Life, death, love, loneliness and grief are the building blocks of Jon Cohen’s wondrous new novel, along with nonstop action, humor and a broad cast of characters whose actions converge like a perfectly crafted jigsaw puzzle.

Undergirding everything in Harry’s Trees is the belief that “the ordinary world is extraordinary, all the time, for everyone.” That guiding principle becomes a recipe for magic that remains firmly rooted in reality, notes Cohen, speaking by phone from his home outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Harry Crane is a U.S. Forest Service analyst who literally can’t see the forest for the trees. This paper-pushing bureaucrat spends his days “in a building utterly bereft of wood,” longing for the smell of pinesap. Although his wife, Beth, urges him to quit and work in a local arboretum, Harry settles for buying a lottery ticket each week and yearning for a stroke of good luck.

Instead, misfortune strikes. After urging her husband to forget his lottery ticket “just this once,” Beth is killed in a freak accident while waiting for Harry. In the aftermath, as Harry tries to find his way past grief and guilt, his world collides with that of a nurse, Amanda Jeffers, and her 10-year-old daughter, Oriana, who are reeling from the sudden death of their husband and father, Dean. After they meet in a forest deemed enchanted by the fairy tale-loving Oriana, Harry begins living in an elaborate tree house built by Dean before he died.

“The call of a tree and the childhood beckoning of a treehouse—that’s interesting to me,” Cohen says. “Everybody’s got a special tree, whether currently as an adult, or a tree from childhood.” He goes on to describe a mulberry tree at the end of his boyhood street that was overgrown with honeysuckle and made for a great nest.

“I’ve had all sorts of trees,” he adds. “Still do.”

Cohen sets his novel in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, where Cohen and his wife once owned a small farmhouse and barn. The property and nearby landmarks provided inspiration, especially for a picturesque library where a beloved librarian, Olive, lends Oriana a strange handmade book called The Grum’s Ledger. This fairy tale about an ogre-like creature becomes pivotal to an amazing cascade of events. Throw in the fact that Oriana wears a red coat and Harry has an evil brother named Wolf, and you’ve got yourself a grown-up fairy tale.

Almost. “There’s not a single thing in there that can’t happen,” Cohen observes. “The world is imbued with a little magic. But I made darn sure that there were real-world explanations for what seem like magical events.”

Grief is the force that unites Harry, Amanda and Oriana, and as Cohen explains, “Again and again, reality-based people are ready for magic. I truly believe that when you are in love or when you grieve, you cross a line and see the world in an altered way.”

It’s no accident that both a librarian and a nurse are major players in Harry’s Trees. Those two details help explain Cohen’s unique career trajectory. He was raised by a children’s librarian mother and an English professor father who was a renowned Herman Melville scholar.

“It was a world immersed in books,” he recalls. “You would think I would go right to writing.”

“I truly believe that when you are in love or when you grieve, you cross a line and see the world in an altered way.”

Ironically, he didn’t write in high school or college. “Not a single story,” Cohen says. He earned an English degree at Connecticut College, but after working as a hospital orderly during a college gap year, he made an unexpected move and obtained a second degree in nursing.

“That ignited everything,” Cohen says. “My 10 years as a registered nurse—working on a cancer ward and then ICU/CCU—that turned me into a storyteller.

“My job was to help people in crisis,” he elaborates. “So many personalities, so many ways to cope, so many intimate and amazing details. So much life. [It was] narrative, action, a ticking clock, something at stake—all right there in a hospital room. And that’s the way I write—something is always happening, constant momentum.”

This surgically precise narrative style is what makes Cohen’s writing so readable. And his plot is exactly like an operating room—controlled chaos that leads to a carefully planned outcome.

In his time off from the hospital, Cohen finally began writing stories. He eventually wrote two novels (Max Lakeman and the Beautiful Stranger and The Man in the Window), received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and left medicine. Nonetheless, he feels that nursing became his muse, and each of his novels features a nurse.

But this nurse-turned-writer had yet another career change up his sleeve. After his novels were optioned for movies, he taught himself screenwriting with help from a book titled Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger. He caught the attention of director Jan de Bont (Twister, Speed), which led to Cohen writing the screenplay for the 2002 blockbuster Minority Report.

“I was happy to have the experience and very lucky,” Cohen says. “It’s nice to have my name on the poster.” Although he describes his screenwriting adventures as “a lark and an oddity,” Cohen always approached the experience pragmatically: “It helped pay some of the bills, but I treated it very rationally and saved the money. I didn’t buy a Jaguar.”

With Harry’s Trees, Cohen has returned to his writing roots. He’s a novelist once more, writing “the one and true voice that I do over and over again—the small, decent guy overwhelmed by events.”

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

Author photo by Andy Shelter.

Joanne Ramos’ debut novel, The Farm, has a provocative premise: A posh resort in New York’s Hudson Valley offers fine meals and handsome remuneration to women, most of them financially struggling immigrants, willing to live in seclusion from their families and carry a baby to term for wealthy clients. We spoke with Ramos about her work.

Dystopian fiction is a genre that other authors have used to shine a light on the treatment of women. The Handmaid’s Tale is perhaps the most famous example. Did you have previous books in mind that deal with similar topics as you wrote The Farm? And, in general, who are some of your literary influences?
It’s funny: The Farm has been called dystopian by many reviewers and readers, and yet, I didn’t set out to write dystopian fiction. I’m someone who grew up straddling worlds—as a Filipina immigrant to Wisconsin in the late 1970s, as a financial-aid kid at Princeton University, as a woman in the male-dominated world of high finance and as a mother with conflicted feelings about my generation’s zeal to give our children the “best” of everything. I’ve often felt like an outsider in my life—an uncomfortable place to inhabit, sometimes, but outsider-hood does give one a certain distance and perspective. It was this perspective that I wanted to write about in my book. My obsessions sprung from this perspective.

The world of The Farm is meant to be our world pushed forward just a few inches—far enough so that the reader can get a bit of distance from our current state, but not so far afield that she can dismiss it as “sci-fi” or highly improbable. Is that dystopian? I suppose it depends on your definition of dystopia.

As far as literary influences, some of the books I read while writing The Farm include Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary; Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy Home, Gilead and Lila; Lincoln in the Bardo and the short stories of George Saunders; Arthur Lubow’s biography of Diane Arbus; and the essays of Zadie Smith.

Jane Reyes and her older cousin, Evelyn Arroyo—referred to throughout the book as Ate, a Tagalog term for an older female relative—are beautifully drawn characters. Did you base them on people you know? Or are they more of a composite meant to embody the issues you wanted to address?
The Farm is a work of fiction, and the characters were made up in my head. That said, we are all influenced, consciously or not, by the water we swim in.

I was born in the Philippines, and my family moved to Wisconsin when I was 6. Many weekends of my childhood were spent with my dad’s family in Milwaukee, a city not too far from our town. His family, and we, were part of the tight Filipino community there. Decades later, when I was raising my children in Manhattan, I got to know a number of nannies and housekeepers and baby nurses during the hours I spent on playgrounds and playdates. Many of these women were Filipinas, and some of them became my friends. Ate and Jane, as well as Reagan and Mae, were inspired by memories, stories and observations from my childhood in Wisconsin, from my life in New York and from my own experiences as a mother and a daughter of immigrants.

At one point, Ate says that American children don’t take care of their elderly parents, unlike the good children in the Philippines. Have you found that to be true? More generally, can you speak to cultural differences between children in America and those in the Philippines?
I have returned to the Philippines only once since we emigrated, and that was when I was in my mid-20s for a short stay. So I am not equipped to speak about how the elderly are treated there, nor how Filipino children compare to American ones. That said, I have often heard family friends and relatives talk about how well cared for the elderly are in the Philippines, how they are not stuffed into nursing homes but grow old at home with family. Often, this was attributed to cultural reasons—a purported greater respect for family and the elderly in the Philippines compared with America—but I’d guess the availability of affordable caregivers is also an important factor.

Another theme that emerges throughout the book is the desire many people have to gain an edge over others, whether it’s the mothers who want an advantage for their babies by coming to the Farm, or people like Mae, Golden Oaks’ director, who covet power and appear to prize status over other considerations. Was this one of the themes that inspired the book? And what did you hope to say about it?
The Farm is in part a response to our tendency to see through, or even vilify, people who are different from ourselves. I had no interest in populating the book with villains or saints. I tried hard to create characters that reflect the complexity of real people. Real people have myriad, and often conflicting, needs, desires and loyalties. We try to balance them; often we fail; sometimes we betray each other.

Along the same lines, I’m interested in your thoughts about consumerism and America’s—and perhaps the Philippines’—relationship to wealth. Mae clearly likes the finest in life, from cashmere clothing to mother-of-pearl tissue dispensers. She says that most people accept 1 percenters that they can relate to, like Oprah or movie stars. Do you think that’s true? And is that true as much in the Philippines as in America?
Mae Yu, who runs the Farm, is a really polarizing character. I’ve heard from readers who detest her and others who love or admire her. The funny thing is that she’s not the only character in the book who betrays people, but she’s the lightning rod for a lot of criticism.

In many ways, Mae is the embodiment of the American dream. Her dad is an immigrant from China; her mother is Caucasian. She grew up middle class and worked hard to get where she is: the only female Managing Director at the luxury-goods conglomerate that owns the Farm, the primary breadwinner of her family.

Mae is good to the people in her immediate orbit. She helps her assistant, a young African American woman who was once a Host at the Farm, succeed in college; she is generous to her best friend, a public-school teacher in Los Angeles on a limited salary. And yet, she runs a business that manipulates and commodifies women. The story of free trade, of capitalism as a “win-win,” is important to Mae because it justifies her life. And so, to her, the Farm is a “win-win,” too—good for the Clients, who get to become parents, and good for the Hosts, who can earn the kind of money that will change their lives. It’s unsurprising, then, that she thinks the 1 percent deserve to be at the top of the heap.

Surrogacy is very much in the news, with gay couples and single parents (and many others) turning to surrogates to help start their families. Your novel paints a relatively dark portrait of a world in which women feel the need to resort to surrogacy to survive financially or break free from families. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your feelings toward surrogacy.
The book is definitively not a statement or judgment on surrogacy! In fact, I have a number of friends—both gay friends and those who have had difficulties carrying a pregnancy to term—who have used or are contemplating the use of surrogates. The construct of a luxury surrogacy retreat gave me a way into the ideas that I wanted to explore—more intimate questions about motherhood and broader questions about fairness and capitalism.

What messages about the plight of immigrants, specifically women, do you hope readers will take away from your book?
The Farm is a continuation of a conversation I’ve conducted with myself for most of my adult life—about the blurry line between luck and merit, inequality, motherhood, feminism and how we see those who are different from ourselves.

What are you working on next?
I have a notebook where I jot ideas, observations, bits from the books I’m reading. Slowly, these scribbles are starting to cohere. But it’s too early to talk about book two. I’m hoping to surprise myself, and my readers, too.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Farm.

Author photo by John Dolan

She’s a Korean immigrant, a former trial lawyer and the mother of three boys with serious medical issues. With her debut novel, Angie Kim has seamlessly woven these disparate strands of her life into an emotionally sprawling yet psychologically taut legal thriller.

With such a masterful blending of fiction and real life, it’s particularly fitting that Angie Kim will celebrate her 50th birthday the same week that her highly anticipated debut novel, Miracle Creek, is published. 

“I’m really excited,” she says in a call to her home in Great Falls, Virginia. “It’s a good excuse to have a big party.” And no doubt it will be a fun one, as the author radiates energy and enthusiasm even over the phone.

At the center of her book is the Yoo family (Young; her husband, Pak; and their 17-year-old daughter, Mary), who have emigrated from Korea and landed in the rural town of Miracle Creek, Virginia. In a barn, they run Miracle Submarine, a center for hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) where people go on “dives” in the pressurized oxygen chamber as an experimental treatment for a variety of conditions, including autism, cerebral palsy, infertility and more. Disaster strikes in the very first chapter when the Yoos’ chamber explodes, killing two people and injuring and disfiguring others.

"When you have a kid that’s sick, it just brings so many things to focus. And when you have three kids that are sick with three different things, it’s just awful. I probably have many, many novels where I could talk about this stuff.”

The accident, it turns out, is the result of arson, and the rest of the novel unfolds during four days of a trial held one year later, told from multiple points of view, weaving past and present together in a tangled yet beautifully constructed whodunit web. (Kim modeled the structure after two books: Korean bestseller Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin, and Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter, which begins with a deadly school bus accident, then describes the aftermath.)

Kim’s choice of subject came naturally. Her second son was born with profound hearing loss in one ear, and later diagnosed with celiac disease and ulcerative colitis. Soon after, she accompanied him to a series of HBOT treatments. Because of the fire risks associated with oxygen chambers, everyone inside had to wear special cotton clothing, while items that might spark a fire were forbidden, including belts, eyeglasses, electronics and even underwire bras. (An explosion in a poorly maintained chamber in Florida killed a 4-year-old and his grandmother in 2009, leading to a manslaughter conviction.)

Kim saw literary possibilities in both the danger and the drama of the HBOT setting, which she compares to a confessional in her novel. “You crawl in, and it’s dark and like a tube,” she recalls. “There’s also an emotional tension when you’re sealed up with other parents of kids who have different disabilities and illnesses. You start comparing and contrasting your lives, and it makes an intimacy that builds. But at the same time, jealousy can develop. I thought that was a really rich setting to be able to explore.”

One mother whose child had particularly serious issues jokingly told Kim, “I don’t know why you do this. If I had a son like yours, I would just lie on my couch and eat bonbons all day.” One of Kim’s characters makes the same comment to another mother, and Kim’s initial working title for her manuscript was “Bonbons in the Blue Submarine.”

Noting that her sons are all doing fine now (one has peanut allergies; the other was born with an abnormally small head and exhibited skin symptoms that could’ve been Elephant Man Disease), Kim says of her family’s medical ordeals, “It’s probably something I’ll be exploring for the rest of my life. When you have a kid that’s sick, it just brings so many things to focus. And when you have three kids that are sick with three different things, it’s just awful. I probably have many, many novels where I could talk about this stuff.”

In addition to writing about HBOT, Kim initially contemplated writing a murder mystery involving a family who had emigrated from Korea. A friend suggested she combine these two ideas, leading Kim to model the Yoo family after her own: She and her parents emigrated from Seoul to the Baltimore area when Kim was 11. Just as Young works behind bulletproof glass in a grocery store when she first comes to America, Kim’s parents worked in such a store, living in a small back room, while Kim stayed with her aunt, uncle and cousin. 

“I was a complete mess, very upset to be here,” Kim recalls of those years. “In Seoul we were really poor—we didn’t have indoor plumbing or anything like that—but we were just so happy, from my memory of it.” Kim felt abandoned as her parents worked long hours, and she eventually rebelled. “I was a really horrible teenager,” she recalls. “I knew intellectually that it wasn’t their fault. Korea is such a patriarchal culture, and that’s one of the reasons my mom wanted to move to America; she didn’t want that for me. But I just wanted to punish my parents, and I did, acting like a complete teenage brat for a really long time.”Kim struggled with English and excelled in math but later decided to challenge herself with liberal arts classes at Stanford and became a philosophy major. She fared so poorly in a creative writing class, however, that she dropped it. Although she never considered herself a writer, she eventually became an editor at the Harvard Law Review. 

Kim’s legal career blossomed, and as a junior lawyer she loved being in the courtroom. After a grueling period working on three successful trials, however, Kim joined her soon-to-be husband on a weekend trip to San Francisco and experienced an epiphany. While he spoke at a legal conference, she spent the day sitting by the ocean at the Cliff House, reading Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. “As a lawyer, I hadn’t had the opportunity to have a day like that in years,” she says. “I decided that I needed to find something that I love, that I could do every day and say, ‘Oh, I love this.’ So that night I told my husband, ‘Oh, by the way, I decided I’m going to quit being a lawyer.’”

She became a management consultant and co-founded a software company. Meanwhile, her confidence in her writing grew, and she began writing essays and short stories. Not surprisingly, Kim particularly enjoyed working on the courtroom scenes in her novel. “I could have witnesses say whatever I wanted them to say,” she says. “They were my puppets, which is what you desperately wish for when you’re actually practicing.”

Kim’s finished product was going to be called “Miracle Submarine,” but after concerns that it sounded too military, the title became Miracle Creek. Kim is pleased, especially since she chose the town’s name as a nod to another of her favorite books, Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. “I just love the way that it’s a literary mystery where you don’t know what’s happening, and there are all these great voices that are so raw and honest,” she says. Those words of praise apply equally well to Kim’s debut.

In the decades since she reluctantly boarded a plane from Korea to America, Kim’s life has taken many unexpected turns. As she writes near the end of Miracle Creek, “Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together. . . . Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”

“That has just sort of become a theme throughout my life,” Kim admits. “I think it’s so interesting how little things can happen that can really take your life on a totally different strand.”

This interview is sponsored by Harper.

In Lisa Barr's seductive second novel, The Unbreakables, a woman flees to France in the wake of her husband's betrayal. But for 42-year-old Sophie Bloom, heartbreak leads to a creative and sexual revival, spurring her to rediscover her passion for sculpting and her sense of adventure. We asked Barr a few questions about this saucy story of self-discovery.

You started your career in journalism, and worked as an editor as well. What was the transition to writing novels like for you?
Let me tell you a secret: There was no transition. I still do it all—just at different levels of intensity. I’d also like to toss into the mix that I’m a mom of three daughters (aka: Drama Central). I’ve had a very full career as an author/journalist/blogger—both here in Chicago and in Jerusalem. I’m very disciplined out of necessity, and it’s really a matter of divide and conquer. When my girls were younger, I would report or edit during the day while they were in school and write fiction at night after they fell asleep. Or, I’d wake up and write at 5 a.m. before they got up. Now that they are older, my time is my own. I also started a Mom blog—“GIRLilla Warfare”—in 2013, right when my first novel came out. It’s a lot of blending and mixing, and sometimes I feel like I’m in Crazy Town. But my journalism skills have really helped my fiction, especially in terms of pacing and cutting away the fat. And I always think in terms of the who, what, where, when, why and how in both fiction and journalism. It’s too ingrained to let that go. There is a lot more freedom with fiction—and I kinda love that.

What’s your favorite thing about Sophie?
Sophie is all heart—she gives so much of herself to those she loves. I admire her vulnerability, but I also relish when she goes from hot mess to badass. Although her husband and best friends betrayed her, the truth is, Sophie abandoned herself long before that. It is a joy to watch her grow and blossom.

When Sophie starts her new life, she comes up with 12 “unbreakable” rules for living. Do you have any rules to live by?
I try to incorporate several of Sophie’s rules into my own life. My rules to live by are simple: Be kind. Be loving. Be communicative. Be strong and stand proud. Be Me in all my forms—the good, bad, strong and vulnerable. Living in a house of women and writing about lots of women’s issues, “you are enough” is probably the number one rule that I’ve embraced and try to put out into the world. And “you got this” is my daily motto—it is the sword I use to slay my fears.

Visual arts play a central role in both The Unbreakables and your debut, Fugitive Colors, a historical novel. How do you research the art world, and were there differences between understanding it in a contemporary context versus a historical one?
I’m a writer, not an artist—but art/passion runs through everything I do and write. Fugitive Colors was a labor of love. Four years of research on stolen art, the artists themselves, the time period, Expressionism and the Nazi persecution of the avant-garde, before I would even allow myself to write a single word. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I even had the Holocaust Museum vet my manuscript. My greatest compliments for that book have come from artists themselves—and it means the world to me. Along a recent journey, I met a sculptor in Napa. He fell in love with Fugitive Colors, and I fell in love with his work. He taught me a lot, and gave me the background in sculpting for The Unbreakables. I researched, watched films, tutorials and read articles. I did my book “research” in the south of France to get all the feels and sense of place. The only difference between understanding art in a contemporary context versus historical was time. Historical research requires SO much attention to detail, time period and trying to understand an artist’s mindset within the context of history. It’s exciting but all-consuming—a quest to get it right. Contemporary is lighter for me—but no less passionate.

The drive to create and be creative is the same whether you’re a visual artist or a writer. Did you find that writing about different types of creativity led you to think about writing differently?
Yes. I think what I’ve really learned from visual artists is that I need to incorporate all my senses into my writing. The sex scenes are very visual in The Unbreakables, and I created them as if they were a painting. And ironically, one of the stronger sensual scenes in the book is actually Sophie “acting” out a painting that moved her, charged her, stimulated her to the point of arousal. Artists, in my mind, bring such beauty and passion into this world, and I try to evoke those same emotions on the page—my own blank canvas.

What do you wish more people knew about women at midlife?
Women are so much better in midlife. We are stronger, sexier, smarter, more decisive, don’t take crap—we know who we are in midlife. This is such a great age—minus the wrinkles, joint pains, forgetfulness and terrible eyesight. I certainly have come into my own—the insecurities of the past have fallen away. And good riddance. It’s almost as if I want to say, “Hey, this is me, and I like what I see, what I feel, who I am.” This simply doesn’t happen in one’s youth. It’s a journey that comes with the seasons.

What are you working on next?
I’m sort of that “forbidden fruit” in the publishing world: I’m a genre jumper. My first novel was historical fiction, the second contemporary women’s fiction—and the next, suspense. But I dig strong women who come into their own with hurdles and challenges. I like to create characters who are not afraid to be vulnerable, go to dark places, get their sexy on, face trials and tribulations, seek passion and truth and, ultimately, find their redemption in a new beginning.

Author photo © Tell Draper.