At first glance, Celeste Ng may look unassuming, but make no mistake, this bright-eyed writer is a veritable fireball. She starts her books with a bang.

Ng’s narratives reveal families plagued by delicately interwoven secrets and misunderstandings that ultimately yield tragedy. Her debut bestseller, Everything I Never Told You (2014), begins with devastating news for a Chinese-American family. Her latest novel, the mesmerizing Little Fires Everywhere, starts with an equally provocative lead: “Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.”

“That was fun,” Ng says with a grin, referring to her new novel’s incendiary beginning. “In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

As we talk on a hot summer morning, Ng sits in the corner of a dark cafe near Harvard University, her alma mater. She lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and soon-to-be 7-year-old son. The initial idea for Little Fires Everywhere was sparked by a church fire in Cambridge in 2009. “That gave me the idea of a literary fire that might burn everything to the ground,” Ng recalls. She speaks crisply and quickly, her mind overflowing with ideas and enthusiasm.

While Everything I Never Told You takes place in 1970s small-town Ohio, Ng sets her latest novel in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy, planned community that prides itself on educational achievement and diversity. Ng spent most of her childhood there, experiencing “that kind of blissful childhood that people think of, where you ride your bike and there are lots of parks and everybody has a front lawn.”

It’s hardly a haven for family arsonists, however.

“I had the idea of a dysfunctional family,” Ng explains. “I started thinking that there’s this one black sheep who is at odds with everything that the family and the community are aligning themselves with. What’s going to happen? How far is that tension going to go?”

Ng’s saga takes place in 1997-98, when Ng herself was a senior in high school, making her the same age as her studious, Yale-bound character, Lexie, the oldest of the four Richardson children. Lexie’s siblings include handsome athlete Trip (a junior); quiet, reflective Moody (a sophomore); and wild Izzy, the fire starter.

Both of Ng’s novels focus on the roles of mothers and daughters and the relationships between the two, but her new book includes a twist. “A lot of times I feel that mothers are supposed to be peacemakers who put out all of the fires,” Ng says, “but in this book, they’re inciting all of the fires.”

At center ring of these mother wars are Mrs. Richardson—a frustrated career woman, local reporter and busybody—and Mia Warren, an artist and single mother who lives hand to mouth and moves into a rental property belonging to the Richardsons. Mia and her teenage daughter, Pearl, soon befriend and infiltrate the Richardson family, with everyone helping to stoke the oncoming firestorm. Ng sees no heroes or villains in the story, just women acting “out of fear of losing their children, especially their daughters.”

The result is a deftly woven plot that examines a multitude of issues, including class, wealth, artistic vision, abortion, race, prejudice and cultural privilege. While all of this could be handled in a heavy-handed way, rest assured that in Ng’s talented hands, the issues arise organically.

“In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

Ng’s parents, both scientists, emigrated in their early 20s from Hong Kong to the United States, where they married, pursued graduate studies and raised two daughters. The family moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights just before Ng turned 10, when her father began working at NASA’s Lewis Research Center and her mom began teaching chemistry and conducting research at Cleveland State University. The move proved to be transformative for Ng.

“It was the first time that I had been in a place that wasn’t basically completely white, where I was the only nonwhite person,” Ng says. “Before, in my elementary school, there was one black girl, one girl who was Jewish and one Asian girl, who was me.”

A woman ahead of her time, Ng’s mother tried to broaden her daughter’s cultural perspectives through books. “If there was a book that came out in the ’80s or ’90s that has to do with anything in East Asia, I probably had it,” Ng says, laughing.

While race was at the forefront of her first novel, it’s also an important subplot in Little Fires Everywhere, concerning a legal battle between a young Chinese immigrant mom who abandons her baby and a white couple who tries to adopt her child.

Ng, who describes her husband as a “tall white guy,” says she didn’t plan to write about this topic. “But because I’m in a mixed-race marriage and have a biracial child, these issues are just things that are on my mind,” she says. “In Little Fires Everywhere, I wanted to write about it from a different angle. I wanted to show the ways that race is not just an issue for nonwhite people; it’s an issue for everybody.”

As for her next novel, Ng is contemplating two “wildly divergent ideas” and has yet to settle on one. “The best analogy I have is that if you’re walking around a big walled city, you need to keep going around it until you can find a gate. I’m kind of walking around and trying to find where the gate is.”

No doubt she’ll find it, and readers will follow her in.

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Kevin Day Photography.

“I wanted to tap into that feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music and it feels as if it moves your very soul.”

Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, her first novel since 2012’s National Book Award winner Salvage the Bones, is the story of 13-year-old Jojo, who lives with his black grandparents, his toddler sister and his drug-addicted mother in rural Mississippi, while his white father serves a prison sentence. We spoke with Ward about her lyrical and challenging novel.

Upon reading Sing, Unburied, Sing, I couldn’t help noticing parallels between this work and the books of William Faulkner. But the parallels a reader detects may differ from an author’s intentions. Which books or fellow authors, if any, were your biggest influences in writing this novel?
I was definitely thinking of Faulkner when I wrote this novel. Specifically, I had As I Lay Dying on my mind. There’s so much to admire in As I Lay Dying, but I am in awe of how Faulkner volleys back and forth between multiple first-person POVs and still tells a coherent, moving story. I thought I could try to mimic that in the structure of Sing, Unburied, Sing. I’m also impressed by the way the characters go on a journey through the Mississippi of their time, so I think I was trying to rewrite that journey in a way.

Not surprisingly, music plays a large part in this novel, not only the cadences of your prose but also the role of singing in the narrative. Jojo sings to Kayla; Stag, Pop’s older brother, “walked all over Bois Sauvage every day, singing, swinging a stick”; Jojo says that the songs were the best part of his birthdays. Did you have particular styles of music or certain songs that inspired you as you wrote this book, or that inspire you in general as an artist?
I was thinking about the blues as I wrote this, and when I wasn’t writing, I listened to some old-style blues by artists such as R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford, Junior Kimbrough and Jesse Robinson. I thought it only fitting since Parchman is in the Delta, the birthplace of blues. My editor also gifted me with a CD and book titled Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings: 1947-1959, so I listened to those as well. The chorus of those singing voices is transcendent; there’s something in those songs that moves me. I wanted to tap into that feeling you get when you listen to a piece of music and it feels as if it moves your very soul. That resonance we feel when we listen to music is a sign of something larger than ourselves, I think, and that's part of what I was exploring in Richie’s experience of the afterworld.

In the middle of the novel, Jojo says, “Pop always told me you can trust an animal to do exactly what it’s born to do. . . . That no matter how domesticated an animal is, Pop say, the wild nature in it will come through.” To what degree do you think Pop’s maxim explains the behavior of your characters?
The characters, Jojo and Pop and Leonie and Mam and Michael and Richie, are all struggling to live through very human quandaries, through illness and hunger and torture and grief. I think this is the parallel Jojo is understanding: that human beings react in very instinctual ways when dealing with very human ordeals.

Matters of race are very much part of the American experience. And they are very much at the center of this novel, especially in the tension between Big Joseph and Leonie and her family. Every author who writes sensitively about race has a message he or she wants to impart about the subject. What messages about the African-American experience do you hope readers, both white and people of color, will take away from this novel?
I would like readers to realize that at the heart, we are all human beings. We all love and grieve and struggle and hunger and yearn, regardless of our race. I think if we are able to recognize the humanity in each other and empathize with each other, we might be able to see past our preconceived notions about each other and realize that everyone deserves to live with dignity and be accorded kindness.

Your two most recent novels are influenced by Greek mythology. In Salvage the Bones, Esch is enamored of Greek myths, and Sing, Unburied, Sing has similarities to The Odyssey. To what extent, if at all, has Greek mythology influenced your outlook on life? Do you think it has also had an effect on your writing?
The Greeks were frank in their assessment of humanity, in their stories about their heroes and heroines: All are flawed. They were equally frank about life: It is fraught with tragedy. If Greek mythology has informed my work and my outlook on life, it has taught me that.

Was your approach to writing Sing, Unburied, Sing different from that of Salvage the Bones? If so, in what way?
It was very different because Sing, Unburied, Sing required research. I knew nothing of the history of Parchman, and I knew little of Mississippi history, which I last studied in seventh grade. So I read several books on Mississippi history and the history of Parchman Prison before I began writing the first draft of Sing, Unburied, Sing. While I wrote the first draft, I continued to research as the story demanded, because I knew little about Voodoo spirituality and herbal medicine. I then had to incorporate the research into the story so that it was organic to the characters and their world. This was a challenge.

What are you working on now?
I am currently working on a novel set in New Orleans during the height of the domestic slave trade (the early 1800s). I’m at the very beginning of the first draft, and I’m still researching: I’ve read several books on the history of slavery in the United States, on the slave markets in New Orleans, and now I’m reading slave narratives by women from the WPA projects. All of this is allowing me to give this world some texture and give the characters authenticity. I’ve found that it’s a hard world and experience to write about: The stress and grief of the characters’ lives feel very present and real. It’s all very heavy, but I guess readers expect that of me by now.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Sing, Unburied, Sing.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Cristina García’s Here in Berlin is a hypnotic work that, through the effective use of multiple oral histories, creates a portrait of the former East German city, the effect its past still has upon residents old and young, and the fallout from Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union. We spoke with García about her haunting new novel.

Other authors have used oral histories in their works, although most of them, such as Studs Terkel and Svetlana Alexievich, have written nonfiction. Did you think about the works of these authors as you wrote this novel, and, if so, to what extent have their achievements influenced Here in Berlin and your work in general?
For me, the compelling first-person voice is one of utter persuasion, not just for the listeners, but for the storytellers themselves. Yet narrative, it seems to me, is always in competition with other narratives—official, familial, political, you name it. What interests me is not just what people remember but why, psychologically and emotionally, they need to remember specific events and details in the particular ways they do. How self-aggrandizing (or self-effacing) are the stories? What’s being left out? Who’s being protected, or vilified? It’s the stories not told in the telling that interest me most.

One assumes you decided that the use of oral histories was a good way to explore the themes you wanted to address. What was it about that type of narrative structure that made it seem the best choice for the story you wanted to tell?
The structure dictated itself through the voices that fought their way to inclusion. I wanted every voice to be individually nuanced and tell a story that no one else could tell, at least not in the same way. And yet the voices as a whole had to work in concert with the others, forge an insistent if dissonant chorus.

Continuing on the topic of the book’s themes, one of the obvious concerns of the book is an investigation into, as you put it, “the human fallout from Cuba’s long association with the Soviet bloc.” I imagine you did a lot of research into the subject as you wrote the book. Did you discover facts about that long association that you didn’t know before? How did those facts shape or alter the novel as you had originally conceived it?
My original idea about illuminating the complexities of Cuba’s political allegiances with Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was pretty quickly eclipsed by Berlin itself, which had its own tales to tell. My work, as I saw it, then became to listen, listen, listen to the city’s whisperings, to read and wander, eavesdrop and absorb, to get out of my own way and eschew any preordained conclusions about what the novel should be. I became less a journalist/researcher than an observer. It was only when I became passive—not an easy things for me—that the stories began to surface.

Did you travel to Germany to conduct interviews for this book? If so, what did you learn from these interviews?
I lived for three-plus months in Berlin during the spring and summer of 2013. But I spent over three years immersed in the history and literature of the city and World War II. I conducted no formal interviews for the book.

Parts of Here in Berlin are grimly humorous. I’m thinking of people like Horst Galbrech, the minor official in the Ministry of Culture whose superiors asked him to come up with a dance craze that would “give the West a (managed) run for its money.” Was this based on an actual incident? And, in conducting your research, did you learn of other stories that were surprisingly humorous or otherwise unconventionally revelatory?
For me, humor is the ultimate coping mechanism. How else could anyone survive difficult times? In that particular story, I was eager to lift the skirts of East Germany’s notorious grimness and show the ambition, sensuality, desperation, and exultation cohabiting the same terrain.

As a framing device, you used the character of a woman known only as the Visitor, a twice-divorced woman who returns to Germany after an ill-fated job in Frankfurt 31 years earlier. Why did you choose this framing device?
The Visitor became a way to guide readers around Berlin, to introduce them to parts of the city not in the tourist books, and to meet a few of its unlikely citizens. I felt that the Visitor’s initial disorientation then growing familiarity with the city might ultimately mirror the reader’s. That was my hope, anyway.

Several characters in this book are unapologetic about their complicity during World War II. One former Nazi soldier bluntly tells the Visitor, “We were soldiers. We followed orders.” And Anna Wildgrube, a lawyer, defends her job representing war criminals with, “a cog is not the machine.” And yet you also show acts of tenderness, such as the German seamen who were kind to the young night watchman Ernesto Cuadra, whom they had captured onto their submarine. One assumes from past histories of World War II (The Sorrow and the Pity is a notable example) that these stories are rooted in fact. What perspectives on the war, if any, surprised you?
Yes, I wanted to hold the gaze on complicity—something the Germans have done exceedingly well in recent years, if not right after the war—and try to get inside the possibility that we all, under the right circumstances, might become perpetrators. This acknowledgement, I believe, is the beginning of a deeper understanding of the how and why of violence and war. One of the biggest surprises for me was the extent to which German women supported the Nazi war effort, both at home and abroad.

Authors often write about the past to warn about the future. What do you hope readers will take away from the experience of reading your novel?
My hope is the same as it is whenever I pick up a novel: to have a long, engaging conversation with another sensibility that will take me to places that, in retrospect, will seem absolutely necessary to have gone.

What are you working on now?
Presently, I’m working on theater—an exciting new venture for me. My adaptation of King of Cuba, my sixth novel, will be produced at Central Works Theater in Berkeley next summer, starring solo performer Marga Gomez as Fidel Castro. I’m also adapting my first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, for the stage with producer/director Adrian Alea, and we are in conversation with the Public Theater about it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Here in Berlin.

Author photo by Isabelle Selby

After prowling the sweltering streets of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in her 2013 novel, Visitation Street, Ivy Pochoda hops to the opposite coast for Wonder Valley, a Los Angeles portrait as tough and beautiful as desert grasses. The author talks about her accidental Wonder Valley home, New York versus California noir, the ties between writing and playing professional squash and more.

What initially attracted you to the Wonder Valley area, which is both rather remote and obscure, even to longtime Angeleans?
Well, I had intended to rent a house in Joshua Tree for the weekend which is a rite of passage it seems when you move to LA. But I guess I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the map, since the house (which was an amazing place that was entirely covered in Gaudi-style tile) was nearly 30 minutes east in Wonder Valley. I’d never been somewhere like it before. I’d been in New England wilderness, but desert wilderness was wilder and fiercer. I was immediately enthralled.

All of your characters seem somewhat damaged, and there are no clear-cut “heroes,” yet most of them wind up being sympathetic. Do you think there are legitimate white knights among us, or are we all encumbered by baggage that only becomes visible when our lives begin to unravel?
Hmmmm . . . I don’t know. I think that there are certainly people who are driven to help or bring about change more than others. But that does come at a price and often means sacrificing some other part of yourself. And sacrificing yourself for others, being a white knight as you say, definitely changes you for better, but often for worse. So I guess I do think we are all encumbered in some way. How could we not be? We are all products of our past experiences. That’s what allows us to read and interpret the world. And it’s often hard to manage these experiences. They are what inform our decisions, good or bad.

What prompted you to use the naked man as the starting point for your book? After all, these people could have initially intersected at the airport or at an AA meeting or at some sort of event that brings people from disparate backgrounds together.
I was, as always, inspired by Don DeLillo’s Pafko at the Wall (the prologue to Underworld) in which he uses the famous “Shot Heard Round the World” as a nexus around which to focus not simply the entire city and its various inhabitants but also the entire global nuclear anxiety. So I wanted to kick my story off with an event, something to which all of Los Angeles, at least for one moment, might pay attention. And it’s based on something I remember from my teenage years—a friend of friend, who, after a rather late night, ran naked across the Brooklyn Bridge with fatal consequences.

There’s a very visual, almost cinematic, element to Wonder Valley. Do you imagine joining (or hope to join) some of your writing peers such as Michael Connelly and T. Jefferson Parker on the big screen?
The fact that you call them my peers! I can retire now. Joking aside, that’s something I’d like to do, but I’m conflicted about. I’m not a screenwriter by nature. I love the strange, deep texture of a novel—the way there isn’t pressure to make things HAPPEN ALL THE TIME! I like the languid, lazy river quality. And I don’t want to lose that. I don’t like rules. However, given the right project (my own I’d say) I’d definitely give it a whirl. But I’m not one of those Hollywood-or-bust types.

You played squash professionally. Does your experience as an athlete inform your writing, or was squash just an activity you used to escape from the drudgery of sitting in front of a screen?
Other way around—I used writing to give meaning to the repetitive drudgery of training! But the two activities definitely complement each other. There’s an immediate gratification when you win a squash match, but finishing a novel is a slow burn with a huge payout. There are similarities, too. Writing and professional sports both teach you self-reliance and self-motivation. No one is going to make you write, and no one is going to make you train. And you only have yourself to blame for your own laziness.

You moved from Brooklyn nearly a decade ago, which, much like the West Adams area in which you live now, has some rough edges but is gentrifying. What do you find different about life on the West Coast, and what effect do you think being a transplant has on your insights into Los Angeles?
LA remains a mystery to me in many ways. And I like that. I feel that even driving my normal routes, I can manage to look at everything with fresh eyes. And perhaps since I came out rather recently and don’t have much to do with Hollywood or the beach, I have less of a preconception about LA. I’ve had to stake out my own neighborhoods which are not the ones most people traditionally associate with Los Angeles. My city seems to stretch farther to the east and to the south than is typical.

Visitation Street was East Coast; Wonder Valley is West Coast. What differentiates New York and California noir, and do you have a preference?
I’m not really a huge student of noir. But I think that the abundant sunshine in Los Angeles certain provides a brilliant contrast with nefarious doings. We expect darker behaviors in a place like New York. But out here, noir is stealthy and surprising. I happen to really like California noir for that reason—the contrast between place and subject matter is incredibly appealing. The sunshine is deceptive and definitely capable of making you crazy.

What are you working on next?
I’m thinking of writing another LA novel. I have to write about the place I live. I’d wanted to write a novel set in Maine where I spend time in the summers. But it’s not as immediate to me. So LA, it is. Perhaps something set close to my home in West Adams.

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and spent several years commuting daily on the 110 from his home in Inglewood to his office at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank. He never saw a naked guy jogging on it.

As a blizzard blows through New York City, 60-year-old NYU professor Richard Bowmaster faces a series of surprises. His car slams into the back of a white Lexus. The young Latina driver emerges, tries in vain to shut the trunk lid that is popping open, and speeds away as Richard hands her a card with his contact information. Baffled by the suspicious event, Richard heads home to end his hectic day, but soon finds the driver of the other car on his doorstep needing help.

More surprising twists are in store, as readers of Isabel Allende's delightful and deeply moving new novel, In the Midst of Winter, will soon learn. Richard's journey is enriched and entwined with two women who enter his life: Evelyn, an immigrant from Guatelmala, and Lucia, a visiting professor who lives in the downstairs apartment of his home. This beautifully told story—a blend of mystery, romance and historical fiction—embraces the personal histories of these three unique characters, uniting them in unpredictable ways.

Allende, who lives in Northern California, has written more than 20 books since her international bestseller, The House of the Spirits, was published in 1982. We asked her about the inspiration for In the Midst of Winter, the origin of the title, the novel's three fascinating central characters and more.

You said in a TED talk, “All stories interest me and some haunt me until I end up writing them.” What was it about this story that haunted you?
At the beginning I really didn't have a story, I had a time, a place and a snowstorm, and then the characters came to me. They were hiding somewhere, waiting for me to find them. Each one of them had a traumatic past, especially the young Guatemalan immigrant, who was inspired by real cases like hers that I have seen in my foundation. Those stories haunted me and still do, months after I finished the book.

Can you tell us a bit about the quote from Albert Camus that inspired the book’s title: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” When did you first read it and why did this passage stick with you? 
I heard the quote at a conference in the Omega Institute, a spiritual retreat upstate NewYork, which the characters in my novel end up visiting. It resonated with me because I was going through one of those apparently endless winters that sometimes happen in life. I was getting divorced after 28 years of marriage, my beloved agent and three close friends died, also my dog had died. I felt that I was stuck in a grey and cold place, but the quote reminded me that I have an invincible summer in me. That summer has saved me from many dark periods, except the illness and death of my daughter. That was the longest winter in my life.

In the Midst of Winter skillfully combines three personal narratives, the beginnings of a love story and an evolving mystery. While writing, how did you work to blend all of these elements into one cohesive story?
I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past.

“I have to admit that, like Lucia, I am vain, bossy and impulsive; I get in trouble and fall in love easily.”  

Lucia seems similar to you in many ways—she’s passionate, romantic and eager to get the most out of life as she grows older. Do these personal similarities between you and your character make it easier, or harder, to write about her?
Although Lucia resembles me, I was not thinking of me when I developed the character.  I based Lucia on a couple of Chilean journalists who had similar experiences. One of them was a feisty, powerful, sentimental, smart and generous friend who unfortunately died of recurrent cancer some time ago. But I have to admit that, like Lucia, I am vain, bossy and impulsive; I get in trouble and fall in love easily. 

In contrast to Lucia, Richard appears to be a taciturn and distant loner. What are his redeeming qualities?
Lucia likes Richard because he is very smart and quite handsome, but mostly because she guesses that under his cautious and cold appearance he has a kind heart. She was right, as is proven in their common adventure. Also, she believes that he is a wounded man in need of a good woman. That has irresistible appeal to most Chilean women. We love projects. Richard is a long-term project, a challenge that would require a lot of work. Perfect for Lucia.

You’ve been a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay area. Why did you decide to set this novel primarily in Brooklyn? As a Californian, what’s your attitude toward New York City?
The closest people in my life are my son, Nicolas, and Lori, my daughter-in-law. She is from Brooklyn and every year we all come from California (my grandchildren included) to spend the holidays with her Italian family.  Brooklyn has become my second home and I am blessed to be part of Lori's noisy and sentimental extended family. I like New York City . . . for a week or two, when I visit for work or for the theater and restaurants, but it is too intense for me, I can't handle it alone. In California I live in a cottage by a lagoon, in silence and in nature, in the company of a silly dog, ducks, geese and some insane swimmers who train in the cold waters of the lagoon.

Snow, cold, blizzards, wind—how do you react to winter weather? Love it or loathe it?
I love my Northern California weather, but if I was forced to choose, I prefer cold winter. I do very badly in the heat. In winter one can always add layers of clothing and survive, but there's no escape from humid heat. How can you look good and think straight if you are sweating? Also, when placing my characters in a novel, winter is way more dramatic than summer. I can't imagine Anna Karenina in Jamaica, can you?

You are known not only as a writer, but as a feminist. How do Lucia, Evelyn and/or Richard exemplify the message of women’s rights and liberation? 
I never try to give a message in my fiction. When I see that an author is trying to preach to me in a novel, I feel insulted. If I find a message, it should come between the lines; I will discover it if it resonates with me. The ideas, feelings and experiences of the author appear unavoidably in the writing. Why does the author choose those stories and no others? Because he or she cares about those issues. Why those characters and no others? Because they speak for the author. I write about strong women who overcome great obstacles and manage to do so without bitterness. I don't invent them, I meet them in my life and in my foundation. Those women don't preach feminism, they live it.

Your account of Evelyn’s experiences in Guatemala and her journey to the United States is harrowing. What was your research process for that storyline?
Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazarios gave me a detailed account of the crossing of Mexico and the border with the United States. Beatriz Manz, from the Center for Latin American Studies in UC Berkeley helped me with the research about the genocide of Indigenous people perpetrated by the government in Guatemala in the '80s and its legacy of violence, corruption, poverty and gangs. Of course, I have been there a couple of times. I have traveled extensively for many years and I can testify that Guatemala is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The character of Evelyn and her story is based on cases I see in my foundation, as I said before. We work with refugees.

Lucia and Richard show true compassion and empathy for the undocumented immigrant Evelyn. Do you believe this is a timely or a timeless message? 
The world is experiencing a refugee crisis, not the first or the last. After the Second World War there were millions of refugees in search of a place to plant roots. Now that refugees have reached the shores of Europe, it is called a crisis, but really the great migrations of refugees happen in Africa  and Asia. Most refugees are escaping from a situation of life and death, they are escaping from extreme poverty, violence, war or natural disasters, yet they are seldom received with compassion, quite the opposite, they usually face hostility and discrimination. Compassion is always timely and timeless. Why do we forget this essential truth?

You’ve written more than 20 bestselling books and won countless awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. What inspires you to keep writing? 
The loyalty of my readers keeps me going in those rare moments when I suspect that I may have reached the age of rest. I love writing, I love storytelling and I love the innumerable messages of encouragement and gratitude I get from my readers. I suppose I will keep on trying to write for as long as I have a brain.

Author photo (c) Lori Bara
 

Asked what he’s reading now that work on his psychologically compelling fifth novel is complete and the book will soon arrive in bookstores, Olaf Olafsson says he is rereading the novels of his father, the award-winning Icelandic novelist Olafur Sigurdsson.

“My dad passed away in 1988,” Olafsson explains during a call to his home in Manhattan’s Carnegie Hill neighborhood, where he and his wife—now parents of two adult sons and a teenage daughter—have lived since 1989. “We were very close. It’s strange, in that his voice is so clear in his writing. It’s like he’s here again.”

Those close paternal ties are certainly not shared by Magnus, the central character of Olafsson’s latest novel, One Station Away. Magnus, a New York-based neurologist, grew up in England, the only child of a narcissistic mother who believes the world has ignored her great talents as a pianist and a hustler father who lovingly caters to and promotes his wife’s injured ambitions. Without musical talent or creative interest, Magnus is largely rejected by his parents, whom he is expected to call Margaret and Vincent, rather than Mom and Dad.

No wonder then that Magnus’ research interest involves another kind of alienation, the separation of mind from body. Magnus and his scientific colleagues search for consciousness in people who are believed to be brain dead, with unexpected repercussions.

“I came upon an article years and years ago about a British neuroscientist who had begun to search for consciousness in people who were believed to be ‘vegetables,’” Olafsson says of the origin of the novels. “To me this state of being fully conscious but unable to communicate at all is the definition of hell.”

Olafsson, who seems to be drawn to conjoined themes and multiple plotlines, also read about a British pianist named Joyce Hatto, “who got involved with her husband in a fraudulent exercise” to pass off the recordings of other musicians as her own work. Olafsson used quite a bit of Hatto’s story to fill in the love-deprived background of his nonmusical central character. The result is a novel that braids together these seemingly disparate themes and thus raises as many profound questions about personal relationships and love as it answers.

“Needless to say, I like gray,” Olafsson says. “Everybody will come to different conclusions. I want my characters to be complicated.”

Olafsson wrote his first work of fiction as an undergraduate studying physics at Brandeis University in an international scholarship program. “I grew up reading a lot of literature, so when I came here, I wanted to study something else.” His first collection of stories was published in Iceland in 1986 to critical acclaim.

“My physics professor had a higher opinion of me as a physicist than I do,” he says with a laugh. “And he wanted me to finish my Ph.D. I said I didn’t think so because I didn’t have the passion for it, and I was writing my first book. To make a long story short, he introduced me to a former student of his who was supposed to persuade me to continue in physics. That gentleman had just left science and was the CEO of Sony. When he couldn’t help my professor convince me to spend my life doing physics, he offered me a job.

“It never occurred to me that I would go into business. I thought I’d try it for a couple of years. At least I’d learn something that I could use in a book.”

“Needless to say, I like gray. . . I want my characters to be complicated.”

To his surprise, Olafsson became an exceptionally successful businessman. He worked first on a brand new technology called the CD-ROM, and then led the introduction of the Sony Playstation in 1995, for which he is viewed as a sort of demigod in some quarters.

About this gaming legacy, Olafsson demurs, “Back then there was the hope that this form of storytelling would mature and develop and stop being a toylike activity. I don’t follow it very closely now, but I think it’s still pretty rudimentary. It just looks better. And sounds better. I’ve always looked at technology as a set of tools. It serves a purpose, but you can’t be a slave to it. What I was interested in then was introducing a new product and building a business, which I enjoyed back then. And then I left it.”

Since 1999, Olafsson has worked as an executive at Time Warner. Yet he has somehow continued to write fiction. “If there’s one thing I’m decent at, it’s discipline with time,” he says. “If I can write two or three hours before I go to the Time Warner offices, I’m happy.” He writes mainly in an office at the top of his house in Manhattan, but also in outbuildings at the family retreats in Iceland and on Long Island.

Today Olafsson, who along with his wife remains an Icelandic citizen, is executive vice president of Time Warner. “I have a green card. I’m what you call a resident alien,” he says, laughing. “At Time Warner, I’m in charge of corporate strategy. Time Warner has a lot of different businesses so my job is basically to figure out the right composition of assets within the company. So I guess my work is predicting how the world is going to evolve.”

So how is the future looking?

Olafsson laughs. “The media landscape is changing enormously. At dinner with my wife and my publisher last night, we were saying that we’ve been through all kinds of technology changes. But the smartphone? The only thing to call it is a revolution, because of the behavioral changes it has brought through the years. But my hope is that the future is also looking good for books. Needless to say, for me personally, that’s the thing I care about most.”

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook

(Author photo by Johann Pall Valdimarsson.)

It’s fitting that Chloe Benjamin was born on All Soul’s Day, a religious festival remembering those who have died. Her latest novel, The Immortalists, explores the eternal mysteries of death and the boundaries of science, religion and magic.

“The Immortalists felt like the book that I was always meant to write,” Benjamin says during a phone call from her home in Madison, Wisconsin. “If I died now, at least I would have written this. I don’t think I’ll ever have a book like this again.”

That’s a somewhat startling statement coming from a young writer, but at just age 29, Benjamin is well on her way to being an established author. Her first novel, the award-winning The Anatomy of Dreams, explored another intangible—the surprising power of lucid dreaming.

Benjamin says of her two novels, “The Anatomy of Dreams is a more internal look at the conscious and the subconscious, and an almost claustrophobic exploration of the central relationship. With The Immortalists, I wanted to cover more ground socially, culturally and historically, as well as interpersonally. It felt important to challenge myself to write a book with greater scope and diversity.”

“It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The premise of The Immortalists is immediately gripping: In 1969, the four siblings of the Gold family (Varya, age 13; Daniel, 11; Klara, 9; Simon, 7) live in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where their father owns a tailor shop. When Daniel gets wind of a mysterious fortuneteller, the children track her down and have an encounter that will forever change their lives. The soothsayer predicts the exact date of each of their deaths.

The four sections of the book address each sibling’s life in order of their predicted demise. Simon was told he would die young, while Varya seems destined to live until a ripe old age. Or is she? One of the book’s central questions is whether the fortuneteller is clairvoyant, or whether her prophecies simply become self-fulfilling.

“I wanted to leave this open to interpretation, to see what the reader thinks,” Benjamin says. “I’ve always really been drawn to books with multiple perspectives or books that show how different people can interpret the same event in such varied ways.”

The book’s beginning brings to mind the four siblings who step through the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What’s more, at one point in The Immortalists, Klara’s daughter cries out, “It’s like Narnia!” when it begins to snow.

Benjamin laughs at the reference, explaining, “That was actually something I said when I arrived at college on the East Coast. Everyone made very prompt fun of me, because I was coming from California.”

As for parallels to the C.S. Lewis classic, Benjamin says they were unintentional, although she admits, “I think those books were in the petri dish that created this one.”

The Gold children all take strikingly different paths: Daniel, the oldest Gold boy, becomes a military doctor, while Varya ends up a scientist. Simon and Klara run away to San Francisco, where Simon dances, both ballet and in a gay bar. Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, following in the footsteps of her namesake grandmother. She even takes to performing her grandmother’s act, the Jaws of Life, in which she hangs from a rope by her teeth, calling herself “The Immortalist.”

Benjamin, who initially knew nothing about magic, modeled the Jaws of Life trick after a real act she stumbled upon during her research. A Hungarian immigrant who called herself Tiny Kline once performed this extraordinary feat over Times Square and later played a flying Tinker Bell in Disneyland. “I think she just held on with her teeth,” Benjamin says. “It was so dangerous and unbelievable.”

It’s not surprising that showmanship is at the forefront of so much of the novel. Benjamin’s mother is a stage actor, and as a child Benjamin was involved in theater and active in ballet until college.

“I miss those things a lot,” she admits, “but I don’t feel brave enough to perform at this point in my life. I’m more comfortable writing something where I can make it as perfect as I can and then put it out there for consumption. But that level of risk and uncertainty and vulnerability—and also a kind of flash and dazzle—was a part of my childhood.”

Benjamin did substantial research for each section of the book, adding: “I don’t make it easy on myself. There’s an adage to write what you know; I’m more interested in writing about what I want to know.”

The research for Varya’s section proved most vexing. At first Benjamin had Varya study a species known as the immortal jellyfish, which seemed to be a perfect thematic fit­­—although the subject had its own challenges.

“I had to read so much molecular biology,” Benjamin recalls, “and that is not the way my brain works. So I’d be practically crying, sitting with this stack of academic journals that I couldn’t possibly understand. I worked on that section for years.” Ultimately, she ended up starting it over. “It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The completed novel spans decades, explores a variety of philosophical questions and addresses everything from gay life in 1970s San Francisco to the ethics of scientific research on animals.

As for her next novel, Benjamin is already at work. “I get an idea maybe once every five years,” she says, “and it’s like, OK, well I guess that’s what I’m writing. So as much as it’s driving me crazy, I have faith.”

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Tayari Jones’ first name is a Swahili word that means “she is prepared.” It’s a powerful declaration that holds true, as the groundwork for Jones’ moving, emotionally complex new novel, An American Marriage, can be traced to seven years ago.

But it truly all began in Jones’ closet, where she wrote her first novel, Leaving Atlanta (2002), on a manual typewriter during her time in grad school. “It wasn’t like an empty closet that I made into an office. It was my closet!” Jones exclaims during a call that reaches her in Las Vegas, where she has a yearlong fellowship at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “I never had any trouble writing in that closet, because with your first book, you’re like a cup that is full to the top and overflowing onto the page.”

Jones tells this story to explain why she can write anywhere: in Brooklyn, where she usually lives; in Atlanta, where she grew up and where her mother still lives; at Rutgers University–Newark, where she teaches writing as a founding member of its MFA program; or at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, where, during another fellowship in 2011, she felt the need to research the mass incarceration of black men, which would eventually form the backstory of An American Marriage.

“The word in my head was ‘bigger,’ ” Jones says. “Most of my books are about the family, the way people interact. But I felt I needed to write about big issues, and mass incarceration has always been nibbling at the edges of my mind because of its collateral effects. So on this fellowship, I read and read and read and read. I learned all kinds of statistics that would blow your mind. But this did not engage me as a storyteller. . . . So I went home to talk to my mama in Atlanta. And when I was in the mall there, I heard this couple arguing. She said, ‘Roy, you know you wouldn’t have waited on me for seven years.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, because this wouldn’t have happened to you in the first place.’ I know I have a novel when I’m intrigued by two people’s conflict and when I feel they both have a point.”

On its surface, An American Marriage tells the story of the marriage of Roy Hamilton and Celestial Davenport. Roy is a poor, ambitious boy from small-town Louisiana. Celestial is from Atlanta’s black upper class. When the two first meet, he is going to Morehouse College and she to Spelman. They are introduced by her “bone-deep” friend and lifelong neighbor Andre, who becomes the third leg of this story. Celestial and Roy connect again in New York, where she is an exceptionally talented art student and he is a rising business consultant. The two marry, and a year and a half into their marriage, he takes her home to Louisiana to visit his parents. While staying at a local motel, Roy is arrested for rape. Readers will have little doubt of his innocence, but he is convicted and sent to prison. The exchange of letters between Roy and Celestial while he is in prison is heart-rending. After five years, Roy is released, and the remainder of the novel is a wrenching portrayal of the love, anger and moral dilemmas—the collateral damage—these characters are left with as a result of injustice.

“It is a question of modern African-American life. What is the balance between your desires and your responsibilities?”

“All of these characters are trying to figure out the extent to which they are allowed to be self-interested in the face of this larger cultural crisis,” Jones explains. “In many ways, it is a question of modern African-American life. What is the balance between your desires and your responsibilities? For Celestial to say, ‘I want happiness’ when her husband is a hostage of the state is very different from a novel where the wife seeking happiness is at home, bored, and her husband is a stockbroker.”

Like any good novel, An American Marriage lives in its particular details. Jones presents readers with a richly evocative cultural moment, and each of her characters has a complicated past that raises as many questions about life as it answers. Especially compelling are her depictions of black urban professional life in Atlanta.

“I’ve lived a lot of places since I finished college in 1991,” Jones says. “But I haven’t lived long enough in those places to feel I have enough authority to write about them. I need to know the layers of a place. Atlanta is my hometown, and I know all its layers. Furthermore, it is important to me as a Southern writer to write about the modern urban South. When I tell people in Brooklyn that I’m from Georgia, they act like I got there on the Underground Railroad. They have no concept of the modern South.”

Readers of An American Marriage will discover a bold, big Southern story to match its ambitious title. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” Jones says. “And I have accepted that my niche is this quiet space. I’ve never been one of those writers who says writing is the hardest job in the world. Look at the jobs my grandparents had. Can I really say a job I’m able to do in my pajamas is the hardest job in the world? This is not a quiet title. And this is not a quiet story. I was a little intimidated by claiming this title for myself. But this novel caused me to challenge myself. I feel really good about it now.”

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Nina Subin.