The surprising source of Bich Minh Nguyen’s enthralling second novel, Pioneer Girl, was her discovery that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter Rose had traveled to Vietnam as a journalist in 1965.

Nguyen (pronounced New-win), whose family fled Vietnam in 1975 when she was 8 months old and settled eventually in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says she “had read the Little House on the Prairie books when I was a kid, and I loved them. And I would reread them as an adult as comfort literature. I identified very strongly with them, which some people would think really strange, because why would an Asian American like Little House on the Prairie? But there’s actually a strong connection in terms of the immigrant/migrant experience of starting over. When I found out about Rose Wilder Lane, I felt this was a connection that was asking me to investigate a little bit more.”

“The real story of our family is never known to us because so much of it happens before us.”

Rose Wilder Lane, as readers of Pioneer Girl—or Wikipedia—will discover, was a prominent journalist and well-regarded novelist in her era. She was a close enough friend to President Herbert Hoover that her voluminous papers are housed at his presidential library in Iowa. And many scholars think that if she did not write the Little House books outright, then it was her editorial hand that gave narrative shape—and popular success—to her mother’s efforts. Three years before she died, she went to Vietnam on assignment from a woman’s magazine to offer a woman’s perspective on the war.

The facts of Rose Wilder Lane’s life—and the secrets that may lie hidden beneath those facts—become a kind of obsession to Lee Lien, the narrator of Pioneer Girl. Unable to find a university teaching job after completing her dissertation on Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, she returns home to help her domineering mother and sweet-tempered grandfather run the Lotus Leaf Café, a struggling Asian fusion-ish restaurant in a strip mall west of Chicago. The discovery of a possible family connection to Rose Wilder Lane sets Lee on a quest to unlock the secrets—real or imagined—of Rose’s life and resolve some of the mysteries of her own family background.

“Meshing the historical with the fictional was a huge challenge for me,” Nguyen says. “I felt that taking a real-life character and imagining an alternate reality is a huge risk. I wanted to do justice to Rose Wilder Lane’s life. I didn’t want to treat her life as just ‘material’ because she’s a fascinating person and a wonderful writer. At the same time I was interested in the idea of mythmaking and the idea of trying to find one’s story.

“Rose kept so many journals and even copies of the letters she sent to other people because she wanted to be in charge of the trajectory of her story,” Nguyen says. “The narrator of the novel, Lee, is essentially in that same pursuit in her family. She wants to take control of her family’s narrative. But the real story of our family is never known to us because so much of it happens before us. We’re researchers picking up clues, trying to understand our parents and family members who are no longer with us. We’re wondering, guessing and coming to conclusions that may not be 100 percent accurate.”

What is certainly true is that Lee’s family is full of conflict. Lee and her mother clash often. Her brother Sam, the favored son, steals from the family and leaves Chicago for San Francisco, where, it turns out, Rose Wilder Lane lived for some years, and where Sam’s is not the only Asian-American face in the crowd, as he tells his sister when she arrives in pursuit of a resolution to the Rose Wilder Lane mystery.

“I’m really fascinated by conflict in immigrant families,” Nguyen says. “This conflict plays out regardless of ethnic background. If you’re a first-generation immigrant in the United States, your children are going to reject so much of what you represent and what you desire. It’s partly the desire for assimilation and partly trying to find one’s own identity while being stuck between two different cultures.”

“I’m really fascinated by conflict in immigrant families."

Pioneer Girl, which takes its title from the working title of the first book in the Little House series, offers a deeply resonant portrait of contemporary Asian-American immigrant life. But, with, for example, a marvelous riff on the generic Chinese restaurant that exists at the edges of many towns in the Midwest, the novel makes clear that it is exploring a different sort of immigrant experience than we often read about—call it the Middle America Asian-American experience.

“That was probably the most autobiographical part of the novel,” Nguyen says, “wondering why my family decided to stay in the Midwest. When we arrived as refugees, we were resettled in Michigan, and for a long time my family wasn’t particularly happy there, but my father never thought about moving. I always thought that was a fascinating aspect of my dad’s character.”

Nguyen previously touched upon these experiences in her highly praised 2007 memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner. “I think my Asian-American Midwestern experience is marked by alienation—not all the time, but a little bit—and self-consciousness. I don’t regret my upbringing because it was a fascinating way to grow up and there was so much conflict that it gave me material probably for the rest of my life. But because I grew up in this dual culture, I never quite felt at home anywhere.”

Still, until last summer, Nguyen had spent her whole life in the Midwest. In July, she and her husband, writer Porter Shreve (who also has a novel coming out in February), left their teaching positions in the writing program at Purdue University and moved with their children, ages 4 and 2, to the San Francisco Bay Area. Nguyen now teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at the University of San Francisco.

“I’m a Midwesterner. We sort of believe you should grow where you’re planted. So it was hard to leave,” Nguyen says. “It took me and my husband a long time to make this decision. It was such a life-changing decision. But the Bay Area is one of these places where, especially if you’re from the Midwest, you think—wouldn’t that be a dream. We love it here.”

Here’s the first thing you should know about Helen Oyeyemi: She’s got a soft spot for twisted fairy tales. Her widely acclaimed first novel, The Icarus Girl, drew from both African and Western mythology to tell the story of a biracial 8-year-old and her wicked secret friend.

Her next two books, The Opposite House and White Is for Witching, address Cuban mysticism and Gothic horror, respectively. Mr. Fox, which she penned in 2011, recasts the classic Bluebeard folktale as a story about an English writer with a nasty habit of murdering his female characters.

Here’s the second thing to know about Helen Oyeyemi: She wrote all four of those books before the age of 27.

The award-winning British novelist (and daughter of Nigerian immigrants) shows no signs of slowing down, having just published her fifth book, Boy, Snow, Bird, a sly retelling of Snow White.

Oyeyemi has particular sympathy for one type of literary scapegoat: the wicked stepmother, whom she believes gets a bad rap.

“I never really set out to rewrite fairy tales,” she told BookPage during a recent telephone conversation from her home in Prague (where she moved last year on a whim). “I just get really interested in them. Perhaps it’s because there’s something about the retelling that exposes the teller. You have this very old frame that’s been used by various other storytellers through the generations—an anchor, if you will. But there’s also room to show your own thoughts and feelings, to insert yourself into the narrative.”

Oyeyemi certainly brought her own experience and wild imagination to bear in Boy, Snow, Bird, which examines the trope of the notorious evil stepmother—but with a racial twist.

The novel begins in 1953 when the beautiful, troubled Boy Novak leaves her abusive father (a snarling, wild-eyed “rat-catcher”) for a small town in Massachusetts. There, she meets and marries a handsome widower, Arturo Whitman, whose daughter Snow is indisputably beautiful—the fairest in the land, if you will. As if Snow’s looks weren’t trouble enough, Boy soon gives birth to her own daughter, Bird, who is shockingly dark-skinned. Thus is uncovered the Whitmans’ deep, dark secret: They are a family of light-skinned blacks desperately trying to pass as white. Once this shame has been revealed, Boy banishes one child, while embracing the other—and all three characters are forced to confront their own identities.

What’s interesting though, is how unfixed the concept of identity becomes over the course of the book. Not only are characters repeatedly miscategorized (by race, by gender) and misnamed (“Boy” is a girl, the Whitmans are not “white men”), some of them aren’t even positive they actually exist. How else could Snow and Bird explain the fact that they generally don’t show up in mirrors? Or the fact that neither can recall meeting the other in person? Even Boy’s father, the abusive rat-catcher, isn’t what he initially seems, revealing himself to be neither completely bad, nor exactly Boy’s father.

If all this sounds confusing, fear not. As with her earlier novels, Oyeyemi’s prose can be cyclical and demanding—she’ll never be the type to spoon-feed takeaways or wrap things up in a pretty bow—but she’s also never out to full-on befuddle. If anything, she aims to please.

“I just want readers to care enough to turn the page,” she admits. In other words, she writes characters who may be complex, but are both relatable and sympathetic.

Oyeyemi has particular sympathy for one type of literary scapegoat: the archetypical wicked stepmother, whom she firmly believes gets an unfairly bad rap. “Wicked stepmothers disrupt the values of a story in a way that interests me,” she says. “They disrupt the notion that a woman should be dutiful or beautiful or sweetly tempered, and in that way, they become real people. In fact, the fairy-tale villain or wicked stepmother has a spark for life that a character like Snow White just will never have.”

"To be honest, I’ve always found Snow White to be quite menacing."

OK, you might concede, so maybe Snow White is a little boring. But surely Oyeyemi can’t deny her fundamental goodness, right? Wrong.

“To be honest,” she says, “I’ve always found Snow White to be quite menacing. She was always so placid and just accepted everything terrible that happened without any anger. I mean, she’s been thrown out of her home. She’s frightened. She has to go and live with these weird dwarves. And yet . . . she’s just this complacent blank slate. I find that much more terrifying than her wicked stepmother.”

Such irreverence is fundamental to Boy, Snow, Bird which, it’s worth noting, is often surreally funny; Even the nastiest characters have moments of levity (the rat-catcher certainly plays for laughs), and particularly harrowing scenes are tinged with lightness—as when a thick clump of hair is found in the cranberry sauce during an emotionally fraught Thanksgiving dinner.

But overall, Oyeyemi’s irreverence serves to disrupt fairy-tale convention, which typically relies on strict black-and-white dichotomy. No character, she seems to say, can be defined by race or gender, let alone moral good or evil.

“Sure, it’s easier if you stick to absolutes,” she admits. “This is a man. This is a woman. This is what a white person does. This is what a black person does. This is what a black person looks like. This is what a white person looks like. And so on. But what I wanted to do was create characters who connect on other levels, who overcome the obstacles that might otherwise make them enemies.”

Another absolute that drives Oyeyemi crazy is the concept of “happily ever after” or “closure,” both of which she resists in Boy, Snow, Bird. “What does ‘closure’ even mean?” she demands, laughing. “I don’t know if I should confess this, but I’ve been obsessed with this TV show called ‘Pretty Little Liars,’ and every episode it seems like somebody needs ‘closure.’ What psychobabble!” Then, with a hint of mischief: “The only real closure is death, right?”

This interplay between the funny and the grim, the refreshing banal and the fantastically unknowable is perhaps what makes Oyeyemi so likeable—both as a person and as a writer. She’s wise beyond her years, but never pompous or intimidating. She gushes about Lydia Davis’ new short story collection, but also admits to crying during trashy airplane movies. And then of course there’s her fiction, which is at times difficult and dense, but always full of humor, joy and good old-fashioned plotting.

About this balance, Oyeyemi is remarkably humble. “The things I write are so disobedient. I never know what they’ll turn out to be.”

OK, fine. But in that case: She’s one darn good disciplinarian.

California-born author Maggie Shipstead returns with a dazzling second novel, Astonish Me. The story of a ballerina that spans decades, it's as sharply observed as it is entertaining—and was our April 2014 Top Pick in Fiction. We asked Shipstead a few questions about the book.

Where did the inspiration for this book come from? Do you have a personal history with ballet?
I’m not a dancer, but I’ve been going to the ballet since I was five. My mom, who’s a lifelong ballet fan, took me about four times a year until I left for college, and now I go whenever I have the chance. Back in 2010, I wrote a short story about a disappointed ballet dancer and her academically gifted son and their conflicts with their next-door neighbors. It jumped through 20 years in short sections and didn’t really work. I liked writing about dance, though, and as I tinkered with revising the story, it seemed to want to expand. So I just kind of went with it, and once I came up with the defector character of Arslan Ruskov, the shape of a book started to become clear.

Given that Astonish Me focuses on the world of ballet, did you ever worry that your subject matter might get the book prematurely dismissed by readers?
You’d think I would have learned my lesson after writing a first novel set at a wedding. The short answer is yes, although the whole conversation about what is and is not chick lit is unappealingly thorny and fraught and difficult to engage in without trashing other writers. Inevitably, lots of people will assume Astonish Me is a fluffier book than it is. I had to work pretty hard to keep a woman in a bathing suit off the jacket of Seating Arrangements (a book that’s primarily about a 59-year-old man), and even so, there were newspaper reviews that started out “I thought this would be chick lit, but . . .” which was honestly really galling. It’s an old chorus, but I think male authors get the benefit of an assumption of seriousness that their female counterparts don’t.

"I think male authors get the benefit of an assumption of seriousness that their female counterparts don’t."

For me, writing a novel is such an epic grind that, in order not to be miserable, I have to write about what fascinates and moves me, even if that brings me to subjects and settings that aren’t immediately identifiable as weighty. And, of course, subject matter doesn’t determine the value of a piece of fiction. You can write about something as heavy as, say, the horrors of war without necessarily generating any worthwhile prose or thought. In the end, all I (or anyone else) can do is try to build a story and characters I find compelling and write as attentively and thoughtfully as possible and revise my face off and hope for the best.

There is a lot of discussion in the novel about how ballerinas are vessels for creativity—do you feel this is also true for authors? Are there any other parallels you would draw between dancers and writers?
I’m fascinated by the practices of artists of all kinds and by the relationships they have with their own talents and limitations. The idea in the Astonish Me of a dancer as a vessel has to do with how a choreographer will make a dance “on” a dancer or dancers and use the bodies of others to explore and realize a personal vision. Dancers, I think, have vastly different lives than writers. Their medium is the body and their work is dynamic and almost always collaborative, while writing is solitary and rooted in the mind and is, unless I’ve been going about things all wrong, best done while stationary. Dancers peak when they’re very young; writers have at least the possibility of continuing to work into old age. But I think there’s a common experience among writers and dancers (and probably most artists) of what it’s like to spend all your time trying to do something that’s extremely difficult, something that requires a massive amount of practice and dedication and might give you a rush of satisfaction one day and then leave you feeling utterly defeated the next. It’s a precarious way to live.

"Dancers, I think, have vastly different lives than writers. Their medium is the body and their work is dynamic and almost always collaborative, while writing is solitary and rooted in the mind and is, unless I’ve been going about things all wrong, best done while stationary." 

What made you decide to tell this story in a linear, but recursive, way?
The early drafts were actually slightly weirder, structurally, than the final version. The narrative jumped forward and back in time according to an internal logic I thought made sense but that my editor gently informed me was confusing. So I eventually had to simplify somewhat by not skipping around so much, combining some sections, sticking with particular arcs longer. The book is written in present tense, but covers almost 30 years, from 1973 to 2002, and isn’t quite sequential. The earliest years fall in the middle of the book. From the beginning, I knew I wanted a structure that let me dip in and out of the story, creating questions and then answering them. The book is meant to have a strong sense of movement and, in some ways, to mimic the feel of a ballet, how small vignettes come together and build toward a dramatic, even breathless, ending.

It seems like a lot of younger authors today hold advanced degrees in creative writing. How did your own time at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop shape you as a writer, and what is the best lesson you learned there?
Before I went to Iowa I had no idea that I could be a writer. I’d taken a couple writing workshops in college but didn’t think fiction was at all a viable career. Then I graduated and was having a hard time coming up with any better ideas as far as viable careers, and I applied to Iowa as a shot in the dark. Being there—being exposed to those teachers and all the writers who come through and being part of a community of people who all care passionately about words—that’s what made me get serious. Learning how to write confidently, and how to fake it when necessary, was probably my most important takeaway. The endless debate about whether or not MFAs are worthwhile honestly baffles me. Of course not every writer needs or should want a graduate degree, and no program is perfect, but, for me, going to Iowa was a no-brainer. It meant time and money to try to become a better writer. What’s the downside?

Many of the characters in this novel are on a never-ending quest for perfection, a plight that seems to afflict many artists. As a writer, are you concerned with achieving perfection or is there some other goal that motivates you?
It’s funny—I was definitely one of those little kids whose elementary school teachers are always like, “Maggie, do you know what a perfectionist is?” I’m very competitive; I don’t like making mistakes. But, perhaps oddly, I’m also pretty accepting of the inherent imperfection of my writing. I’m concerned with writing the best book I can squeeze out of myself at any given time. If I held out for a perfect book, I’d never publish, and I’d be miserable. I do wish my books were better—nothing I write down will ever quite be what I want it to be—but when I’m done, I’m done. And then I move on. The prospect of starting something new is actually a big source of motivation for me. Maybe it’s that my impatience is stronger than my perfectionism.

 "I’m concerned with writing the best book I can squeeze out of myself at any given time." 

Readers who have read your first novel will likely remark that Astonish Me is very different. As an author, were you consciously trying to push yourself with this new novel? Is there anything that you feel like you did more successfully here than in your previous book?
I’ve published maybe 12 or 13 short stories, and I tend to write about wildly disparate things from one to the next. Like I have a Montana cowboy story and a story set on a guano-mining Pacific atoll in the 1910s and one about an actress who marries into a Hollywood cult and one about a couple honeymooning in Romania in the early 70s. So, to me, it seems natural to seek novelty in my novels. I’m also not starting from an autobiographical place and then branching out: the WASPy world of Seating Arrangements interested me but wasn’t any more my world than ballet is. I hope I always try to push myself. I think I would be bored if I didn’t. Because my two novels are so different, though, it’s difficult to compare them. Astonish Me is a more compressed book as far as length but ranges more broadly in terms of time and geography and variety of characters. It also has more momentum than Seating Arrangements, I think, and that momentum builds over the course of the book, which is hopefully a good thing.

Even readers who don’t have an interest in ballet will probably find themselves utterly engrossed by this book if they give it a chance—have you ever found yourself astonished by a book, initially assuming it wouldn’t appeal only to find yourself incapable of putting it down?
That happened to me all the time as a child. I would read more or less at random. I’d find myself up late with my flashlight under the covers reading something unlikely like, say, a novel about aerial combat in World War I. I was never put off by being a little confused. I think I was a very trusting reader, too. I had the idea that all books were good, and if I didn’t like one, it was my fault. These days my reading is more constrained by time and by the need to do research for what I’m writing or to read galleys or to keep up with books my friends publish. I’m also less game than I used to be because I’ve become critical. Still, sometimes I’ll get talked into reading something I’d been resisting (usually for no good reason) and love it. That happened with The Art of Fielding, actually. I hadn’t read it because, paradoxically, I’d heard too many good things and didn’t think it could measure up. Then someone gave me a copy when I was traveling alone, and it became my new best friend.

In Astonish Me, one of the characters posits that if you really connect with a story, it is possible for things to be true even if they never really happened. Would you say that this is the goal of fiction, to take universal truths and make them personal?
I don’t really know if there are universal truths, but I do think fiction can absolutely be true while also being entirely invented. When I read, I’m after that feeling of recognition, like, “Yes, that’s exactly how it is.” Which I might get just from an especially apt word or incisive sentence or which might come from a character who’s particularly alive or a plot that feels entirely unforced and organic to the characters. Fiction doesn’t have to mimic exactly how life is, but spectacular things happen when fiction captures how life seems. I also believe, as does the character you mentioned, that if a story is important to you and feels real to you and alters how you see the world in some small way, it’s immaterial that it didn’t really happen. We dwell in our imaginations more than we realize, I think. Unreality helps us process reality.

"We dwell in our imaginations more than we realize, I think. Unreality helps us process reality."

What is your favorite part of the writing process: starting a new project or finishing one?
Far and away finishing one. Starting can be exciting and full of high hopes, but the early stages are also fraught with anxiety, especially since I don’t outline. I start with a vaguely formed idea and cross my fingers that the rest will follow. I don’t get comfortable until I’m midway through a draft.

What are you working on next?
I have a handful of stories I’d like to finish, and I’ve started a third novel. 

Photo of Maggie Shipstead by Michelle Legro

As a investigator who specializes in death penalty cases, Rene Denfeld had a wealth of real-life material to draw on when she wrote her first novel, The Enchanted, which is set on death row in a crumbling prison. A mute inmate narrates this mesmerizing story in which love and unimaginable horror coincide, making for a uniquely powerful page-turner.

What was your first spark of inspiration for this novel?
This novel was inspired by my work. I'm hired by the attorneys representing men and women facing execution. It's my job to investigate the life story of the client. I find their relatives, long-ago neighbors, teachers who taught them in grade school—anyone who can offer insight. I also spend time with the clients making them feel safe so they can tell me their secrets. It can be a very hard job full of pain and sadness, and yet it can be a wonderful job too as I get to learn why—why they became the way they did, why they did such terrible things. I feel honored that people tell me their truths—I think it is something we all hunger for, to be seen and understood. 

"I am often stunned by the courage in people, in their ability to transcend their circumstances—the prisons we all live inside, whether actual or in our fears." 

What initially drew you into your work as a death penalty investigator?
To tell the honest truth, I needed a job. I was a single mom to three kids I had adopted from foster care. I had met death penalty investigators before and was fascinated by their work. They seemed like the only people who really get to understand the roots of crime and violence. In 2008 I got licensed and quickly moved into the work in 2009. I love the job. 

What is a typical day on the job for you?
Every day is different. I spend a lot of time on the road tracking down long-ago witnesses. I drive deep in the woods, into failing timber towns. I visit tenements in the roughest areas of the country. I go into prisons, finding witnesses. I dig up ancient records in old courtrooms and hospitals. I also spend time on death row with the clients. Some days are very tough, such as when people confess to me the terrible things they have done or how they have been hurt by others. Other days can be absolutely beautiful. I am often stunned by the courage in people, in their ability to transcend their circumstances—the prisons we all live inside, whether actual or in our fears. 

What do you love most about the narrator of this book?
He has such a stunning, poetic grasp of language. He truly sees the enchantment in the world—the way life can be so magical, so beautiful, no matter where we are. 

What, if anything, surprised you the most while writing this novel?
I didn't know how joyful it would be, to be immersed inside this story. The characters seemed very real. I was rooting for the lady to find love, for the priest to become absolved, for the warden to continue in his goodness—and for the others to find their own redemption, no matter how, even in the execution chamber. 

The narrator has a very deep affinity for James Houston’s novel, The White Dawn. Do you have a favorite “comfort book” that you find yourself re-reading and re-discovering in a similar way?
I've loved books since I was a young child, when they became my solace and escape. And so there are lots of books like that! 

You’ve written three previous nonfiction books—how did you find the transition to writing fiction?
I love it. It is like discovering what you were always meant to do. There are so many layers of truth in fiction, so many other people—and their lives—to explore. 

What are you working on next?
I feel like I have many stories to tell, but I will have to keep as magically silent as the narrator of this story on the process.

Author photo courtesy of Gary Norman

Hawaiian author Kaui Hart Hemmings returns with The Possibilities, the story of Sarah St. John, a woman struggling to return to life after the death of her adult son in an avalanche. We asked her a few questions about the new book and what she’s working on next.

Though The Possibilities is a book about grief, it also deals with the way that parents and children’s relationships change as they reach adulthood. What interested you in this topic?
It’s a process that involves a lot of loss and a lot of gain, a lot of nostalgia, hope, mystery, and miscalculations. You can know your family so well, but only in terms of that particular relationship. You don’t know them as friends or colleagues. I’ll always be interested in this topic. I don’t think I’ll ever be writing about wars or someone in an office coming to terms with his or her identity. I like small relationships—minor wars.

"I don’t think I’ll ever be writing about wars or someone in an office coming to terms with his or her identity. I like small relationships—minor wars."

What is the significance of the title?
The novel explores freedom and choice, and I want to show that there are so many variations, opportunities and possibilities for all choices and directions. There are so many ways our lives can go—it’s exhilarating and scary.

You couldn’t have chosen a more different setting for your second book—what inspired you to set this novel in Colorado?
I went to Colorado College then moved to Breckenridge after graduation. It’s a place I love and try to return to as much as possible.

How much pressure did you feel writing a follow-up to a book as successful as The Descendants?
None at all. The Descendants as a novel, despite great reviews, didn’t really get read until the film was made.  I don’t even think of it as a great success. It’s just a book, and I’ve written another book, and I’m just going to keep writing what I’m interested in and hopefully, it will get read. There’s my own pressure, but I’m not a big enough writer to feel anyone’s expectations. I’m still new at this.

Like The Descendants, The Possibilities has been optioned for film, to be directed by Jason Reitman (Labor Day). Do you have a dream cast? How do you feel about seeing your work on the big screen?
I have ideas about who would be great in the roles of these characters, but you can’t really cast things in your mind—you need to see auditions. Who would have thought Matthew Lillard could be George Clooney’s rival? I didn’t—until I saw his taped audition.  I loved seeing my work, and Alexander Payne’s work, on screen. What’s not to love? It’s another layer, dimension—a second act.  It keeps your book alive, and it’s so much fun. 

The relationship between Sarah and Billy (Cully’s dad) is so realistic and touching. Where did that come from?
Maybe it’s something I wish I had, or do have with my own parents. It’s a great privilege to feel annoyance, frustration, love and joy with your loved ones. I hug my family and yell at them all the time.

Losing a child is certainly a parent’s worst nightmare. As a parent yourself, did you find the scenes that describe Sarah’s grief difficult to write?
It’s difficult because you never know if you’re getting it right, but then I think to myself: there is no “right.” Your character is going to grieve and express this grief the only way she can. And so I just stay in character and write.

What are you reading right now?
I’m reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. She writes in a way I never could.  I’m rather spare.

What’s next for you?
A YA book called Juniors, to be published Fall 2015, I think.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Possibilities.

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.