Millions of readers have lived, laughed and loved alongside the residents of Mitford since the 1990s. After a four-year absence, Jan Karon brings back Father Tim and Cynthia in Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good.

Many readers regard Cynthia and Father Tim as friends or even family after all these years. What is it like to write about these characters for so long?
It’s like growing up, changing, living through different passages in life. They change, the author changes. Or is that vice versa? And I do love my characters in an oddly intimate and authentic way.

You say in an author’s note that the title of this book “expresses in just five words what we all long for.” Could you talk a little more about its significance?
Somewhere safe. I want to be there, don’t you? With somebody good. Absolutely. These two components make up a satisfying whole. The line comes from a love letter Cynthia writes to Father Tim on their ninth anniversary and which expresses her life’s desire.

In the new book, Father Tim is, in his own words, “trying to hammer out what retirement is for.” What do you think it means for a man to give up a vocation like Tim’s?
Well, of course, he doesn’t give it up entirely, he has “supplied” as they say, numerous pulpits. He greatly loved the focus of a single pulpit, a single flock. It is how he is wired, he cannot resist. His calling to help others serves to build the kingdom and—this is key—to help himself.

Small-town life is a recurring element in American fiction. Other than Mitford, what do you think is the best small town in literature?
Lake Wobegon is a charm.

Do you think about readers and their reactions when you write?
Always. When I am laughing my head off with a scene I am writing, I’m hoping my readers will find it as funny. I really do wish to make people laugh. It is such a simple gift to extend. Also, will my tears be theirs?  

Faith is important to your stories, but it never overwhelms them. How do you incorporate Christianity without making it feel didactic?
If it is didactic, it is not Christianity. Many are scared to death of faith and perhaps especially the Christian faith, which is radical, dangerous and exhausting. But of course it is also joyful, healing and transforming. A lot to chew, this Christianity, it is not for sissies.

What is your favorite simple pleasure?
Umm. Ice cream? Salted caramel? Talking with people who are not afraid to feel their feelings. Sitting on the porch with someone I love. Jeans that still fit after 10 years. A watercolor-blue and cloudless sky. Old dogs and puppies. A really wonderful fragrance, like 31 Rue Cambon or mown hay or bacon frying or babies or the smoke off an autumn hearth fire.

What’s next for you?
Lord only knows, as we say down South. Maybe just taking a deep breath, summoning the courage to show my arms or finally taking a trip on the Orient Express. And some writing, of course.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of Somewhere Safe With Somebody Good.

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

Author photo by Candace Freeland

"Just a minute," Garth Stein says when he answers the phone at his Seattle home. "The kids are kicking soccer balls at me—I've got to get out of the line of fire."

It’s understandable that his three boys—ages 17, 15 and 7—are craving their dad’s attention. With an international phenomenon already under his belt (2008’s The Art of Racing in the Rain, which has sold 4 million copies) and a new book about to hit shelves, Stein is frequently on the road these days. He has just returned from a trip to West Virginia, where he did a reading at the famously elegant Greenbrier.

“It’s creepy!” he declares of the historic hotel in the Allegheny Mountains. “It’s totally haunted.”

Funny, coming from the author of a stunning new book in which a spooky house figures prominently. A Sudden Light is based on a play Stein wrote, Brother Jones, which was produced in 2005.

When 14-year-old Trevor Riddell travels with his father, Jones, to the family’s legendary home overlooking Puget Sound, he expects a rundown shack based on Jones’ description. Instead, he finds that Riddell House is a hulking mansion made almost entirely of logs. It’s a fitting home for the Riddell family, which made its fortune clear-cutting forests to fuel the nation’s insatiable need for timber at the turn of the century.

But the guilt stemming from their opportunistic way of life flows through generations. Many of Trevor’s ancestors met untimely and tragic ends that some in the family feel are reparation.

Jones left the family home abruptly when he was a teenager, not to return until the summer of 1990, when he and Trevor go back to convince Jones’ father, Samuel, to sell the property. Joining them in this endeavor is Serena, Jones’ beautiful younger sister, who has been caring for Samuel all these years as the house rots around them. Their reasons for wanting to sell are different—Jones needs the cash to get out of debt and save his faltering marriage, Serena needs freedom—but the two siblings set about convincing their aging but stubborn father to sell the land to a developer.

Meanwhile, a bored and lonely Trevor begins wandering through the vast house, uncovering artifacts of another era and meeting some interesting beings along the way. The longer Trevor and Jones stay at Riddell House, the more Trevor learns about the family’s past and yearns to make it right by letting the property return to nature. He and his dad clash, their anger escalating until it culminates in a heartbreaking but inevitable outcome.

“What do you do when you’re 14 years old?” Stein asks, speaking with the wisdom of a father of three boys. “You fight with your father. They challenge you—their little antler buds come out, and everything is a fight. Trevor sees for the first time that his father hasn’t even figured himself out yet.”

It isn’t lost on Stein that the book is likely shaped by his experiences with his own father.

“My father died five years ago,” he says. “I’d been working on the book, was early on in the formative moments of the book, and my father ups and dies. I don’t do psycho-therapy, but I’m sure if I did, my therapist would have something to say about that.”

A Sudden Light is the best of many genres: a ghost story, a love story, historical fiction. What makes it a truly killer read is the way Stein brings the house to life, almost literally: its rickety basement staircases groaning; its patriarch staring down from an eight-foot-tall portrait; “a world that smelled of decay, heavy with moist, thick air, which floated in the rooms like an invisible fog.”

“I wanted the house to be an actual character that interacts with other characters,” Stein says. “That’s really where it all started.”

“I wanted the house to be an actual character that interacts with other characters. That’s really where it all started.”

Stein found inspiration in an old book that depicted a University of Washington forestry building built of some of the finest old-growth trees. He couldn’t shake the notion of someone feeling powerful enough to fell trees that had been alive for centuries

“They went out and found trees that were perfect specimens, and cut them down. It was stunning,” Stein recalls. “I thought, ‘That’s my house.’ ”

After 18 years in New York, Stein moved his young family to his hometown of Seattle several years ago to secure naturopathic care for one of his sons. (“I enjoyed it,” he says of New York. “I just decided, I’m a writer now, and I didn’t need to be there anymore.”)

He has become fully immersed in the rainy city’s literary scene, which he calls “a very fertile place.” He serves on the board of Seattle-7Writers, a group dedicated to promoting local literacy efforts through grants and events. (Its membership reads like a who’s who of Pacific Northwest authors: Tara Conklin, Erik Larson, Jim Lynch and Rebecca Wells, to name a few.)

A Sudden Light is a bold, poignant book about wealth, family ties and the power—and -fallacy—of memory. The story is told by adult Trevor recalling the trip to Riddell House as a 14-year-old. It’s a middle-aged man reflecting on himself as a teen and his tenuous relationship with his father from the distance of many years, and it adds a rich layer of mysteriousness and pathos to the story.

“When we read a book, we all read it differently,” Stein says. “We all view it through our own experiences. I like the unreliability of narrators. I want readers to say occasionally, ‘Did that really happen?’ ”

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

North Carolina author Charlie Lovett has always had a passion for books and writers—his father was an English professor, and Lovett is an expert on the Victorian writer Lewis Carroll and a former antiquarian bookseller. His 2013 novel The Bookman’s Tale combined these interests to create a compelling story about a bookseller who uncovers a mystery in a used bookstore.

In his latest novel, First Impressions, Lovett again combines antiquarian intrigue and a literary mystery—and this time, Jane Austen herself is at the center. We asked Lovett a few questions about books, collecting and, of course, Jane.

Can you talk a little bit about where the idea for First Impressions came from? What made you choose Jane Austen and Pride & Prejudice as the “real world” literary connection for this novel?
One of the working titles for my first novel, The Bookman’s Tale, was The First Folio. As I worked on editing that book and began to think toward my next project, I thought—if The First Folio, then why not The Second . . . something. As a book collector, the obvious continuation of the phrase was “The Second Edition,” so I began to imagine a book that would be worthless in its first edition, but priceless in its second edition (it’s more likely to be the other way around). My father had taught English Literature for 40 years, with a specialty in Jane Austen and the 18th Century. When I added the “second edition” idea to what I knew about Austen and her creative process, the idea for First Impressions began to gel.

It must be an interesting challenge to take real people and weave fictional stories around them. How do you approach this task, and in the case of Jane Austen, was there any specific research you did (or didn’t!) do?
It’s important to remember as a novelist that I am treating a real person as a fictional character; I want to be respectful to the facts of Jane Austen’s life, while at the same time being true to the fictional story I am telling in which she is a character. To understand the basic facts of her life, I used as my primary source an early biography written by family members—Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh. But to write Jane as a character, I went straight to her novels. I wanted my Jane to be the sort of person I imagine could have written those books. I re-read the novels and came up with a character who is bright, witty, bold, loyal and quietly revolutionary.

For a Jane Austen fan, First Impressions has a rather incendiary central mystery. Did you ever worry that such a scandalous premise might alienate Austen fans? What would you say to urge them to give the book a chance?
To me the central question of the novel is not “Did Jane Austen plagiarize Pride and Prejudice?” but “How can Sophie Collingwood prove that Jane Austen didn’t plagiarize Pride and Prejudice?” Because Sophie believes so strongly in Jane, I think Austen fans will relate to her. And I hope that the portrayal of both Jane and Sophie will leave readers rooting for these two heroines, born 200 years apart.

There’s a good deal of talk in this novel about the importance of opening lines, with the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice being held up as one of the gold standards. As an author, what do you believe makes a great opener, and what’s one of the best ones (other than P&P) that you’ve ever read?
I think the best opening lines are both simple and intriguing. In that sense, the opening to The Hobbit is one of the best: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” You can’t get much simpler than that. But what the heck is a hobbit (the reader of 1937 would ask)? And why does it, or he, live in a hole in the ground? I like a line that is both completely straightforward yet totally mysterious at the same time.

Every Austen fan has to make this difficult choice at some point: Of all her novels, which is your favorite and why?
I love all the novels for different reasons, but if I had to pick one, it would probably be Sense and Sensibility. Why? Well, Pride and Prejudice is too obvious a choice. And I love the relationship between Eleanor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. I like to think it is something like the relationship Jane had with her sister, Cassandra. I love the twist at the end when the reader discovers something about the identity of Mr. Ferrars. It’s a great bit of plotting that I didn’t see coming the first time I read the novel.

Finally, there is the fact that I am so fond of Austen’s sense of humor, and that is so wonderfully evident in the first conversation between Fanny and Mr. John Dashwood.

One of your book-loving characters in First Impressions says, “A good book is like a good friend. It will stay with you for the rest of your life.” What’s one book that has been a constant companion over the course of your lifetime?
There have been many. I used to listen to a recording of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a child, and I now have a collection of hundreds of editions and many other works by Lewis Carroll, about whom I have written several books. So, I suppose that is the most obvious answer. But there are books that I read at important times in my life that I like going back to again and again: The Hobbit, which I used to read every summer as a teenager (along with Huck Finn); The World According to Garp, which I read the first time while backpacking through Europe. I can remember our school librarian reading us From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a book I loved reading to my children and will soon be reading to nieces and nephews.

Back in the 1980s and1990s, you owned your own antiquarian bookstore and you’re still an avid book collector. In First Impressions, your heroine Sophie is on the hunt for the first draft of Pride and Prejudice; in real life, what is your most exciting literary find?
I was called out to do the appraisal for an estate one time. The house was little more than a shack in the woods and I was thinking I had wasted my time, but inside were about 6000 books—mostly 20th-century and mostly in excellent condition. I ended up buying most of the library, which included first editions of books like The Catcher in the Rye, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Road, and many other highlights of American literature. The owner had not been a book collector per se. He simply bought books when they came out and took good care of them. We didn’t sell paperbacks in our shop, and I was about to toss a pair of paperbacks into our front porch bargain bin when I realized they were the Paris-published first edition of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I sold the book the next day for a lot more than the 25¢ bargain price.

As a former bookseller, how do you feel about the increased digitalization of books and literature? In your opinion, what are the advantages of physical books over eBooks?
I think eBooks are great at storing text, but there is a lot more to a physical book than just a text container. The Bookman’s Tale begins when Peter Byerly finds an old watercolor pressed between the pages of a book—something that couldn’t happen with an eReader. Some of our earliest experiences with books (pop-ups, board books, etc.) are multi-sensory and go well beyond interacting with the text alone. To me a perfect reading experience is a three-way interaction of reader, text, and physical book. I do use an eReader when I am travelling and I think they can be great in many situations, but given the choice I still prefer a physical book. And it may seem counterintuitive, but a printed book will probably last a lot longer. A well-made hardcover book that I take good care of can be read by my great-great-great grandchildren more than a century from now with ease. The same probably won’t be true of my eBooks, which are really just licenses to read the text in electronic format and are unlikely to transfer through multiple generations

You own property in England and have traveled extensively around the U.K. Have you visited any places during your travels that have any interesting literary connections?
Absolutely. In the late 1990s I wrote a book called Lewis Carroll’s England about the places around England associated with Carroll and his life. We visited places all over England for that book. In preparing to write First Impressions, I visited Steventon, where Jane Austen was born and spent the first 25 years of her life. Even though we were only there for an hour or less, it was extremely helpful to me. I like to feel a strong sense of place when I am writing, and since most of my Jane Austen chapters are set in or near Steventon, it helped to soak up the atmosphere. We also had a lovely tour recently of a village that I have run through on many occasions, as it is only about three miles from our cottage.

Adlestrop was the home of Jane Austen’s maternal cousins, and she visited there on three occasions. We had a nice tromp round the village with Victoria Huxley (grand-niece of Aldous Huxley) who wrote a book about Jane Austen and Adlestrop. I am always on the lookout for literary connections as we travel around Britain. Last year I happened into the church in Norwich where Robert Greene (a minor Elizabethan writer and character in my novel The Bookman’s Tale) was baptized. We had no idea there was any literary connection until we started reading plaques.

You’ve now tackled both Jane Austen & William Shakespeare in fiction—are there other authors you would like to feature in future novels?
The novel I’m writing at the moment is in the early stages, so I won’t say much about it except to say that I think it will appeal to fans of mysteries about old books. I’m often asked if I will write a novel about Lewis Carroll and I think probably not. I have so many fictional versions of him on my shelves that I can’t see my way to adding another. But there are many other authors that intrigue me, especially the greats of English literature like Dickens and the Brontës. I have a Christmas book coming out next year that, while not strictly about Dickens, is a sequel to A Christmas Carol in the style of Dickens. There are lots of ways to incorporate great writers into stories. Austen is a major character in First Impressions, Shakespeare (though he makes a brief appearance in person) is present more through his literary reputation in The Bookman’s Tale, and Dickens is the authorial voice of The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of First Impressions. 

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

In his 2009 bestseller One Day, British actor-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist David Nicholls traced the inevitable romantic collision of star-crossed college acquaintances via snapshots, taken on the same calendar date each year, over their 20-year journey to togetherness. 

In his equally nimble follow-up, Us, Nicholls reverses course to chronicle the gradual disintegration of the 30-year marriage of a well-intentioned if hopelessly mismatched London couple who never quite recovered from the death of their infant firstborn daughter.

“One Day is a very classic will-they-or-won’t-they-get-together love story; over 20 years, how do they change and how are they finally drawn to one another and finally make a life together?” Nicholls says from his home in London. “Us is sort of what comes next, I suppose. The questions are: Will they stay together? Do they belong together? Is this going to last? It’s not a sequel to One Day in any specific way. It’s more of a companion piece, I suppose.”

Narrator Douglas Petersen is a buttoned-up, left-brained biochemist who’s still baffled that his free-spirited, right-brained artist wife Connie chose to marry him. When Connie wakes him in the middle of the night to suggest that their 30-year marriage may have run its course, the scientist in Douglas cooks up a logical solution: a Grand Tour of the continent’s art masterpieces with their moody, artistic teenage son Albie.

In the course of this Griswold-​esque forced march, Douglas is rescued from a biker beating by a prostitute in Amsterdam, Albie bails to Italy with an accordion-​playing female busker, and Connie retreats home, there to hover via smartphone as the determined father fumbles to find and emotionally connect with their wayward son.

Love, loss, laughter and tears are the primary colors to which Nicholls adds subtle shades of wit and wisdom that enable his characters to transcend the page. Little wonder that Us was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize even before it hit U.S. bookshelves.

Nicholls admits he took his own roundabout journey to fiction writing, having spent the better part of the 1990s as a struggling actor, including three years with the Royal National Theater. That apprenticeship morphed into script reading for BBC Radio Drama, script editing for London Weekend Television, script adaptation (Much Ado About Nothing; Tess of the D’Urbervilles) and eventually scriptwriting for TV (“Waiting”; “I Saw You”) and film (One Day; Starter for Ten).

“Sadly, I wasn’t an accomplished actor at all. I realized it wasn’t acting that I enjoyed; it was the characters and stories,” he says. “I do regret the fact that I wasted eight years of my life pursuing something that I couldn’t do, but I think I learned a lot from it. It was good training.”

The breakout success of One Day and the book tour that followed found its way into the comedic framework of Us.

“When One Day came out, I went on something of a grand tour myself, visiting a lot of the cities I’d read about but never seen, and I thought it would be a funny idea to set someone out on that kind of journey, but in middle age,” he says. “It also was a chance for me to write about travel, which I love, but not in the hokey glories-of-Venice, splendors-of-Rome way. I wanted to write about it more as it’s experienced—the coffee stains, missed trains, bad breath and cheap hotels.”

Readers couldn’t have asked for a better traveler-without-a-clue than Douglas, whose command of the minutiae of train schedules and hotel check-in times borders on the obsessive. How did a biochemist stumble into this rom-com?

“My novels had always been about the arts, books and TV and films, things I understand. I thought it would be interesting to write about things that I didn’t really understand, like science and the visual arts,” Nicholls explains. “Douglas doesn’t really believe in fiction; he’s rather repressed and buttoned-up. There’s a key line where he says, ‘I love my wife more than I could say, and so I never said it.’ That’s sort of what I love about him, the deep well of emotion and passion that lies just beneath the surface.”

Nicholls and Douglas do share one memorable moment: the Amsterdam scene in which the scientist accidentally topples a line of expensive motorcycles, nearly sparking a riot. “That happened to me pretty much as written three years ago,” Nicholls chuckles. “I managed to escape, but it was pretty horrific.”

If One Day explored the adage that opposites attract, Us tests its staying power.

“Douglas and Connie’s marriage is a bit like a lot of relationships: the differences initially intrigue you. It’s only when children become involved that the different attitudes you have and different outlooks on life can become a problem,” Nicholls says.

Speaking of problems, how does one craft a happy ending to a marriage falling apart?

“That’s a tricky one,” he admits. “I still think of Us as a love story; it has a lot in it that’s romantic. But it’s probably a little more grown up, a little darker, a little more ambiguous, and I think that all of those things are good. Hopefully, in the same way that people saw themselves in One Day, they will see themselves in Us.”

"Hopefully, in the same way that people saw themselves in One Day, they will see themselves in Us."

The film adaptation of One Day opened shortly after the book’s publication, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess starring in Nicholls’ screenplay—but the author has other plans for Us.

“I really want it to have a proper life as a book first. Also, I think it’s a very, very hard book to adapt, which is why I won’t adapt it. Someone else will have to take it on.”

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

Lauren Oliver is well known and quite beloved for her young adult and children’s books. Her first novel for adults, Rooms, is a ghost story, but is completely unlike any we’ve read before. In an elegant blend of real and supernatural worlds, the story takes place entirely within the walls of one house, moving from room to room and unfolding through the voices of seven different narrators—including two ghosts.

What was your inspiration for Rooms?
I’m really interested in old houses. I grew up in an old house, and when I grew up there, I was always thinking about the people who must have lived there before and the people who lived there afterwards. Part of the idea for Rooms was I wanted to just be able to tell a house’s story—all of the dramas and tensions and romances that have played out within one home—and be able to tell it in a way where you’re collapsing the timeframe and telling multiple stories that have existed at different points.

I also love stories of dysfunctional families that can be in a home—This Is Where I Leave You being a recent example, which is about family that returned home to observe shiva, but also The Corrections. There’s a whole literary tradition of dysfunctional families that return home and collide.

What sort of research did you do on ghosts or haunted houses for this book?
My ghosts are unlike other apparitions or spirits that one would typically find in Gothic literature or “Ghost Hunters”-type TV shows. My ghosts have real personalities and narratives and patterns of speech. But I did do a lot of research about who they were and what kind of life they lived. One of my ghost narrators was born around 1920, and the other was born in the early 1950s in Georgia. They have had experiences that I didn’t really know about—like anything, when vacuum cleaners became common usage, what it was like to grow up in Georgia in 1955.

Did you draw on any well-known haunted houses?
No, not really. One of my best and oldest friends is obsessed with ghosts and obessed with hauntings, so I’ve gone with her on different ghost missions and tours. And I have an old house in upstate New York which is allegedly haunted. Although I have never had any experiences with the ghosts, several of my friends have.

But the research I did was more about encapsulating their personalities and what their experiences would’ve been.

There are seven main narrators in Rooms. Did you have one you enjoyed writing the most?
I really loved writing Trenton. I had a particular fondness for him because he was one of the first characters that came to me. Sandra was a hard voice for me to capture because she’s so incisive and foul-mouthed—not that I’m not foul-mouthed, but I’m foul-mouthed in a very different way. She’s older and she’s so ornery. And so it was hard for me to get her voice, but once I did, it was so fun. She says the most ridiculous things, uses the most ridiculous metaphors. She’s a crass, loud, doesn’t-give-a-shit kind of person.

This is your first novel for adults. Did you face any new challenges in switching to an adult audience?
I came across a million challenges regarding Rooms because of the way that it’s structured and the way that there are so many narrators and the fact that it takes place in one house—but those are not necessarily challenges endemic to it being for adults. It’s hard to say, because those are challenges endemic to the book, and I couldn’t have written that book in that way for anybody who wasn’t an adult. So of course they’re related, but afterward it feels like the challenges pertain to the material itself and not to any audience.

What’s next?
In March 2015 I have a teen book called Vanishing Girls, which is a realistic novel about teen girls in the aftermath of an accident, for fans of We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. In fact E. Lockhart blurbed it. In the fall I’m launching a middle grade series that’s really fun, called Curiosity House. And then currently I’m writing a teen book and an adult book.

Is there anyone you’re excited to see while you’re here for the Southern Festival of Books?
I’m here for like one second, so no. I’m just going to catch up with two of my friends, Claudia Gray and Lev Grossman, though now it turns out I’m probably going to miss him.

Australian novelist Graeme Simsion found unexpected success with his first novel, The Rosie Project, a romantic comedy starring an uptight geneticist and a free-spirited young woman.

In The Rosie Effect, Simsion returns to the life of Rosie and Don as they struggle to turn their marriage into a lifelong love affair.

The Rosie Project was something of a surprise bestseller—had you always planned to continue the story of Don and Rosie?
On the contrary, I had made a firm decision that there would not be a sequel. I had tied up all the loose ends in the tradition of the romantic comedy happy ending, and was well advanced with a new novel when I changed my mind. A number of readers and critics had commented that the happy ending was unrealistic—Don and Rosie would struggle in a marriage. Of course they would! Everyone does at times. I wanted to explore this and show that they could make it through in their own ways. I also felt that we had more to learn about Don: that I hadn’t really plumbed the possibilities of this character. I struggled for a while to find a way into the story—then, one evening at dinner we were celebrating the pregnancy of one of my writers’ group . . .

The book explores what happens after the “happily ever after.” Was it hard for you to put your characters through these difficulties, or exciting to explore what happened next?
Overall it was exciting. Don is a great character to write: you put him in a challenging situation and just ask yourself, honestly, what would he do? But I wanted to take Don and Rosie to a very low point, to where their marriage was in real jeopardy. That meant having both of them lose faith in the relationship. We are in Don’s head, so we understand why he is doing what he does. But we only see Don’s view of Rosie, and if we take this at face value, it’s easy to judge her harshly. I knew some readers would lose their empathy for Rosie, but hoped that most would ask themselves “Really, if I was in her position…?”

Why did you decide to move Don and Rosie to New York, and what challenges came up because of that?
It was a carry-over from The Rosie Project, where Don and Rosie’s visit to New York allows Don to re-invent himself away from his routines and the expectations of others. In a restaurant, a fellow diner tells Don that there are so many weird people in New York that everyone just fits right in. So, at the end of the story, I moved Don and Rosie to New York, to allow him to continue his own re-invention. I didn’t plan a sequel! So when I started writing a sequel, there they were, in New York, and I decided to play the cards I’d dealt myself.

Rosie seems closed off and unapproachable to the reader as well as to Don for much of the book, whereas in the original she was the more accessible character.
Ah! See response to earlier question about putting characters through difficulties.

We are looking at the world through Don’s eyes—and this is how Rosie appears to him. And she’s not in every scene: Don is the protagonist here. We’re all accustomed to the chick-lit genre, which is where we expect to find books that focus on regular domestic relationships, but almost invariably the protagonist is female. I guess we’d not be surprised in the male partner was invisible, at work, closed off, unapproachable when the protagonist was having a drink with her female buddies—but when we reverse the genders, we notice the absence of the woman.

I know some readers are also bothered by what seems to be a change to the bubbly Rosie we saw in The Rosie Project, but let’s remember that (a) the honeymoon is (literally) over; (b) Rosie has taken on a challenging workload and is now pregnant; (c) Rosie’s nemesis, Gene, has moved in with them and Don is spending a lot of time in his company (d) much as we may love Don, he’d also be a difficult guy to live with at times!

I think (a) is pretty important. The Rosie Project was about falling in love. The Rosie Effect is about making a long-term relationship work. The tones of the books reflect these different moods—and different challenges. The psychologists tell us how important communication is to the success of a relationship, but most of us don’t do it as well as we could. Don and Rosie are no exceptions. What the two stories do have in common is that we should see that these guys are fundamentally compatible—and we sometimes want to bang their heads together!

Don interprets deceit differently than many people and can’t stomach even “little white lies.” How does that complicate his relationship with Rosie?
Deceit is a recurring theme in the The Rosie Effect. I think “can’t stomach” is a bit strong: Don just finds these white lies puzzling and unnecessary—as illustrated by Gene’s lie about Don having doggy do on his shoe. I don’t think the small stuff complicates his relationship with Rosie: that’s the sort of thing she can find refreshing and amusing—cute. It’s when Don decides that deception is warranted (in keeping his arrest from Rosie) that complications arise. He’s uncomfortable with what he’s doing, worried he’ll be caught. He withdraws, Rosie senses this, and the downward spiral begins.

It’s clear why people on the autism spectrum might relate to Don, but can you tell us about other readers who relate to him in unexpected ways?
I didn’t expect so many women to “fall in love” with Don. I wanted readers to be sympathetic, empathize, but, “I’d give up being a vegan if I could marry Don”; “Is there a real Don and can I have his email address?”; “Rosie doesn’t deserve Don!”—no, I didn’t expect that. Don, for all his intelligence, decency and “cuteness” would be hard work! Okay, he is a romantic hero, but he’s a long way from a conventional one.

I’ve had very interesting feedback from women married to men on the spectrum. They find the portrayal of Don realistic, but not necessarily funny. Some do, some don’t. All who I’ve spoken to have related to the portrayal of Rosie in The Rosie Effect: “Sometimes you just need space away from the verbal barrage”; “I’ve done extreme things like threaten to leave just to provoke an emotional response.”

I do have a problem with women who seem to relate to Don as a pet rather than an intelligent adult. And they’ll say, “Rosie knew what she was getting herself into (so she should suck it up)”. Said no marriage counselor, ever. These guys are in an adult relationship, and that means negotiation, change, and give-and-take. Don’s quite capable of all of these. 

What made you decide to write about Rosie’s pregnancy instead of writing about Don’s reaction to the baby after it was born, which seems like the more obvious plot choice?
Many reasons! The question that drives the story is, “Can Don and Rosie make their relationship work in the face of the sorts of stresses that couples are likely to encounter?” So I wanted to focus on Don and Rosie, not Don and Rosie plus baby. With a baby in place, Rosie would have been less available (and with good reason).

The pregnancy provided opportunities to explore the theme of how we deal with advice and information (something that causes us all stress, but Don in spades). Yes, I could have done this with child-rearing too, but I’m looking at a third book for that! 

The character of Gene is the opposite of Don—it’s easier for him to fit in with other people, but he makes a lot of decisions that seem unethical. How does his character help you develop Don’s? Why do you think these two very different people have such a strong bond?
I don’t think they’re as different as they look. As Don points out when he confronts Gene about his infidelity in The Rosie Project: “You’re similar to me. That’s why you’re my best friend.”

I see Gene as the dark side of Don—a man who was probably as much of a geek as Don at school, but learned to fake it till he made it. I mean, what sort of man in his mid-fifties is “collecting” women? What’s he trying to prove? Why the interest in collections? I think unusual people have a choice of finding a place that accommodates them or changing to fit it with broader society. Don and Gene represent those two different choices.

One reason Gene likes Don is that Don relies on him for advice. Who else would listen to Gene on social behavior? (Although he’s chosen to study and teach it for a living.) That’s a simple take: I like to think that in The Rosie Effect we see Gene in more depth.

You did a lot of readings and appearances for The Rosie Project. Any fun fan stories? What do you like about meeting readers?
I love meeting readers. It’s affirming to know that my stories are reaching people, and I continue to be amazed about what readers bring to the table—things they find in the book that I perhaps put in unconsciously, or that they simply constructed themselves. Interestingly, I don’t see any differences in how readers in English-speaking countries, at least, respond to the book.

I have lots of stories about people who have family members or close friends on the autism spectrum—some funny, some moving, some uplifting.

“Hi, my name’s Ben and I have Asperger’s. I have a problem with your book (long pause). Page 27, line 23. Don says he doesn’t want a partner who’s mathematically illiterate. The word is innumerate. Don Tillman would not make that mistake.”

“My brother had difficulties all his life, and was finally diagnosed with Asperger’s in his 40s. The family read books and went to seminars to learn to be more supportive, but it was only after he passed away and we read The Rosie Project that we understood what it was like to be him.”

“We always thought my dad had Asperger’s and we thought it’d help if he acknowledged it. We gave him books on the subject and he kept saying, ‘That’s not me.’ Then we gave him The Rosie Project. He read it and announced, ‘I’m coming out!’

 What are you working on next? 
I’m currently writing a novel about a love affair re-ignited after 22 years. 

Carrie Rollwagen is a bookseller and author in Birmingham, Alabama. 

In Dietland, timid Plum Kettle is sure that losing weight is the key that will unlock the life she wants to live. But when she crosses paths with a mysterious young woman, she ends up involved in a full-on riot grrl ride to a feminist awakening. Author Sarai Walker answered a few questions about her edgy, girl-power debut.

It feels like a bit of an understatement to say that this is an unusual premise for a novel! What was your starting point for the story?
I would say it had two starting points. The first was when I saw the film Fight Club many years ago. As soon as the film ended, I knew I wanted to write something for women that had that defiant, punk spirit. (It’s not fair that men get to have all the fun.) But at the time this was nothing more than a vague idea, a gut feeling.

Several years after that, when I was studying for my M.F.A. in creative writing, I wrote a short story about a young fat woman who works at a teen magazine. As a veteran of teen magazines myself, this story was very personal to me.

This short story and the Fight Club idea eventually merged into one, which I think explains the unusual premise of the novel!

The structure is also unusual—Dietland includes book excerpts, complete with footnotes, plus news stories and even a journal. How did you decide to include all these elements?
I wish I could say I invented this, but I was influenced by other novels that use this “pastiche” effect. The one that comes to mind is Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which includes a book-within-a-book and news articles. I read Atwood’s novel around the time I was first attempting to write Dietland and thought this technique looked like great fun, so decided to try it myself. I adapted it for my own purposes and love what it adds to the novel. Dietland uses an intense first-person voice and I think it benefits from the inclusion of these other voices.

What do you like the most about Plum?
I like that she’s brave. I aspire to be as brave as she is.

In her book, your character Marlowe says that “being a woman is being a faker.” What’s your take on that statement?
She’s really commenting on all the ways that we as women are socialized to pretend to be what we’re not. We wear make-up to appear prettier and younger; we use various techniques to appear thinner and shapelier and bustier; we often deny that we have appetites, pretending not to be hungry and so forth; we’re encouraged to act dumb and weak and helpless sometimes; and the list goes on. Being a woman in our society too often means concealing who we really are. Girls learn this at a young age.

 "Being a woman in our society too often means concealing who we really are. Girls learn this at a young age."

You wrote most of this book while living in Europe. What differences (if any) did you see in women’s lives in Europe vs. the United States?
What was most interesting to me was the difference in my life while I was living there. I spent most of my time living in London and this influenced the novel in key ways. I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, but the U.K. is the most overtly sexist place I’ve ever experienced, as well as the most fat-shaming. There’s a chapter in the novel that takes place in London and explores the sexist media scene there; I felt compelled to write that chapter as a form of catharsis.

"The U.K. is the most overtly sexist place I’ve ever experienced, as well as the most fat-shaming."

Who are your feminist heroes?
I have way too many to list, but I’ll mention two women who should receive more attention. As I wrote Dietland, I was influenced by feminism of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, both the fiction and nonfiction of that period.

Joanna Russ should not be forgotten. She wrote a wonderfully irreverent work of feminist literary criticism called How to Suppress Women’s Writing. I also love her essay “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write.” She is perhaps most known for her science-fiction novel The Female Man.

I also want to mention Dorothy Bryant. Her early feminist novel Ella Price’s Journal is one of my favorites and it deserves to be discovered by many more readers today. It has to be read and considered within the historical context in which it was written, but it is a moving exploration of a woman’s consciousness-raising during the early days of Second Wave feminism.

"It’s important to have kindred spirits however you can find them."

Dietland is something of a manifesto. What would you say to readers who finish the book wanting to change the world?
I’ve actually already been contacted by readers who had this response, which is terrific, but also a lot of pressure for me!

I think one of the things that Dietland can do for certain readers is raise their consciousness, to use an old-school feminist term (which I love). Consciousness-raising is the process of coming to see the personal as the political; after your consciousness is raised, you see the world through a different lens. This is an important first step in creating change.

My advice for readers is to find a like-minded community of people, as Plum does in the novel with the women of Calliope House. An in-person community is great, but online works as well. It’s important to have kindred spirits however you can find them. I also think expanding your knowledge by reading up on the topics you’re interested in is essential. For readers interested in fat acceptance, there are lots of great websites, blogs and books to explore. The insights you gain this way can help you make the change you want to see in the world around you.

Many feminists in the 1970s believed that many small personal “revolutions” have the potential to add up to a large revolution. I really like that idea.

What are you working on next?
I’m researching and thinking about my second novel. I had hoped to be writing it already, but I don’t have the mental space or distance from Dietland yet. I’m also writing essays.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of Dietland.

Author photo by Marion Ettlinger.

What if you had everything everyone thought you should want, only to realize it wasn’t what you wanted at all? That’s the dilemma facing Lily Wilder, who is about to marry the perfect man at the beginning of I Take You. However, tying the knot means the end of her romantic freedom—something that fun-loving Lily has always reveled in. Eliza Kennedy answered a few questions about her debut novel and its unconventional heroine.

Can you tell us a bit about your path to publication? Where were you when you found out your book had sold?
Before I queried agents, only two people had seen my manuscript: my husband and my father. So I went into the process having no idea whether my book would be met with eagerness, horror, or—worse—total indifference. Still, out it went, and after a slightly excruciating weekend, a few agents responded. They were enthusiastic, and I was over the moon. I eventually went with the wonderful Suzanne Gluck of William Morris Endeavor. She made some editorial suggestions and came up with a list of editors. The wait was on. A few days later, my husband and I were at the playground with our son when I got a call from Suzanne. Josh says he watched as I sat down under the jungle gym and covered my mouth with my hand. He could tell from my face it was good news.

For a novel about a woman who’s not sure she wants to get married, your book takes on a lot of serious topics. Was this your original intention for the book?
My goal from the outset was to write a fun, funny, lighthearted novel about a free-spirited woman rushing calamitously toward the altar. I wanted it to be the kind of book you race through and don’t want to put down. But describing Lily’s out-there behavior and point of view raised certain questions in my mind—about why monogamy is our romantic norm, how messed up our beliefs about female sexuality are, and the realities of happily-ever-after. I realized that I had things to say, and just so happened to have created a forum for saying them. After that, it was a matter of balancing the froth with the weightier stuff.

"Describing Lily’s out-there behavior and point of view raised certain questions in my mind—about why monogamy is our romantic norm, how messed up our beliefs about female sexuality are, and the realities of happily-ever-after."

The wacky atmosphere of Key West provides a great backdrop for this book—can you tell us a little bit more about why you chose it and what it means to you?
Key West is one of my favorite places in the world. I love its bizarre combination of  lush tropical beauty, gorgeous architecture, swashbuckling piratical history, and unabashed smuttiness. It’s a place with a sense of humor, with light and dark sides—much like my main character.

More to the point, my husband and I got married in Key West, and as I was developing my idea for the book, I realized that it was the perfect setting for the slightly unhinged wedding I had in mind.

Lily isn’t perfect, but she’s a lot of fun to spend time with. What’s your favorite thing about her?
Her outspokenness. She says exactly what’s on her mind, all the time. It never occurs to her to do otherwise, even though it often gets her in trouble. Out here in the real world, women are often taught, in ways subtle and more overt, that we should hold their tongues, defer, be diplomatic. Lily didn’t get the memo.

I Take You questions a lot of the traditions around and beliefs about relationships. Which was the most challenging to explore?
The most challenging was the notion that someone can be a serial cheater but a fundamentally good person. I was trying to question our collective impulse to judge people in terms of their success at monogamy—cheating equals bad, faithfulness equals good—which fails to recognize the extraordinary complications of actual people and the realities of life and coupledom. Lily loves her family, she’s a loyal friend and she works very hard at her job. She also just happens to love to sleep around. I didn’t want to apologize for her conduct any more than I cared to suggest that she was behaving well. But I did want to show someone who is more than the sum of her misbehavior.

Women who cheat typically face more social censure than men. Did you ever worry that readers wouldn’t relate to a character like Lily?
I did wonder whether some readers will be turned off by Lily’s behavior, whether because she’s a woman, because they’ve been personally affected by infidelity or because they simply think it’s wrong. With any luck, those readers will appreciate other aspects of her personality, or enjoy the book enough that relatability becomes beside the point.

But I’m actually not sure I agree with the premise of the question. I feel like men are condemned and excoriated for cheating more often than women are. Although perhaps that’s because they do it more often. Or, I should say, they get caught more often.            

You’re married to the author Joshua Ferris—do your writing routines differ? Are you the first to read each other’s work?
Our routines are pretty similar: We park ourselves at our desks in the morning and work throughout the day. We currently write in adjoining rooms, which has taken some adjustment—apparently I’m an offensively loud typist, and he feels free to call out random questions like I’m his personal Wikipedia. We are each other’s first reader, and have gradually learned how to accept criticism with grace, good humor and only occasional threats of violence.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a review of I Take You.

Kevin Kwan is not where one might expect to find a best-selling, New York City-dwelling author. “I’m taking a little break before the craziness of three solid months of touring,” Kwan says from an undisclosed southwestern location far, far away from Manhattan. “I thought I’d look at rabbits frolicking in a field for a while first.”

The tour is to support China Rich Girlfriend, the raucous sequel to his acclaimed debut, Crazy Rich Asians. In it, we catch up with several familiar faces, as down-to-earth Rachel Chu gets married to professor Nicholas Young, who has given up his inheritance to be with her. Rachel grew up not knowing who her father was, and when she discovers his identity she eagerly hops a plane to China to meet him. Nothing can prepare her for the unbelievable “China rich” culture that awaits her, where an exploding economy allows multibillionaires to look down on regular billionaires.

Kwan, who was raised in a wealthy family in Singapore before moving to the United States at age 11, drew upon his own experiences to color both his novels.

“I grew up with that sort of old world money,” he says. “I was not really conscious of that till I stepped out of it and thought, oh my gosh, that was kind of freaky. You go to houses with sunken pools filled with sharks. It is a world with its own dysfunctions.”

Kwan insists that the over-the-top wealth he describes in China Rich Girlfriend—socialites hopping on their private 747s complete with koi ponds, spending nearly $200 million on a single piece of artwork—is based in reality.

"In many ways, it’s toned down. The truth is so much more fascinating than anything I could fictionalize."

“In many ways, it’s toned down,” he says. “My editor had to step in and say, ‘Kevin, this is bordering on fantasy. It’s like you’re writing Game of Thrones.’ But it was real. The truth is so much more fascinating than anything I could fictionalize. For example, the China rich are importing expensive racecars and killing themselves in these horrible accidents.”

That truth served as the inspiration for Carlton, son of Bao Gaoliang, a prominent politician and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. When Carlton crashes his car in London, his mother, Bao Shaoyen, rushes in to cover up the death of a girl in the passenger’s seat and—seemingly higher on her priority list—to set her son up with the best plastic surgeons. This is the family Rachel comes into when she discovers Bao Gaoliang is her father. Despite their radically different upbringings, Rachel and Carlton form an unlikely friendship, but Bao Shaoyen refuses to acknowledge her husband’s illegitimate daughter, whom she fears will irreparably harm her family’s reputation. 

China Rich Girlfriend is the most fun I’ve had reading a book in quite some time. The vibrantly drawn characters and equally vivid settings in and around Beijing make for a jam-packed, lively story. And it was just as fun to write, Kwan says.

“I found myself laughing out loud at so many sections as I wrote,” he says. “You become like a demon possessed—I had so much fun traveling and doing the research to saturate this world. I did want an element of gravitas but you have to balance that with lightness. This is not an episode of ‘Oprah.’”

Kwan traveled to China to prepare for writing the sequel, and even after several trips overseas, he was surprised by what he found. 

“Every time I go there, it’s almost utterly a different place,” he says. “It never ceases to amaze me. Mainland Chinese are so utterly different from Asian Americans. Here, cultures and traditions are completely intact, things like foods and festivals, whereas in China, the Cultural Revolution erased the Chinese culture completely in many ways. So I would meet these young Chinese, and they don’t know where the root of their belief system comes from—it’s erased from their memory, which is liberating in a way.” 

The result is a cast of characters who are wholly believable and human. But even with meticulous research, Kwan said writing a sequel to a book that did as well as Crazy Rich Asians was daunting. 

“I was very conscious about whether there should even be a book two,” he says. “To me, there was something kind of perfect about the way I ended the [first] book. Some agreed—and of course I also heard the screams from those who didn’t.”

Among those who claim to have no opinion about either of his books are several members of his family.

“There are a lot of people in my family who claim not to have read my books,” he says wryly. “They genuinely may not have read it. They’re too busy nurturing their fortune. I have many cousins who loved it—they get it—they know this world.” 

Kwan is still getting used to the idea that his books could be hotly anticipated. Entertainment Weekly recently named China Rich Girlfriend one of six books to look forward to this summer, along with offerings by the likes of Stephen King and—wait for it—Harper Lee.

“I was kind of flabbergasted,” he says. “Harper Lee is really one of my favorite authors. To Kill a Mockingbird was such a seminal book for me. I read it in college—it’s a disservice to read it when you’re too young. You need to have already come of age. It was an unbelievable kind of thrill to be even mentioned in the same breath as her.”

For now, though, Kwan is focused on his own calm before the storm of what is sure to be another bestseller. The promotion plans include his hosting an interactive guide of New York City’s craziest, richest Asian hotspots. What is yet to be decided is whether this will become a trilogy.

“It really depends on how well this book does,” Kwan says cheerfully, “and whether people want a third.” 

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

Sometimes a character appears in an author’s imagination fully formed. All the writer needs to do is offer him or her a blank page on which to play.

So it was for British writer Jojo Moyes, who hit the bestseller list in America for the first time with her tear-jerking ninth novel, Me Before You. Will Traynor and Louisa Clark, the central characters in the word-of-mouth hit—which has sold more than 5 million copies since it was published in 2012—came to Moyes fleshed out, ready for action. And as Moyes prepared to revisit Lou in the sequel, After You, that sensation resurfaced. Sometimes, lightning strikes twice.

“It’s the same thing again, where all you have to do is put yourself in a room with a new situation and it’s easy to write,” she says, during a telephone call to her home in London.

This time, the character who hit the ground running is Lily, a teenager who shows up on Lou’s doorstep. Lou has embraced new experiences since Will’s death, including an extended stay in Paris and purchasing a condo in London. But she’s become stuck, unable or unwilling to move forward. 

Lily might provide just the push Lou needs.

“They never left me, those characters. Normally, you move on to something else,” Moyes says. 

This is the first time Moyes, the author of a dozen books, has written a sequel. “I’m wary to be seen as writing [this book] because Me Before You had done so well,” she says. “But literally I had one of those moments where I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and sat bolt upright.”

Even with that epiphany and her so-believable-they-seem-real characters, Moyes says she was well aware of the pressures of writing a sequel as compared to a stand-alone book.

“I felt the weight of expectation. Everything I did in this book, I almost could hear the readers saying, no, I don’t want that to happen!” 

Fear not, readers—Moyes was careful that Lou’s character stayed consistent from the first book to the second. But that means Lou’s decision-making skills remain the same, and she doesn’t always operate in her own best interest.

“Everyone kind of assumed she’d sail off into the sunset and live a new life. But knowing Lou, she’s a sensitive soul. She might do that initially, but what she’d been part of would not be easy to walk away from,” Moyes says.

After You is an immersive experience, inviting readers back into the homes of the characters they fell in love with in Me Before You. They’ll experience the mourning that follows a devastating loss, and the glimmers of hope that propel the brokenhearted forward. And, like Me Before You, After You is a book that is best leapt into without knowing much about the plot, which explains the slight vagueness Moyes uses when discussing it.

“It’s partly a book about what happens when you’re left in the wake of somebody else’s decision, whether that be a divorce or the decision for someone to take their own life,” Moyes says. “I’m always fascinated by the way people are entitled to follow their own path.”

While Lou remains a central character, readers will again visit the Clark and Traynor families in all their glory. The quirky Clarks serve as a lighthearted counterpoint to the grief-laden Traynors, whose marriage has crumbled after the loss of their son. Will’s death weighs heavy, and his presence permeates After You as his loved ones make decisions informed by his life—or their loss.  “[T]he moment you opened the box, let out even a whisper of your sadness, it would mushroom into a cloud that overwhelmed all other conversation,” Lou thinks as she tries to decide how much to tell a new acquaintance about her past.

From that, readers might draw lessons of their own. Moyes is a believer in the power of fiction to change hearts and minds. “Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from fiction,” she says. “One of the greatest things you learn from fiction is empathy. If you can’t empathize with someone else’s position, it makes a rigid adult.”

She’s not concerned with maintaining appearances with regard to what she reads; recent titles include a thriller by fellow Brit Lee Child and Humans of New York by Brandon Stanton, a collection of photo essays based on the blog of the same name.

Nor is Moyes worried about how her own work is classified. “I’ve never pretended that my books are literary fiction. But what I do believe is you can write commercial fiction that is quality. I know what I put into my books, how hard I work with the language, to make sure everything has a proper rhythm,” she says.

If sales are anything to go by, Moyes has accomplished that goal. Though her novels are serious page-turners and cover a wide range of topics and time periods, they all contain memorable characters and resonant themes.

Moyes is a hard worker as well; she’s published almost a novel per year since she first started writing in 2002. Now that After You is out in the world, the author is planning on taking a bit of a writing break.

“I’m not going to think about writing another book until the end of the year. I just don’t have the mental space,” she says. 

She’s been busy with movies recently: The film adaptation of Me Before You, which stars Emilia Clark (“Game of Thrones”) as Lou and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games) as Will, is set to debut next June, and Moyes has a screenwriting credit. 

“I’m also moving house. Before I spoke to you, I spent an hour painting a floor. I thought to myself, oh, the glamorous life of an international bestseller,” Moyes adds, laughing.

In the meantime, she’s looking forward to taking her three children along for the After You American book tour. 

“American audiences are so demonstrative. English audiences are usually not as demonstrative,” Moyes says. (She has carried observations like these into her work; in After You, Moyes writes of Lou’s reaction to Will’s father: “If he had been anybody else I might have hugged him just then, but we were English and he had once been my boss of sorts, so we simply smiled awkwardly at each other.”)

There’s one more national difference that’s pretty important to a best-selling author like Moyes.

“In the United States, if they ask how many books you’ve sold, you say 5 million copies, and they break into applause. In England, they’re like, oh, stop showing off.

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

Janice Y.K. Lee’s 2009 debut, The Piano Teacher, was beloved by readers and critics for its pitch-perfect portrayal of Hong Kong in the years after World War II. In her second novel, The Expatriates, the author—who was born in Hong Kong and educated in the U.S.—explores modern-day Hong Kong through the eyes of three American women who are all struggling to find their roles in a land far from home. 

Lee answered a few questions about the new novel, her writing process and the reasons that being between cultures can be a good thing for both a writer and her characters. 

It’s been a while since your debut, The Piano Teacher. How long have you been working on this novel, and how did the experience of writing a second novel compare to the first? 
Both books took around five years, which I've come to think of as my normal gestation period, if you can draw any conclusions from a sample of two. When I was writing The Piano Teacher, there were a lot of unknowns for me: Could I finish a novel? Could I sell it? Would it ever see the light of day? So I labored at it, sort of in the dark and without telling most people what I was doing when I disappeared into the library or was at my desk. It was a fraught and anxious time but I've romanticized it in my head as a glorious time of discovery. 

When I started The Expatriates, I also didn't know if I could finish another novel. I always remember a short essay that Jeffrey Eugenides wrote in the New Yorker about how being a novelist is the only profession in which you sign up to be an amateur every single time you start a book (paraphrasing wildly, with apologies to him) and I felt that acutely. I never write with an outline or a plot in mind so it really does feel like fumbling around, looking for a lifeline. This time, though, I felt comfortable saying, "I'm working" when people asked me what I was doing, and the greatest benefit was that I could spend my afternoons reading books and calling it work. 

The book opens with a lovely set piece about the expatriate mindset and the different reasons people try to start a new life somewhere else that immediately establishes the tone of the story and gives insight into the characters. Did you always plan to frame the story that way?
I wish I could say I had had a plan, any plan! I never had an inkling where it would all go. I started The Expatriates with the image of a woman, lying on her bed, unable, unwilling to get up. That's all I had. Then, after I had delved into that character for several dozen pages and found another character for her to interact with, I understood the novel was set in contemporary Hong Kong. After that realization, I wrote the opening passage in a feverish rush, sort of channeling the arrivals that happen every day, trying to get right at the feel of the world the reader would be entering. I wanted the readers to be plunged into this world. 

This story is told from the points of view of three very different women. How did you settle on this structure, and did one voice come more easily than another?
When I was entangled in it, I wished more than once that I had written a simple A to Z timeline with one perspective. I got bogged down in the weeds trying to figure it out but it just worked out that way. I wish I was able to be more deliberate with the way I write, or that I had more control, but I sort of nose around in the dark until it feels right, print it out, read it, and change what feels wrong. It's a very inefficient, laborious process but the only way I know. When I began The Expatriates, it was with this image of the woman in bed. From there, I started to develop a story and eventually another woman came along. A year into it, one of the woman started acting erratically and unlike herself. I could not figure her out. 

It was at this critical juncture that I had coincidentally managed to carve out some time to go to Yaddo, the artist colony. When I was there, away from family obligations and life stresses, I was really able to delve deeply into the women, and I suddenly realized that that odd woman was actually two women. She had been acting oddly because those had not been her actions, her words, her thoughts. The book was about three women. It was such a relief and so obvious when I realized it, and from there the story started to unspool in a much more organic way. 

You grew up in Hong Kong, but you have said that, as a Korean, you didn’t feel at home there. How did that experience shape this novel?
I've always felt more at home in America than in Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong and it's an amazing city and a wonderful place to grow up and raise children but I never saw myself there permanently. So I think you'll see that feeling infused into the novel. Very few expatriates choose to make Hong Kong their permanent home so there's always a temporary feel to their experience. I have never lived in Korea either, so I don't know how that would feel. I always tell people that I am not an expatriate but I'm not a local either. I think being between worlds is a good thing for a writer. 

What is your relationship with Hong Kong these days? Do you think it will continue to inspire as a setting for your fiction?
I'm nostalgic about Hong Kong. We just moved back to the U.S. this summer, and there's a lot we miss about Hong Kong, my children especially. We miss hiking the beautiful mountains, swimming in November, everything being 15 minutes away. Life in Hong Kong is easy, in a way, because it feels like your life is on pause. Hong Kong will always be in my DNA and I love it but I'm not sure that it will be the setting of my next book. I think I'd like to venture further afield. 

Your debut novel was set in Hong Kong in the 1950s, and this book is contemporary. Was it harder to capture the past or the present? 
I did a lot of research for The Piano Teacher, in libraries and universities. I'd have to stop and find out how much a ferry ticket cost in 1950, what movie would have been playing in the theaters, or what people would have worn on an airplane flight, a rare luxury at the time. I loved that process, as it was fun to be a student again. For this book, I didn't have to do any research, just live my life and take from it liberally. So that was very different. Sometimes, I found myself longing for the structure of the library and the materials. But it was also freeing, to know that I was already an expert in the field, as it were. 

For a lifestyle that is outside the norm in many ways, expatriate life can be very traditional, especially for the so-called “trailing spouse.” Could you talk a little bit about this and the way it affects your characters?
It's an odd situation that's hard to describe. Imagine giving up your friends, family, and most likely, job, to follow your spouse halfway around the world. Imagine when you get there, you are given a house, a servant, possibly a driver, and a country club membership. And then imagine that you suddenly have eight more hours in your day. Because that's what it feels like. 

It's hard to generalize because everyone has such a different experience but I saw spouses who ran the gamut from ultra-traditional housewife to globetrotting entrepreneurs. But the stereotype is of the housewife “trailing spouse” because a lot of people do come because of their spouse's job. So people do different things with their new worlds. Some women get very into charities, some get very fit, some start small businesses. What I came away is that everyone is trying to do the best that they can in the situation they find themselves in, so I think that's the positive part of it.

One of the novel’s central themes is forgiveness: how to get it, who deserves it, etc. One of the main characters is even named Mercy. What made you want to explore this topic?
As I get older, I realize that all those tropes you're told when you're younger—Be kind and people will be kind to you; Be open; Be generous; Give without expectation—they are all true. They seem wildly impractical and somewhat insane when presented to you as a child and young adult, not to mention impossible. But to move forward in life, you have to forgive and go on. I don't pretend to be able to keep to these ideals but I like to remember that that is the goal.

The men in the lives of these women don’t seem to struggle with guilt and the need for forgiveness as much as the women do. If the book were told from a male point of view, how would it be different?
Oh, I don't know. Men seem an utterly different species to me, a species that I cherish and adore, but I don't pretend to know anything about how the male mind thinks. I have a wonderful husband and three amazing boys, but their existence on Earth seems to run on a parallel plane to the one women are on. Of course, we interact closely, but what the other takes away from any given situation seems to be wildly different. I have a lot of close girlfriends and we share our experiences. Men don't seem to share their experiences in the same way. They blow off steam by doing physical activities together, and women get closer by exchanging confidences, at least that's what it's been in my experience. I think I know something about motherhood and women but I don't ever claim to know a lot about men. If this book were told from a male perspective, I think it would have been a lot shorter and had a lot more action! I don't know about how men forgive themselves either. I don't think they find it easier, but I think they find it easier to compartmentalize their anger and sorrow. I think that's a skill well worth having and I envy them that. 

What are you working on next? 
I'm working on getting on the pre-publication work done for The Expatriates, so nothing is on my radar yet for next project. I'd like to write for television, and so I get to watch a lot of television and call it work. But also noodling on images and characters, which may then go forth to populate a future novel. 

Author photo by Xue Tan.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Expatriates.