism and the limits of what he can express. This leads to some unique and even poetic imagery, as well as unexpected humor. How did you develop this voice?
I initially wrote the book in the second person. The second person, with its peculiar ambiguity—is the writer addressing himself or the reader—was useful as a mapping tool to chart the perceptual universe of the narrator.

I then rewrote it in the first person, while trying to retain not only the freshness of his perception but the strangeness within the individual sentences. That was the real labor—to make do without my literary reliance on simile, metaphor and the conventionally prettifying resources of “style.” There are very few commas in the book. The sentences are bluntly declarative. It was refreshing and also difficult to work against my own grain, but I hope it added to the verisimilitude of the finished product. As for the deeper wellsprings of that voice—they remain a mystery. 

You include so many details that show how Todd experiences the world. My favorite is his mistrust of animals, which he sees as people “who had been crushed into strange bodies.” Did details like this come from your research? Did you find any first-person accounts of adults living with autism?
I read here and there on autism and the history of the malady, but no, I didn’t read any accounts to find the particularities of the narrator’s outlook. I simply drew on my memories. A fear of cats and dogs, by the way, is a characteristic of classical autism, and in the example you cite I attempted to come up with a reason why the most innocent, floppy-eared beagle should be a terrifying beast to my brother.

After the book was done, I did read a powerful memoir called Boy Alone, by Karl Taro Greenfeld. His younger brother was Noah, the autistic boy who became a huge celebrity in the 1970s when his dad wrote a book about him. Karl’s upbringing had uncanny similarities to my own.

Even though Todd’s mother is long dead by the time the book opens, you manage to provide a truly touching portrait of their relationship. How did his mother shape Todd?
Clearly, her relationship to him was one of intense, nearly interwoven closeness, as often happens between mothers and developmentally disabled children. Her love for him is a kind of inner landscape he longs to return to, or a sea whose tides he feels moving in his own chest.

The idea of his childhood home is a powerful draw for Todd, even though it holds as many bad memories as good ones. Can you tell us a little about what home represents in this book?
I think home in this book represents a warmth and wholeness, a time, in the words of Wordsworth, the great poet of childhood, “when meadow, grove and stream . . . did seem apparalled in celestial light.” Almost everybody misses their home-world on some level, even if, as in the case of Todd, it was a place and time where he had to endure a tremendous amount of difficulty. 

Because of his lack of understanding of the full emotional range of what’s going on around him, and his inability to express a lot of what he does understand, Todd is almost childlike. And just as they are for children, these qualities are both insulating and dangerous. What do you think is the difference between a child narrator and an autistic narrator?
That’s a wonderful question. I think the two narrators, child and autistic, can merge in many ways—the vulnerability coupled with an openness to experience and the freshness of perception.

The autistic narrator has the added burden of an actual malady, which skews things inevitably—it can turn him deeply rageful, as when Todd gets his “volts,” which are nearly epileptoid in their fury—or when, despite his apparent innocence, he has to deal with the social shame of looking and behaving differently, a fact that filters in to his consciousness despite his seeming indifference to it. There’s a reason that older autistic men and women are often, characteristically, stooped.

How and where do you write?
Kafka wanted to be lowered in a bucket to the bottom of a well shaft. I’ll settle for anywhere quiet, away from the Internet and social stimulation. Much of Best Boy was written in a submarine-like garden apartment in Brooklyn, along with many solitary weeks spent at a friend’s isolated house on Shelter Island.

What are you working on next?
Something entirely new—a historical novel. It’s killing me.

Beginning with the 1981 publication of his first novel, A Good Man in Africa, winner of the prestigious Whitbread Award, William Boyd has been astonishingly prolific—14 novels, four story collections, four plays, countless film and television scripts, essays and reviews.

“I think it’s a very British thing,” Boyd says during an afternoon call to his home in London. He and his wife, formerly editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar and now a film writer and producer, are packing to escape overheated London for the house they have owned for 20 years in rural southwest France, where they spend roughly a quarter of the year. “You’ve got to write something every day,” Boyd says. “It needn’t be a novel. It might be a restaurant review or your diary. I think it’s because of the great Victorians—Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope—those tireless dynamos of writers who make us all look lazy. In the British literary tradition, it seems normal to be prolific.”

Over the last decade, in addition to producing a novel every three or so years, much of Boyd’s extracurricular writing has been devoted to a newfound interest in photography. That interest bodies forth in bold, captivating and mischievous ways in his sweeping new novel, Sweet Caress.

Subtitled “The Many Lives of Amory Clay,” the novel opens on a sparsely populated island off the coast of Scotland in 1977 with the title character, born in 1908, looking back over a tumultuous life. As a professional photographer, Amory has been a witness to many of the signature events of the 20th century: the return of emotionally damaged soldiers—including her father—from World War I; scandalous Berlin between the wars; the catastrophes of World War II and Vietnam. Amory’s romantic life has been equally turbulent.

“In all my novels I tend to steer my protagonists into areas of life or history that intrigue me,” Boyd says. “Amory’s journey is pretty amazing, but it’s not extraordinary. A lot of women photographers, especially between the wars, seemed to live interesting, emotional-rollercoaster lives. Photography is a very democratic profession. There was no glass ceiling for these women. So they had a kind of independence which other professions open to women did not have.”

As part of his interest in photography as an art form, Boyd says he also wanted Amory’s career to span “the many types of photography that the 20th century threw up. So she takes [action] photographs like Jacques Henri Lartigue in the beginning of her career, then she becomes a society photographer like Cecil Beaton, then a fashion photographer maybe like Richard Avedon or Irving Penn, and then a war photographer and a reporter.”

Boyd decided early on that merely describing Amory’s photographs wouldn’t suffice. So in a move that will surely stir comment, Sweet Caress is illustrated with photographs purportedly of and by Amory. Other novels, Boyd notes, have included photos. His own elaborate literary hoax Nat Tate (1998), a supposed biography of a tragic American painter, for example, included images of the fictitious artist and his paintings. But, with 73 images, few previous works of fiction have used photography on the same scale as Sweet Caress.

“The decision to make Amory a photographer in the 20th century made me think that maybe I should do the unprecedented thing and put a lot of her photographs in the novel,” Boyd says. “Once I had that idea, it seemed to me a really intriguing kind of parallel creative process. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could illustrate her life with photos that were purportedly taken by her but are in fact anonymous photographs and also give the anonymous people in these photographs new identities from the fiction.”

And so the search for la photo juste began. Already a frequenter of junk shops and “car boot sales,” from which he had amassed a large collection of found photographs, Boyd also searched through online catalogs for photos of the right era and style. Vietnam War photos were the most difficult to come by because most of the pictures from that war are press photographs. But France, he notes with a laugh, was a gold mine. “The French seem to throw away their family albums willy nilly. Because I live in France, I go to these brocantes—antique fairs—where I’ve bought many a family album. I used them in Nat Tate and I used them in Sweet Caress.”

At the outset, Boyd worried that the photographs might be a distraction. But his creative selection of photographs, many of them snapshots, has the opposite effect. Not only do the images aptly fit how a reader might imagine a particular character or situation, but they add a surprising vitality to the narrative. As Boyd says, “In a very curious way that I haven’t fully analyzed yet, the photographs actually enhance the fiction. It’s a most strange thing that happens.”

Maybe, Boyd speculates, the key lies within the nature of the snapshot. “What strikes me about photography is that it’s a stop-time device. And I think the snapshot is the quintessence of photography. Time is frozen, a moment is frozen, life stops. That moment frozen forever can be incredibly powerful.”

Which leads Boyd to a kind of epiphany. “Many people have read the novel now and there’s a consensus that the photos don’t detract from the fiction. Seeing the man Amory’s in love with or the house she lives in actually makes the novel seem more real. And that fits into this bigger plan I realize I’ve been working on throughout my writing life, which is to make fiction seem so real you forget it’s fiction, to push the bounds of fiction into the real world, the world of history and journalism and reportage. I never had this plan, but I can look back at the work and see, yes, this is something I consistently tried to do: to make people’s suspension of disbelief absolute.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“I'm in a swamp in County Sligo,” Kevin Barry tells me over the phone. The Irish author has lived in at least a dozen places, from his childhood home of Limerick to Spain to Santa Barbara, but he’s settled now in an old police station built in the 1840s, known as the Barracks. Sadly, he says, it doesn’t appear to be haunted.

If it were, he’d surely know. Barry, whose first novel, City of Bohane, won the prestigious IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, is highly attuned to what he calls the “strange reverberations” that linger in towns and landscapes. His new novel, Beatlebone, navigates a world of ghosts and echoes and spooky floating patches of emotion. It’s a musical fever dream of a book that sounds weirder than it is; Barry’s perfectly honed storytelling voice sweeps readers happily through decades and across rough seas. 

The wounded hero of Beatlebone is John Lennon, who, in this version, has fled New York domesticity in 1978 and run away to Ireland to spend three days alone on the island he bought a decade earlier. He hopes to do a bit of scream therapy and maybe try to write again. But he has to dodge the press, and on top of that, he’s not at all sure how to find his island. Enter Cornelius O’Grady, local driver, fixer, mentor—and decidedly more than he seems. 

How did Barry happen upon this odd tale? “My bicycle led me directly to this story,” he says. 

He’d heard there was an island in Clew Bay that Lennon owned. His favorite Beatle’s connection to Ireland continued to fascinate Barry, even after he’d mentioned it in a story or two. 

“It wouldn’t let me be!” he says. “It kept coming back at me.” He was “snoozing on the sofa one day” after a bike ride and, startled awake, suddenly realized he should write a novel around it.

“It’s a very risky thing to take such an iconic figure and set him down in one of your stories. When it came to the Beatles, I was always very much Church of John.”

“I was immediately terrified,” Barry says. “It’s a very risky thing to take such an iconic figure and set him down in one of your stories.” He worked carefully and with devotion. “When it came to the Beatles, I was always very much Church of John, ” he says.

The risk paid off; Lennon is a fully convincing yet still original character, none the worse for having been borrowed from real life. Barry says early readers of the book have told him the first thing they do is start Googling to see how much of what they’re reading really happened.

“I love to work right out on the edge of believability,” he says, “where the reader is going, no way. Come on. Well . . . maybe.” 

Some of the wondering is put to rest in a section two-thirds of the way through the book, in which Barry steps forward and tells how he came to write the novel. “I always knew I was going to put an essay bang in the middle of the book,” he says. 

At its heart, Beatlebone is about what it takes to make a record, to write a book, to create something. “I wanted to put my own struggle in there as kind of a mirror.”  

Naturally, Barry visited Lennon’s island while working on the book, in pursuit of those strange reverberations. He tells me the same thing Lennon’s driver, Cornelius, says in Beatlebone: that stories and feelings linger not in people but in places. You might be out for a walk and “a sense of elation would come over you,” Cornelius says. 

That patch of happiness could have been floating around the field for the last 10 years. Or for the last 350 years. Because of love that was felt there or a child playing or an old friend who was found again. Whatever it was, it caused a great happy feeling and it was left there in the field. 

Of course, you could as easily find a floating sadness or fear. 

“I hope this is sounding very hippie-ish,” Barry says, laughing.  

Beatle Island, properly called Dorinish, is empty now, apart from nesting terns and their massive eggs and the stories that linger. But the barren isle was once home to one of the earliest organized communes. In 1971, Lennon arranged for a group of New Agers to camp out on his island as an experiment; they stayed about a year and a half. They were part of a trend starting in the ’60s of hippies coming to Ireland, partly because it was cheap to get a cottage along the coast. (“It’s not now,” Barry says.)

“I find it a really interesting time,” he says. The “gray, monolithic” country was opening up to new ideas. “It’s weird and lovely to think that John was involved in that.”

Did Barry try some scream therapy while he was on the island? 

“Oh for sure, you’ve got to!” he says. “I was determined to be very method with this book. But,” he adds with a laugh, “there didn’t seem to be very much in there.”

The book took him four years to finish, and you can tell by his tone they were long years. 

“The first year,” he says, “there was an awful lot of watching YouTube,” trying to perfect Lennon’s voice from old video clips. 

“When the book started to become delightful to me was when I gave John a sidekick,” he says. This would be Cornelius the driver, who has “oodles of roguish charm—we’re never quite sure what he’s up to,” Barry says, adding, after a pause: “He’s kind of me.” 

Among the book’s greatest pleasures are the long conversations between Lennon and Cornelius—which Barry admits took a tremendous amount of work to get right. “They have to feel really light and natural on the page,” which meant endless revisions. He acted out the voices, pen in hand, making notes as he read, going over the dialogue hundreds of times. 

With Cornelius in place, Barry says, “I started to realize it was the most old-fashioned kind of novel in the world—essentially it’s Don Quixote.” A man goes on a quest, the nature of which is basically irrelevant—it doesn’t really matter if they get to the island. The important stuff is what happens to them along the way.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s compelling second novel, childhood best friends Anil and Leena choose very different life paths.

Anil leaves India to become a doctor in America, while Leena marries a man in a neighboring village—but they are soon confronted with changes that make them wonder whether they’ve made the right choices. Gowda confronts the universal question of how much our lives are shaped by family and cultural expectations in The Golden Son, a thoughtful family saga. 

You were born in Canada and live in California, but you describe life in India very evocatively. What is your relationship to India like?
I come from a long line of immigrants. My grandfather left India to set up a trading business in East Africa. My parents left India and eventually settled in Canada. I came to the U.S. for university and have lived here ever since, and my children were born here. The idea of having multiple cultures is very much my own experience. I’ve visited India all through my life, and it does feel like “home” in some way. When I took my children to India for the first time, they too fell easily into the rhythms of family and culture, and I have to believe there’s some connection there on a deep level.

The idea of arbitration as practiced in Anil’s home village is likely unfamiliar to many American readers. How did you come across it?
I have long been intrigued by the Indian tradition of settling disputes within a community. I grew up hearing stories about lives that were changed: women granted divorces from abusive marriages, for example, before there were laws in place to protect them. Of course, not all disputes were settled happily, and afterward they had to go back to living together in the same community. It’s so different from the nearly anonymous, transactional way we administer justice.

What do you wish more people understood about immigrants and their reasons for seeking a life in North America?
I am drawn to stories of characters who have to navigate cross-cultural issues, because there are an infinite number of ways an individual can react to the particular opportunities and challenges of being an immigrant. At the same time, it’s also a universal theme: Almost everyone can point to a story in their family history that features a personal uprooting and resettling. Both Canada and America have been built on this tradition. It’s this diversity that makes Western society so strong, rich and innovative, and we would do well to remember that.

There is a lot of information about the medical field in this novel—how did you research those aspects of the story?
As someone who didn’t study science past high school and is squeamish about blood, it was not a likely (or wise) choice for me to write about a young doctor in his residency. But I thought Anil Patel belonged in the field of medicine, with its high stakes and prevalent moral questions. So, I dove into research. I read about the residency experience [and] interviewed many, many doctors. I’m very grateful to all the physicians who helped me learn how to tell this story. Fortunately, I never fainted on one of them.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.