Janice Graham never dreamed she'd settle in Kansas, let alone set a novel there. Yet in 1991, almost 20 years after the Wichita native ditched the sunflower state for the pleasures of Paris, she returned to her hometown. A single mother, Graham wanted to raise her daughter in proximity to Graham's parents. It was a drastic change for the self-described gypsy, who for the last ten years had lived alternately in Paris and Los Angeles, where she worked as a screenwriter. And it was a move that could have meant the end of her writing career: she stopped writing for five years after her daughter was born and began teaching French and English in the Wichita public schools. Instead, it may well have been the smartest, albeit unintentional, career move of her life. I am convinced that if I were still writing about Paris, no one would buy it, the author laughs.

Unlike her two unpublished novels, set in Paris, Greece, Los Angeles, and Israel, she has set her new novel, a love story entitled Firebird, in the Flint Hills of Kansas, the largest unbroken expanse of tallgrass prairie in North America. Graham was familiar with the Flint Hills from her student days at the University of Kansas: she drove past the seemingly endless rangeland on her visits to and from her parents in Wichita. But she had no interest in it.

"I was doing my degree in French, and I was very attracted to older civilizations," she explains. Not to barrenness." It was only after her return to Kansas that the Flint Hills took hold of the author's imagination. "After living in two very big cosmopolitan areas, the wide open spaces looked very very appealing. And I became very attached to them."

It is an attachment she shares to a degree with Ethan Brown, the 43-year-old hero of Firebird, for whom the Flint Hills are his greatest devotion. "Ethan Brown was in love with the Flint Hills," the novel begins. "His father had been a railroad man, not a rancher, but you would have thought he had been born into a dynasty of men connected to this land, the way he loved it. He loved it the way certain peoples love their homeland, with a spiritual dimension . . . He had never loved a woman quite like this, but that was about to change."

Ethan is in fact practically engaged to Katie Anne, a rancher's daughter who shares his dream of raising cattle on the land they both love. "Ethan wanted very much to like Katie Anne," Graham writes. "There was so much about her he did like." For although Ethan is compassionate and intelligent, a lawyer with a Ph.D. in English and a passion for the romantic poets that has earned him the nickname Wordsworth, this man of conscience is about to do the unconscionable: marry a woman he does not love.

"I think people can have a conscience in every part of their life except in their personal relationships with the opposite sex," Graham explains. "I don't think finding a soulmate was ever anything that he thought would happen to him or that he felt would ever be a goal in his life. I think he was so focused on a way of living." Indeed, he barely seems cognizant that it is wrong to marry a woman he does not love; he views marriage to Katie Anne as part and parcel of his dream of cattle and his own piece of land. But just as he is within grasp of his long-held dream, he meets Annette Zeldin, a Kansas-born concert violinist in town from Paris to settle her mother's estate, and they fall in love.

"I really wanted to do a love triangle where everybody won," Graham says. That inherently difficult task was compounded by the obstacles Graham placed in her characters way: Annette's aversion to the land Ethan loves; Katie Anne's resolve to hold onto Ethan though she knows he loves Annette; and Ethan's realization that if he abandons Katie Anne, whose father holds enormous sway in Cottonwood Falls, he will be made a virtual outcast. Whether all three characters win is debatable, but Graham's resolution of their dilemma, which involves elements of the spiritual and supernatural and earned the novel comparisons to The Horse Whisperer, will surprise even the most prescient of readers.

The 50-year-old author says the life of the spirit and the soul is an important component of her existence, "though you don't see me walking around . . . under a veil," she chuckles. With her open manner and hearty laugh, she seems more earthy than otherworldly, and in spite of receiving one million dollars for the sale of Firebird and her next two novels, she plans to eventually resume teaching French part-time because she "like[s] having one foot in the real world." (She is currently on a leave of absence.) Graham came to writing later than most, at the age of 30, after taking a screenwriting course at the University of Southern California film school. "I thought this is it. This is what I want to do." And, she adds, "I had stories to tell by then." She arrived at film school fresh from Israel, where she had worked on a kibbutz for six months, prior to which she'd lived in Paris for four years, and briefly Greece and Turkey. Though Firebird is not set in those far-off places, Graham feels that her travels have enhanced her ability to write about her homeland.

"It creates a backdrop and a foundation that is . . ." she pauses, "I keep coming back to the word ambivalent. You don't see things as flat. You see them as multi-meaning, multi-texture, multi-faceted . . . I particularly see this area like that because I have lived away and come back to it."

The young woman who once disdained the Flint Hills now rhapsodizes about them as a mythical place of amazing variety, and writes of the dangers that lurk there, obscured by the deceptive harmony of waving grasses. And her ambivalence for that place enhances her depictions of the wide-ranging emotions it inspires in her characters, from Annette's wish to distance herself from this terrifying space where there was nothing but prairie forever and ever, to her later insistence that she wants to remain under that wide expanse of sky filled with armies of clouds hanging so low Annette felt she could reach up and touch them, because that is where Ethan is.

Though Firebird is unmistakably a love story, Graham corrects me when I refer to it as a romance novel. "I'm sure that it will appeal to romance readers, but I don't see it in that genre at all . . . I would not like to see my books categorized in any particular category . . . I think what I'm writing will have a broad appeal to women." Of course, she hopes that her novel will appeal to men, too. But after writing action-adventures and thrillers "to satisfy the dictates of the film market," she explains, she relishes writing what is meaningful to her. "This is mine," says the onetime screenwriter, literally having the last laugh. "You know, whether people like it or not, this is my work. It's all my work. Nobody else came in and told me what to write here."

Laura Reynolds Adler lives in New York City and regularly interviews authors.

The belief that love has the power to transcend even mortality is the heart of Luanne Rice's evocative love story, Cloud Nine. The sheer poetry of the relationships she portrays is the story's soul. Rice transforms tragedy into grace in telling of Sarah Talbot's soaring triumph.

Sarah's family creates down-filled quilts which she sells in her shop, Cloud Nine. But the family is estranged, and Sarah's son, father, and aunt live on the remote Maine island which was, at one time, her home.

As Thanksgiving approaches, Sarah makes arrangements to return home, aided by the nurse who became her friend while she recovered from cancer surgery. Will Burke is the pilot who takes her, and in the process becomes the new love of her life.

Sarah's capacity for love encompasses Will's daughter Susan, who masks emotional pain by adopting unlikely nicknames like Secret and Snow — until Sarah helps her find acceptance.

Luanne Rice describes Cloud Nine as a book that demanded to be written. Like Susan, Luanne's experience of caring for her own dying mother affected her profoundly, and for two years she was unable to write. Her mother "was the constant, encouraging figure in my life," notes Rice. She attended the same small public school as her mother, and credits her teachers with reinforcing her mother's support of her writing. "The years of her treatment and decline were so terrible and compelling," Rice says. "The whole thing affected me really deeply, and I stopped writing. I stopped being able to think like a novelist, I couldn't make the emotional connections I've been so blessed to be able to make."

The loss of her mother and the loss of her writing lingered until Rice sat at the kitchen table in her childhood home, and Cloud Nine began to come to her. Rice describes that setting as a place where there were a lot of personal ghosts, a lot of loss, but also a lot of love. "The whole experience came to me in one character, and that was Sarah. I didn't know how to work with her, and I didn't have it in mind to write a book about death at all."

Rather, Rice says, the story is about how to really love, "how when you open yourself up to that experience, it can really transform your life."

In Cloud Nine, Sarah's courage and love transform all those whose lives she touches — including her birth family, whom she seeks out for reconciliation, and the new family of Will and his daughter.

Just as she draws on personal experience in creating the emotional lives of her characters, Rice also draws on personal touches for the story's details. Rice's visit to a down shop, for example, inspired her to create Sarah Talbot's quilt shop. Even Sarah's family home in Maine is an outgrowth of Luanne Rice's love of that locale, where she always goes for the revision process of her story-writing.

"I realized as I was writing that I was very much writing about my own experience," Rice says. When asked whether that means she identifies most with Susan, Rice demurs. "All the characters in the book are aspects of people I have known and loved, or they reflect experiences that I've had.

"I think it's the realization that Sarah herself comes to that I wanted to get across. To go through loving somebody and losing them is very transformative when you allow yourself to love them through it all. The only reason you can feel that much pain is that you have that much love."

On how the book evolved, Rice says, "The characters just came out my fingertips, I didn't so much tell them what to do as they created themselves."

Rice reflects now that while writing the book may have been cathartic, even more cathartic were the two years of silence she went through before writing it. "Writing the book was a joy, it came out so fast, it just shocks me."

The joy that Rice takes in her writing makes the book a joy to read, too. Lessons are sewn in tiny, telling stitches until the completed experience is as warm and encompassing as the enduring quilt of life itself.

Asked if she could tell readers one thing in handing over Cloud Nine to their keeping, Rice's response is swift: "Love your family." You will, in reading this evocative novel, love Sarah Talbot's family, as well.

Sandy Huseby writes and reviews from her homes in Fargo, North Dakota, and lakeside near Nevis, Minnesota.

With her new novel Fortune’s Rocks, Anita Shreve, author of the bestseller The Pilot’s Wife, returns to the time she loves, the 19th century. Though she believes that, at their core, people’s lives have not changed in a hundred years, the way we talk about our lives has. She likens modern speech to a corset, finding it "spare, tighter, bereft. It’s much harder to write contemporary language. The language of the 19th century is more forgiving, more luxurious. It’s the difference between using really expensive silk and voile and velvet as opposed to using cotton."

Written in a richly wrought style evocative of the age, Fortune’s Rocks is set a century ago, in an affluent seaside community in upstate New York. It follows the life of self-possessed Olympia Biddeford. Fifteen years old when the book opens, Olympia has reached the moment when, as a character tells her, "a girl becomes a woman. The bud of a woman, perhaps. And she is never so beautiful as in this period of time, however brief."

"It’s an extraordinary age," says Shreve, speaking from her home in Massachusetts. "The maturity may not be there, but the sexuality is so ripe.

It’s an age of great beauty; it’s fascinating. I have a daughter who recently went through that and two stepdaughters who are all stunningly beautiful. It’s been interesting to watch how they dealt with it, but more [interesting] to imagine how one would deal with it then."

At this precarious age, Olympia has an affair with a married man, John Haskell. Their forbidden love echoes other great American novels, including Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which Shreve even refers to in the course of Fortune’s Rocks. "As a reader, as a writer, The Scarlet Letter was one of my earliest influences. Ethan Frome, a simple work of American literature, also had a lasting and profound impression on me. I’m interested in passion, betrayal, great love, how they can twist a character as well as forge a character." As her works have shown, Shreve is fascinated by characters thrust into extreme circumstances. "It’s a perfect scenario for a moral testing ground of character."

Like The Scarlet Letter‘s Hester Prynne, Olympia must endure hardship and humiliation, and though she and Haskell are parted, her feelings for him endure. "To be told not to love is useless, she discovers, for the spirit will rebel. Though she thinks it unlikely she will ever see Haskell again, she cannot stop herself from remembering him," writes Shreve, who both is and isn’t Olympia.

At that age, Shreve lacked Olympia’s emotional certainty, but shared with her protagonist the ability to enjoy solitude, nothing most teenagers admit to. Her voice dreamy, Shreve recalls, "I valued quiet and liked nothing better than to take a walk and be left alone and be able to observe." The author, who says she would hate to write a memoir but loves to write fiction "because it gives me a mask to hide behind," admits that like Olympia, she has "a willingness to take incredible risks for something as strong as love."

In that way, she says, people have not changed from the last century. Cell phones have replaced letters and bathing costumes have given way to bikinis, but in the end, people are always kindled by their passions and constrained by circumstances. These things are as constant as the sea, a force and presence in five of Shreve’s six novels. "The sea," she says, "is an inexhaustible metaphor. I think every single one of my books takes place on the coast of New England, with the exception of Eden Close."

Fortune’s Rocks not only returns to Shreve’s favorite time and landscape, it takes place in the very house where The Pilot’s Wife is set. "The house . . . was once a convent, the home of the Order of Saint Jean Baptiste de Bienfaisance . . ." writes Shreve in Fortune’s Rocks, and in both books, the house itself is a character, stately yet haunting, evocative of the past.

"This is an idea that’s been with me some time," explains the author. "Any old house has a history. Other women lived there, every person who lived there had a story."

Setting and the epic forces of passion and betrayal link The Pilot’s Wife and Fortune’s Rocks, yet Shreve says, "A lot of readers may be shocked by Fortune’s Rocks. Every one of my books is very different. I have no desire to recreate. In the past, it’s been a commercial liability." She no longer has to fret about marketability, not since Oprah Winfrey chose The Pilot’s Wife to be part of Oprah’s Book Club.

"What a fantastic thing that was," says Shreve, still amazed. "Now I have many, many more readers." After being in Oprah’s spotlight, the author found herself inundated with requests for interviews and readings. It is fun, she admits, to be on the bestseller list, but otherwise, "my life is exactly the same." She knows, though, that the interest in The Pilot’s Wife will draw readers to Fortune’s Rocks, where Shreve will usher them into an earlier time, whether they’re ready or not.

If she could turn back the clock for herself, Shreve wouldn’t mind in the least. "I would have been just so happy to be writing then. I love the language. I don’t know how long I can get away with writing 19th-century language, but I just enjoy it so much." She first experimented with 19th-century language in The Weight of Water "and loved it so much, I was determined to find my way back. I’m interested in the marriage of story and language."

Fortune’s Rocks is where it all comes together, a compelling tale knit with elegant prose. Though how Shreve tells Olympia’s story sets her new novel apart, Olympia’s struggles are not all that different from the experiences of women throughout history and on into the present. "It’s an intimate look at a woman’s life, her grappling with a biblical sense of obsessive love and betrayal and moral decisions and loss, terrible loss. It’s about how to continue with life."

Ellen Kanner writes from her home in Miami, Florida.

Author photo by Norman Jean Roy.