Nine hundred pages? What was Vikram Chandra thinking? Quite a lot it turns out, as readers of Chandra’s exhilaratingly ambitious and entertaining novel, Sacred Games, will soon discover.

Set mostly in contemporary Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), where Chandra and his wife, novelist Melanie Abrams, spend half the year, Sacred Games is, on the surface, a police procedural novel. In alternating chapters the lives of Sartaj Singh, a Sikh police inspector, and Ganesh Gaitonde, a Hindu crime lord, converge and diverge as a story of international criminal intrigue unfolds. But, as any suspecting reader would surely conclude after hefting its door-stopper bulk, Sacred Games is about much more than its attractively polished surfaces.

"When I started, I thought I was writing a pretty conventional 250-page crime something or other. You know, the type of thing that starts with a dead body on the first page and then at the most 300 pages later ends up with everything figured out and fixed," Chandra says during a call to his home in Berkeley, California. Chandra and Abrams have been teaching in UC Berkeley’s creative writing program since leaving Washington, D.C., about a year ago, which is also roughly the length of time the couple has been married.

Soon after beginning the novel eight years ago, however, Chandra’s research among Indian policemen, crime reporters and even Indian gangsters and mob bosses led him to conclude that what seemed like a local crime "had all these connections to politics and religion and the ongoing struggles between nation-states in the region. I got this sense of this huge web of events, people, organizations and forces at work that were affecting people’s lives and linking them together. Then the structure of the book became more and more clear to me, and it started to grow in size and thematic concerns. At some point I realized, damn, this is going to be big."

Big it is. And rollicking and provocative and frightening and moving . . . and more. Chandra, who says British Victorian novelists are among his favorite writers, displays a Dickensian verve for character and event, with a decidedly Indian twist, of course. The small bribes and favors that come Inspector Singh’s way, for example, induce no cynicism and hold no real corrupting power over the redoubtable policeman and are often the hinges for small, comic turns in the plot. And the murderous Ganesh Gaitonde runs one of the biggest crime cartels in the country and at the same time tries to both produce popular movies and pursue a serious, if deluded, religious quest as a follower of the elusive Swami Shridhar Shukla.

This yoking of seeming opposites within a single person creates an often-unexpected empathy for the novel’s characters that Chandra says is one of his main goals here. "It became very important to me that Ganesh Gaitonde, for instance, be somebody that the reader really engages with, that if you don’t feel, and in some sense participate, in his desire, then the book didn’t work. So when the book was finished, Melanie was the first to read it. After she’d been reading it for a couple of days, she marched out of her study and told me she hated how much I made her like this guy. That was a very happy moment."

Still, Sacred Games seethes with the racial and ethnic conflicts that have repeatedly brought death and destruction in India and throughout the subcontinent over the past half century. "I wanted very much to treat those events," Chandra says, "because . . . things that happened 50 years ago in a sense wrote divisions physically into the geography of the region, but also into people’s bodies and minds. Those events continue to have very clear impacts on our lives today. And I wanted to get at least the feeling of that and not shy away from its ugliness. The propensity for violence that coexists with all those other feelings was something I wanted to deal with."

If the terrifying brutality of the violence in some sections of Sacred Games is not exactly redeemed, it is a least sensibly situated within Chandra’s vivid portrait of the clash and jangle and excitement of modern-day Mumbai – and India, in general – and within the flavorful hybrid of English he uses to tell his tale. Chandra, who reads Hindi and some Punjabi and understands several other regional languages, purposefully spices his tale with linguistic borrowings.

"Bombay is full of immigrants," Chandra explains. "The language that people actually use on the street tends to be sprinkled with all these words from different regions. If I was sitting in a bar in Bombay telling these stories to my friends, I would use an English that has all of these words from other tongues in it. It is so much a part of the texture of life in India now and of Bombay in particular that I just wanted to get that on paper as fluidly as I could."

Not surprisingly, that hybrid language reflects the technological powerhouse that India is becoming. It also reflects an unexpected part of Chandra’s own personality. While studying fiction writing in graduate school in Houston, he earned a living as a computer programmer. He thinks computer programming and fiction writing are not so very different, since both require "constructing a sort of self-contained world in which various components must interact with each other." In conversation Chandra refers to himself as "a computer geek" and admits that his writing studio is filled with gear and gadgets, screens and speakers, whereas Abrams’ studio next door is "a much calmer place."

By Chandra’s account, he and Abrams have an unusually close working relationship, exchanging ideas, working through plot problems, acting as sounding boards for each other. So when, after eight years of writing 400 words a day, six days a week, Chandra completed a considerably longer version of Sacred Games, he and Abrams spent several months together editing down the manuscript. Now, Chandra says, "In my mind, at least, it is as short as it could possibly be."

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland.

After the unexpected success of his first novel, The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini decided to focus his second book on a part of Afghan society often obscured from public view its women. "There are women characters in The Kite Runner, but I wouldn't describe any of them as major characters," he says. "So there was this entire aspect of Afghan society and Afghan life that I hadn't touched upon. It was a landscape that I felt was rich with possibilities for storytelling."

Hosseini, a superb storyteller, realizes those possibilities fully in A Thousand Splendid Suns, his textured, deeply affecting novel about the intersecting lives of two Afghan women. Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Herat movie house owner. She grows up exiled with her mother to a hovel in the hills outside the city, visited occasionally by the father she adores. When her presence at the periphery of her father's life threatens family peace, she is forced into marriage with a shoemaker from Kabul. Life in Kabul goes from bad to worse under the Soviet occupation. Her husband brutalizes her and eventually takes in, then marries, a young, well-educated girl Laila who has been orphaned during the Afghan civil war. Most of A Thousand Splendid Suns depicts the extraordinary relationship that develops under grim circumstances between these two women.

"As a writer, the things that always move me are the intimate human stories, the links between the characters, their dreams, their disappointments, their crushing defeats and their atonements," Hosseini says during a call to his home in San Jose, California. Hosseini was an internist at a Bay Area Kaiser hospital before the phenomenal popularity of The Kite Runner allowed him to take an extended leave of absence. He and his wife have two young children. He briefly, politely, interrupts the call to kiss his son goodbye as he heads off to school. Hosseini appears remarkably unaffected by the hoopla over his first novel.

But later in the conversation, Hosseini admits the success of his first book, which has sold more than 4 million copies, cast a looming shadow over early attempts at composing the new novel. "Suddenly everybody was interested in what I was writing next," he says with a pleasant, rueful laugh. "You go through these crises of self-doubt. You wonder: Am I a hack? It took a little bit of work to ignore the noise outside my door." In fact, for a while, Hosseini rented an office in a nondescript office building, a room with nothing on the walls to distract him that he now calls his windowless bunker.

He worried about finding the right voice for the book, writing through four drafts using different approaches and points of view. He chastised himself because he had not only decided to write from a woman's standpoint, but had decided to write from the standpoints of two women. "I had to not only think about what it would be like to be a woman, but I also had to think about what it would be like to be a different woman. As long as I was self-conscious about the fact that I was writing from a woman's voice, it kept coming across as very self-aware and contrived. But as I wrote and as I began to know these women, began to understand their motivations, their dreams, began to understand them as people, the issue vanished on its own. At first I was a ventriloquist and they were dummies speaking with my voice. But as I began to know them, the characters took over and I became a mouthpiece for them. That was a watershed moment for me."

The completed book has the same big heart displayed in The Kite Runner, but even Hosseini (despite his writerly doubts) believes the new story is more masterfully told. "I feel this is a more subtle and somewhat more restrained book," he says. "I think that I, as a writer, have learned to trust readers and allow them to make their own connections." One sign of such mastery is the way Hosseini weaves recent history into the narrative. He says he struggled to restrain himself from getting too much into the history and political turmoil of those years. But he eventually found that the intimate story of these characters and the bigger story of what is going on in Afghanistan twisted around each other like a DNA strand. "It is really by necessity, because these two women happen to be living in the volatile period of recent Afghanistan history. There is no way I could have told the story of Laila and Mariam without telling the story of Afghanistan."

In addition to their concern for the plights of Hosseini's characters, readers will be carried willingly from page to page by the sensory and cultural details that enrich Hosseini's depiction of Afghan life in this era. Hosseini grew up in Kabul before immigrating to the United States as a youth. His family was originally from Herat, which he would visit for family gatherings. "I remember the city and how beautiful it was," he says. " I can speak Farsi in both the Herati and the Kabuli accent. This is part of my background." Breaking his rule of allowing only his wife to read and comment on drafts of his novels, he asked his father, a former Afghan diplomat, to read the final draft and serve as a sort historical and technical advisor. In 2003, a time of cautious optimism in Afghanistan, he visited Kabul. A Thousand Splendid Suns resonates with his remembered and recently witnessed details of Afghan life.

"The writer side of me," Hosseini says at the end of our conversation, "wants what every writer wants: that people respond to my characters, to feel their happiness and sorrow, and to be transported by them. Then there's the other side of me. I am from Afghanistan. And although it's not my intention to educate people about Afghanistan, I do hope that in some ways this novel gives people a window into Afghanistan, especially into the difficult existence of Afghan women over the last 30 years. Maybe this novel will give some identity to the nameless, faceless women in burqa walking down the street, so that a reader will now sense that these are real people who have dreams and hopes and disappointments. Just like everybody else."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

In conversation, Ha Jin displays a remarkably playful sense of humor about the smallish absurdities of life. " It’s crazy!" he exclaims, laughing, after describing how novelist Allegra Goodman, Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott and he all share a single office in the English department at Boston University, making it impossible for any of them to actually write there. He laughs again, almost gleefully, as he relates how, after getting a doctorate in modern American poetry and after developing a reputation as a poet himself, he taught poetry writing at Emory, but at BU, where he has been for five years, "there are so many good poets that I only teach fiction writing and literature."

This ebullience is, frankly, surprising, coming from the author of the highly, and deservedly, praised novels War Trash, which offers a deeply affecting portrait of the grim fate of Chinese prisoners of war during the Korean conflict, and Waiting, which won a National Book Award for its suggestive look at the emotional and political paralysis of life in the People’s Republic of China.

On the other hand, a stylistic and thematic playfulness bubbles enticingly beneath the surface of Ha Jin’s marvelous new novel, A Free Life, a book that offers a notably fresh look at the Chinese immigrant experience in America.

"Every book is a kind of departure; every book is a step forward, a move away from the past," Ha Jin says of the new novel during a call to his home in Foxboro, Massachusetts, where he and his wife live in a quiet neighborhood on the edge of a state forest. The couple’s son recently graduated from Princeton in American history and is now in graduate school at Brown. "The style in this book is different from my earlier books," he continues. "The linguistic playfulness in this book cannot be translated anymore."

Ha Jin came to the United States as a graduate student in 1985. Like Nan Wu, the central character in A Free Life, he decided to remain here after the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. Unlike his main character, however, he has never returned to China, even for a brief visit. His novels, composed in English and translated into many languages including Chinese are banned in China. "I used to believe a good book should be translatable, meaning if it is translated back into Chinese it will be meaningful to the Chinese as well. But this book will be hard to translate into Chinese. Somehow it will be hard for Chinese to understand the meaning, the style, the playfulness. That is a kind of sacrifice, but I don’t care much about how the Chinese read this book anymore, mainly because I think of this as an American novel. Stylistically, I really wanted to do as much with English as I could."

A Free Life is a sweeping narrative that tells the story of Nan Wu, his wife Pingping, and their son Taotao as they struggle to establish a life in America over the course of about a decade. Nan moves from being one of the favored youth of China who was sent to be educated in the U.S., to a waiter and cook in a Chinese restaurant in New York after he rejects life in post-Tiananmen China, to a restaurant owner in Georgia, struggling to sustain his family while nurturing a desire to become a poet.

Throughout his absorbing story, Ha Jin offers an extraordinarily nuanced view of the complexity of immigrant communities and the individual human beings who inhabit them. The members of the Chinese community near Nan’s Georgia restaurant, for example, are divided over their conflicted loyalties to their homeland. Nan’s writer friend Danning is spiritually and morally at odds with himself about his artistic integrity versus his need to succeed in the restrictive social and political environment of China. Nan and his family face long, difficult periods of separation. They also encounter the subtle and not so subtle bigotry of some of the American inhabitants in the communities where they live. All of this is a forceful, moving reminder of the depth and range of human experience that unfolds, often below our awareness, in the seemingly monolithic communities of recent immigrants.

But Nan’s struggle is not merely about finding a way to fit into his new social environment, it is also about a more difficult effort within himself to seize the freedom that America offers him to become the person he chooses to be. "Nan’s struggle for freedom is not just about whether he has the right to be free," says Ha Jin, "it is about achieving a state of mind. A Free Life is about a person from a kind of totalitarian society, where freedom is alien, arriving here and being overwhelmed, because freedom involves a lot of uncertainty, risks, sacrifice and a lot of other things he simply couldn’t imagine."

That freedom, Ha Jin says, also involves more than just the ability to achieve financial success. "A lot of people come to the United States not just for material benefits. There is a kind of spiritual, even metaphysical aspect to this journey. It’s another part of the contemporary immigrant experience. In Nan’s case, he’s never really materialistic, so the general notion of the American dream doesn’t make much sense to him. For him the dream is much more than that."

In recent years, Ha Jin has spoken more and more frequently of his desire to become a truly American writer. To do that, he says, he has "to write more books about the American experience. I do believe the national experience is very important. It’s not just in the language but in really writing about the experience in a way that is somehow resonant with the audience." Later, near the end of the conversation, he observes, "I’ve been teaching immigrant literature recently, and I’ve realized that immigration is not a universal theme in literature, because it’s basically an American phenomenon."

So is A Free Life a book that allows Ha Jin to feel he’s become an American writer?

"It is a step toward the goal," Ha Jin says.

Indeed it is.

Alden Mudge, of Oakland, is a juror for the California Book Awards.

Overwhelmed by her diplomatic experience in Afghanistan and wanting to share her story, Patricia McArdle turned to fiction instead of memoir to protect her contacts. The result, Farishta, was the recipient of the 2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award—it took first prize out of 5,000 entries.

Describe your book in one sentence.
Farishta is the fictional war memoir of an emotionally damaged American diplomat, whose one-year tour of duty at a remote outpost in northern Afghanistan takes her life in an unexpected direction.

What was your reaction when you found out your first novel would be published?
I was one of 5,000 novelists who last year submitted manuscripts in the general fiction category of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition.  After a five-month process of elimination, I was awarded first prize and a publishing contract with Riverhead Books in June 2010.  I was stunned.  I still am.

As a diplomat, you traveled around the world. Of all the places you've been, why did you choose to set your novel in Afghanistan? 
I've been in some difficult situations during my diplomatic career, but until I went to Afghanistan I had never served in a war zone. I've always kept a journal and did so during the year I spent there. I was overwhelmed by what I saw and when I came home I wanted to share my experiences with others. A memoir would have been difficult since many of the Afghans and foreign soldiers I'd worked with could not be identified without compromising their safety. Placing my composite but fictional characters in real settings with real events was the device I chose to make my points about Afghanistan, while still protecting my contacts. With Farishta I hope to share my perceptions of that country, its environment, America's longest war and the effects of PTSD with an audience that might never pick up a non-fiction book about Afghanistan. 

Besides reading and writing, what do you like to do for fun? 
My hobbies are watercolor painting, pastel drawing, photography, swimming and walking on the beach. I used to ride horses until I took several bad falls going over jumps at a riding stable in Paris. Since I returned from Afghanistan at the end of 2005, I have been consumed with two things—writing Farishta and promoting solar cooking technology around the world.  The writing and editing of Farishta is now complete and I fervently hope that people who read my novel will be moved by this fictional account of the effects of war on the lives of civilians and soldiers in Afghanistan.

My work with solar cooking, which began in Afghanistan, will never end. My involvement with this technology is much more than a hobby. It has now become an obsession. I know that simple, inexpensive solar cookers work. I have seen them used around the world. I also know that this technology could allow millions of poor women to cook their food and boil their water using only the endless and free light of the sun. The fossil fuel industry is doing its best to keep us dependent on coal, oil and gas for several more generations. I know there is a better way. Promoting solar cooking is my small contribution to a clean, renewable energy future for our planet.

Name one book you think everyone should read, and why.
City by Clifford Simak. This slim, offbeat work of science fiction, written in the early ‘50s, offers a quirky, possibly prescient and (for me) thought-provoking take on the future of humanity. It's been out of print for a while, but copies are still available on Amazon. Every few years I take out my dog-eared copy, sit down with a tall drink and lose myself in the eight tales. Definitely worth a read. You will never again look at dogs, ants, the planet Jupiter or the city of Geneva in the same way.

It’s a call that changes everything. Not the one to author Thrity Umrigar’s home in Cleveland—where she is associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University—but the one her character Armaiti makes in her compelling new novel, The World We Found. It’s a call across continents that launches a group of friends on a transformative journey.

The story begins when Armaiti, divorced and living in America, reaches out to her college friends after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Her last wish is to be reunited with Laleh, Kavita and Nishta, all still in Bombay. During the late 1970s, as idealistic students and Communists, they’d been inseparable, but have since lost touch. The women are as diverse as India itself. There is Kavita, a successful architect, who struggles to live openly as a lesbian; Laleh, married to Adish (a Parsi) and a mother of two, who enjoys a life of privilege at odds with her activist past; and Nishta, whom none of them have heard from in years. When they finally find her, Nishta is clad in a burqa and living in a strict, impoverished Muslim neighborhood. It soon becomes clear that Nishta’s husband, Iqbal, a fellow university idealist turned fundamentalist, will be the biggest obstacle to fulfilling Armaiti’s final request.

Now far from the exotic locale of her birth, Bombay, Umrigar explains how a chance meeting with an old friend became the genesis of the novel. “I spent a few months in India in 2008 and while there, ran into a friend whom I had not seen in 25 years. During our conversation, she mentioned how the Hindu-Muslim riots that occurred in Bombay in 1992-93 changed her forever. She realized the limits of political activism, after that event, and turned inward,” the author recalls. “The accidental meeting and conversation lingered with me, and it reminded me of what a seminal event those riots were.”

Umrigar returned to her life in the U.S., ruminating on political and religious fundamentalism and how the young are particularly susceptible to it.

Born to an affluent and close-knit Parsi family, Umrigar herself was a student at a time of political and social upheaval and remembers a different Bombay. “In the Bombay that I grew up in the ’70s, it was a beautiful time. It was very secular, very intellectually challenging; it was a good time to be a Bombayite. There was a lot of good energy. The Hindu-Muslim riots ended that for many of us.”

Spurred by the memory of those events, Umrigar hoped to write about fundamentalism from the perspective of her homeland. “In the West, we often conflate Islamic fundamentalism with terrorism,” she says. “I wanted to write a novel that spoke of religious conservatism from a non-American, non-9/11 perspective, but one that still captured the anxieties of our age.”

She does just that in The World We Found, exploring a divided India with great insight and tracing those fissions through history.

Umrigar came to the U.S. in 1983 at the age of 21 to attend Ohio State University, where she received a master’s degree in journalism. She spent 17 years working as a journalist, first at a small newspaper near Cleveland and later at the Akron Beacon Journal. After winning a Nieman fellowship in 2000, she completed her first novel, Bombay Time, and has since written three more critically acclaimed novels about the experiences of Indians and Indian-Americans, including The Space Between Us and The Weight of Heaven, as well as a memoir of her childhood in India, First Darling of the Morning.

Her new novel, The World We Found, is above all else a character-driven narrative, the story of friendship that transcends politics and religion. Though some aspects of the novel are uniquely Indian, many others are universal—the intimacies between couples, the vagaries of youth, the love of a mother for her child.

Umrigar says, if that’s the case, she has succeeded. “I always share this advice with my writing students: Tell the story of one person so deeply and completely, that in the act of going deep into that one person, something magical happens, and it becomes a universal story.”

Take Iqbal, for instance. It would have been easy to paint him one-dimensionally as an oppressive Muslim husband, but Umrigar portrays him as both deeply flawed and sympathetic. “[Iqbal] happens to be Muslim in this book. He could have been anything—Parsi, Christian—and the same forces might have worked on somebody else,” she says. “For me as a writer, the most important thing is to get the emotional life of a character right and to make it as true to form as possible.”

The novel’s essence is perhaps best captured in a conversation between the dying Armaiti and her college-aged daughter, Diane. Armaiti tells her daughter, “These women gave me something. A sense of belonging to the world, but more than that. A sense that the world belonged to me. Do you understand? A belief that it was my world—our world. To shape it as we wanted.” Asked if she still believes she can change the world, Armaiti responds, “I don’t know if the world we dreamed of is an illusion . . . but I do know this—that my desire for that world was true. It was the truest thing I’ve ever felt, as true as my love for you. And—and I’d like to believe that means something.”

Umrigar muses, “In a sense, Armaiti is trying to connect with the friends from her past, but she’s also trying to reconnect with that part of herself—that in some ways was the best part of her, was the best part of all of them. I don’t know if nostalgia’s the right word, but there’s this real yearning to go back to that pure self.”

Each woman plots her own course in that search as she readies herself for the trip to America, and all arrive at life-changing revelations. In her melodious voice, Umrigar says, “This book is about journey. It’s about process. It’s not about destination. [At the book’s end] the revolution has already happened. The reunion has already occurred.”

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid made his literary debut with the critically acclaimed Moth Smoke in 2000, and cemented his reputation with the 2007 international bestseller The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In his third novel, he continues to plumb the uneasy relationship between Southeast Asia and the United States through the story of a young man’s journey from the slums to the high life.

You’ve written two books in the second person, which is an unusual point of view. What does it offer that the first person doesn’t?

What I like about the second person is that it makes the relationship between writer and reader more explicit. It allows you both to play with how novels are supposed to work. It feels intimate, too. In my mind, second person has echoes of oral storytelling, being told a story by someone you know.

Your previous novels were very specifically located in Lahore and New York. But How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia takes place in an unnamed Asian location. Why were you less specific here?

I used Pakistan as a model, but people, myself included, often have so many preconceptions about the place. By having no named location, I had to force myself to describe things as if they'd never been described before. It was liberating to me. And hopefully it frees the reader too.

Is that true also about not naming your characters?

Yes. And also, it makes the story more universal and more incomplete at the same time. It can be YOUR story. Having no names opens up space for readers to empathize differently.

There are traces of F. Scott Fitzgerald in your novels—characters who are in love with the fantasy of being rich or fitting in with a certain class of people and who then have to deal with the reality of the situation at hand.  Are you influenced at all by him?

I think he was a great writer, especially when he was writing at his best. Gatsby has definitely been an influence. It's a small novel, and hits such big themes. Also I went to Princeton, and Fitzgerald's literary ghost still lingers there.

It was interesting that sex was a part of the Pretty Girl’s rise to wealth. Do you think that is more commonly part of a woman’s path to economic independence?

I don't think there's any one path. Different people follow different paths. But sex is part of the power the pretty girl has, and since she's ambitious, but desperately poor at the beginning, in a society where women are far from equal, it isn't surprising she uses that power.

You have spoken about the ability to relate to a range of characters imaginatively as a key ingredient of empathy. What value do you think fiction has in today’s world?

I think empathy is important: It's a moral value, not just an artistic one. And fiction cultivates it. But fiction also does something else very special: It lets adults, readers, spend hours playing in their own imaginations. Not just passively absorb content, but take words and transform them into images and emotions. We often don't get to do much of that after childhood.

What is your writing process like?
I take about six or seven years to write a novel, so it's pretty slow! Usually lots of drafts. On a typical day, I get up early, go for a long walk and then write until lunch. I used to write at night. Then I became a father.

Living part of the time in Lahore, do you feel like there are certain things you can’t write about? 
Not so much certain things you can't write about, but certain things you can't approach directly in your writing. You have to find other ways of saying them, less direct ways. It's a challenge, a puzzle. Not simply a muzzle.

How do you feel your law background influences your writing?

I spent three years in law school and produced a draft of my first novel instead of a legal thesis. Plus I never worked as a lawyer; I worked in business. But I think the idea that words really matter, that you have to think about them with great precision, is something I absorbed from the law.

Do you feel your American readership is different from your Pakistani readers?

For me, the wonderful thing is that readers are different from each other. They're individuals. There are kids who grew up in America living in Pakistan and kids who grew up in Pakistan living in America. I once met a blond American guy with dreads and piercings who told me that he was just like the main character of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (a Pakistani character, by the way) because he'd worked on Wall Street and then left it to become a yoga instructor.

Are there other Pakistani writers we should be looking at? Perhaps ones less known in the US?

There are lots. Muhammad Hanif and Daniyal Mueenuddin are both excellent. And there are others: Aamer Hussain, H.M. Naqvi, Kamila Shamsie . . .

What are you working on next?
Another novel, I think. But it's still in notebooks and emails to myself, for now. I keep jotting and scribbling until the urge to write hits me. That can take months, even a year or two.

RELATED IN BOOKPAGE
Our review of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

A taut, suspenseful novel of small-town secrets set during a drought in rural Australia, The Dry follows federal agent Aaron Falk who is called back to the town where he grew up and asked to investigate the murder-suicide of his best friend from high school. Falk, who has his own secrets, soon finds there is more to these deaths than meets the eye. Jane Harper’s debut thriller has already been optioned for film by Reese Witherspoon—we asked the first-time author and former journalist a few questions about what success feels like.   

The manner in which The Dry came about and was discovered is almost as exciting as the mystery itself. Can you share with our readers what that experience was like?
I wrote the manuscript that would become The Dry as part of a 12-week online novel-writing course in late 2014, and at that time had no real expectation that it would ever be published. At times when it wasn’t going well, I remember telling myself that it was OK for this to be a “practice novel” and simply try to finish and treat it as a learning exercise.

I’ve always worked best to deadlines, so for motivation I set a goal of entering the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, which runs every year in my state. My main aim was just to get the novel finished and to a standard that I felt I could begin to share it, and maybe get some feedback from the judges. I entered the award in April 2015 and to my surprise found out the following month that I had won!

That was a huge boost and the real catalyst to publication for The Dry. On the back of the award, the novel was sold in separate three-book deals to Flatiron Books in the U.S., Pan Macmillan in Australia and Little, Brown in the U.K., as well as being sold for translation in more than 20 territories.

It was an absolute dream run for the novel and I feel so lucky to have had the exposure that came from winning the award. I really couldn’t have asked for more and I still can’t believe it sometimes!

Was this your first work of fiction?
I’d worked full-time as a journalist on newspapers in the U.K. and Australia for 13 years before writing the novel, so I was used to writing hundreds of words a day on all kinds of topics. I’d always hoped that one day I would write a book, but I just never seemed to have the time or discipline to sit down and seriously try. Finally I realized that I was going to have to make the time, and I wrote a short story that got published in the fiction edition of a magazine. That was really exciting and encouraged me to finally attempt a novel. It helped a lot having the external pressure of a writing course and the expectation from the teacher and other students that I would work on the manuscript as required.

How do you feel your experiences as a journalist informed your novel?
Working as a journalist helped me write The Dry in so many ways. It gave me the opportunity over the years to speak to people facing a range of issues in many different Australian communities (although none as dysfunctional as the town in The Dry!) It was through talking and listening to people in small towns that I started to get a sense of just how closely tied their lives can be, and how strongly they rely on the community and each other, for better or worse.

In practical writing terms, I still draw on my journalism experience every day. It has taught me the discipline to write regularly and at a reasonable speed, to write for the reader rather than for myself, and not to let myself feel too nervous about blank page!

You are originally from Britain. What brought you to Australia?
I was born in the U.K., but lived in Australia with my family between the ages of 8 and 14 and acquired dual citizenship. We returned to the U.K. and I finished high school and university there and worked for several years on newspapers in Yorkshire. In 2008, I felt like a change and thought it would be exciting to get some experience working in Australia. I applied and got a job on a newspaper in Victoria, and decided to come out for a couple of years. I must have enjoyed it because eight years later, I’m still here, married to an Australian man and with a baby daughter!

The small town in The Dry is so richly described. What inspired this aspect of the novel?
For the physical description, I wanted to give readers enough detail to picture the scene, but not so much that it slowed down the story. I tried to really focus on specific aspects that brought that Australian setting to life and set the town apart from anywhere else in the world.

In terms of the relationships within the community, I think they are much more universal and I was inspired by a lot of places I’ve been over the years, not just small towns and not even just in Australia. I think all communities have their own specific problems that put pressure on the residents. I hope that the feeling of neighbors knowing more about you than you’d like, or the sense of being tied to a community that you have outgrown strike a chord with readers in many places in the world.

How does Australia influence your writing? Do you think of yourself as an Australian writer?
Yes, I do think of myself as both Australian and an Australian writer and I wanted to write a book set here because I really do feel it is my home. But I think having been born overseas does give me the advantage of being able to view it with the eye of an outsider. It is such a wonderful and unique country with some really interesting people and scenarios, so it was easy to be inspired by life here.

I read that you were working on another book with the character of Aaron Falk. How do you see him developing? What do you think he learned in The Dry that will make him a better detective?
The second book sees Aaron Falk return in a different setting, but again facing a mystery with a few twists and turns in a remote Australian location. I feel the events of The Dry forced him to confront aspects of his past and his personality that he had chosen to keep buried, and that in turn will encourage him to re-evaluate some choices he has made in his life. I enjoyed the opportunity to see him develop as a character, but he still has some way to go to resolve all his issues so it’s not all smooth sailing for him yet!

As a new author, what kind of advice would you give to other writers just starting out?
I found taking part in a reputable and structured course was a huge help. I really wanted to write a novel, but honestly felt like I had no idea how to actually start and, more importantly, finish! Even with the advantage I had of writing professionally for newspapers, a novel seemed like an overwhelming task, so I found a course was a big motivation. I also got a lot of benefit from the feedback. If writing on your own, I find it helps me a lot to write regularly to develop a habit, and rather than focus on a strict word count every day, I break the plot down into scenes and tackle one scene each time I sit down to write.

Are you going to continue balancing your work as a journalist with your fiction writing?
No, I was lucky enough to be able to live the dream and quit my day job! It was a hard decision because I really loved being a journalist, but I love writing novels even more so I felt I had to take the opportunity to do that seriously and dedicate the time it needs.

The movie rights have already been purchased and by Reese Witherspoon! Congratulations! Any thoughts about who you’d like to see play Aaron and Gretchen?
I get asked this a lot and I never have a good answer! I did have a picture of them both in my head when I started writing, but their characters actually developed in ways I didn’t fully expect and my image of them has changed. I’m always more interested to hear who other people think would play the roles because I love getting a sense of how they see the characters.

Were you a big reader as a kid? What kinds of books did you like?
Yes, definitely. Reading was, and still is, my favorite thing to do. I was fortunate that my parents were both big readers and encouraged it from an early age. As a child I loved all the usual children’s authors, in particular an Australian writer called Paul Jennings who wrote pretty outrageous short stories for kids that we all found shocking and hilarious. As I grew older I started reading what my parents read, which were often crime and mystery novels, so that’s where I got a taste for that genre.

Who are some of your favorite mystery writers?
I always enjoy seeking out new writers, but I’ve got a few long-term favourites including Val McDermid, Michael Robotham, and Nicci French. I’m a big fan of Lee Child and David Baldacci, even if their books wouldn’t strictly be classified as mystery. But I enjoy anything that keeps me guessing, and being surprised at the end of a novel is my absolute favorite way for a book to finish!

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Dry.

Author photo by Nicholas Purcell.