Jennifer Ryan

Jennifer Ryan's new novel is The Me I Used to Be.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for The Me I Used to Be, and for your character Evangeline?

A: The overall premise of the book came from something I’ve noticed in my own family. When something happens, everyone experiences the event in different ways. How they feel about what happens varies depending on their personal experiences and background.

When Evangeline gets into trouble, everyone in the family sees what happens in a different way and they have their own feelings about it. Their minds are made up.

Until the truth comes out.

The opening scene of the book where Evangeline is facing the parole board comes from the movie trailer for Ocean’s Eight where Sandra Bullock’s character is telling the board exactly what they want to hear, but in her mind she’s plotting what she’s going to really do when she gets out.

Evangeline has her own plans, but that all changes when the police...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's new novel is The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. From the transcript of her NPR interview with Scott Simon:

SIMON: And what moved you to write a sequel 34 years after the original?

ATWOOD: Well, it seemed like time. People had been asking me to write a sequel for a long time, and I'd always said no because I thought they meant the continuation of the story of Offred, which I couldn't do. But then I thought, what if somebody else were telling the story? And what if it were, oh, 15 or 16 years later?

And it was also time because for a while, we thought we were moving away from "The Handmaid's Tale." And then we turned around and started going back towards it, ominously close in many parts of the world. And I felt it was possibly time to revisit the question of how do regimes like Gilead end because we know from "The Handmaid's Tale" that it did end.

SIMON: Tell us about these new narrators that pick up the action 15 years later.

ATWOOD: Oh, so there are three narrators. Two of them are...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Emily Liebert

Emily Liebert's new psychological suspense novel is Pretty Revenge.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Pretty Revenge, and for your characters Kerrie and Jordana?

A: I was inspired by the idea of revenge and wanted to explore what could happen when, after two decades, a woman has the opportunity to ruin the life of another woman who wronged her when they were growing up. In my past novels, there have been characters who were based on friends and family members or, at the very least, characteristics of those people. But, with this book, the characters are pure fiction. I knew that the two protagonists had to be very different, but also share something, like...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Emily Liebert's website.

The Page 69 Test: When We Fall.

Writers Read: Emily Liebert (September 2014).

My Book, The Movie: When We Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

Laura Lippman

Laura Lippman was a reporter for twenty years, including twelve years at The (Baltimore) Sun. She began writing novels while working full-time and published seven books about “accidental PI” Tess Monaghan before leaving daily journalism in 2001.

Her work has been awarded the Edgar ®, the Anthony, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Nero Wolfe, Gumshoe and Barry awards.

Lippman's new novel is Lady in the Lake.

From her Chicago Review of Books interview with Lori Rader-Day:

Lori Rader-Day: I always ask: where did this book start for you, with an image, a character, with something else?

Laura Lippman: It started in so many places—in my desire to escape the present-day world after the election in 2016, in my re-reading of Marjorie Morningstar and getting upset at Wally Wronken’s dismissal of Marjorie as now much too old for him (she’s 39!) to a series of photographs from the Catskills resorts of the 1930s. I remember very clearly walking home on a bright, cold winter’s day, cup of coffee in hand, and seeing those photographs and thinking it was a sign that I was onto something with the idea of trying to figure out what happened to Marjorie Morningstar the day after she saw Wally.

Lori Rader-Day: I understood from something you wrote in the acknowledgments that Lady in the Lake went a way you didn’t predict. Are you frustrated or delighted by that kind of thing? Both?

Laura Lippman: I never expected to write a newspaper novel; it held no interest for me. But it made sense for Maddie, who’s obsessed with making her mark on the world. It seemed credible that she could, with some effort, write her way onto the newspaper. I don’t mind when my books change course—I think it’s a sign that I’m paying attention, following...[read on]

Visit Laura Lippman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Another Thing to Fall.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

The Page 69 Test/Page 99 Test: Life Sentences.

The Page 69 Test: I'd Know You Anywhere.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Dangerous Thing.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Hush.

The Page 69 Test: Wilde Lake.

My Book, the Movie: Wilde Lake.

The Page 69 Test: Sunburn.

The Page 69 Test: Lady in the Lake.

--Marshal Zeringue

Claire McGowan

Claire McGowan's new thriller is What You Did.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for What You Did?

A: I actually can't remember when I got the idea as it was a few years ago - but it's partly inspired by a house I used to walk past every day when I lived in the countryside, and also from wanting to write a book partly set in Oxford and about friendship.

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

A: I had longer than usual to write this one, as I started working on it several years ago on spec. The structure, where we get one chapter from everyone who was...[read on]

Visit Claire McGowan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Tooze

Adam Tooze is the director of the European Institute at Columbia University and author of the forthcoming book, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.

From his May 2019 New Yorker Q&A with Isaac Chotiner:

[Chotiner:] It seems like the center left and center right keep falling away, even if individual economic conditions are O.K. I know that isn’t true in certain countries. In Austria, the center right did well, and—

[Tooze:] And Spain. Spain is another key country. Once the U.K. leaves, it is the fourth-largest country within the E.U. And in Spain we see a reassertion of the social democratic Socialist Party, and it even looks as if the [center-right] People’s Party is coming back. So it is a very motley picture. But, to your point of what is going on with the center left and center right, I think that is indeed the core question. Part of the problem is that the center right was tempted to move away from its positions. It moved either to the far right, in the case of the French Republicans—they basically adopted a nationalist agenda—or, as critics of Merkel would say, she turned the C.D.U. into something more like the S.P.D. In terms of the agenda Merkel’s government has pursued, it is actually quite close to a social democracy, and, indeed, even the Green Party on various points. So that adds up to an incredible blurring of the lines. Certainly what has happened is the ability to silo a particular social constituency, a particular set of cultural values, a particular set of economic programs, even regions of the country, and say, “This is S.P.D. territory,” or, “This is Christian Democratic territory”—that’s gone. And so what we have are lots of different parties fishing in what, in many ways, is a soup of agenda items.

And if you combine that with anger at the status quo, it doesn’t seem like a good recipe for traditional parties.

Exactly. There is a branding issue. The most striking...[read on]

Visit Adam Tooze's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicola Moriarty

Nicola Moriarty's new novel is Paper Chains.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Paper Chains and for your characters Hannah and India?

A: The idea for Paper Chains grew out of a difficult time I was having in my own life, involving depression and anxiety. I realised that if I wrote about these issues, it could actually be quite cathartic for me.

I had these desires to run away from life and from my family (which filled me with incredible guilt, of course), and I discovered that if I wrote about two women, Hannah and India, who were running away from their lives, then I could live out these fantasies on the page without actually following through in real life. In the meantime, I was getting treatment for my depression so that I could enjoy my own story again!

Q: How was the novel's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

A: It was difficult to come up with the right title for this novel. Originally, I wanted to call it “Chasing India,” but it didn’t quite fit because it was about Hannah’s story too. In the end...[read on]

Visit Nicola Moriarty's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Fifth Letter.

The Page 69 Test: Those Other Women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lyz Lenz

Lyz Lenz's new book is God Land: A Story of Faith, Loss, and Renewal in Middle America.

From her interview with Emma Green for The Atlantic:

Green: In your book, you seem ambivalent about something I think about a lot—this desire to understand and find empathy for people who theoretically stand across some kind of “divide” from us, as journalists or as readers. Clearly, you care about understanding people, because you spent two years researching this book, and you’ve stayed in Iowa instead of moving to the liberal cocoon of Brooklyn. On the other hand, you seem really angry—at these people, and at the fact that the national media fetishize nostalgic white cultures. How do you square that ambivalence?

Lenz: It’s just like being in a family. I grew up with seven brothers and sisters, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can love someone and be deeply angry at them at the same time. This is a key tension in America: You can love this place and still be pissed at it.

This is a very personal thing for me. I was married to somebody who voted and pushed for policies that I believed were hurting America. The people in my churches, who have loved me through some really difficult times, were also the people I heard saying very homophobic things and hurting others. I love this place where I live, but I also want it to be better.

Green: What you just articulated seems to be the opposite of so-called cancel culture. There’s a spirit right now, on both the right and the left, of total elimination of the enemy. Do you see yourself as countering that culture, or homeless in a world that’s driven by those impulses?

Lenz: I think I might disagree with the characterization.

Green: Hit back, Lyz!

Lenz: [Laughs] I think that game of both-siderism is really dangerous, and here’s why: The conversation should be about who has power and who is not being given a voice.

I was recently talking with my pastor about this idea that...[read on]

Visit Lyz Lenz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daphne Kalotay

Daphne Kalotay is the author of Calamity and Other Stories, which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize. Her debut novel, Russian Winter, won the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Prize, made the long list for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, was nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and has been published in twenty-three foreign editions. Her second novel, Sight Reading, was a Boston Globe bestseller, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize, and winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award in Fiction. She has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Kalotay's new novel is Blue Hours.

From her Q&A with Caroline Leavitt:

I always think writers are somehow haunted into writing their books—what was haunting you?

At first, it was simply the ghost of New York City in the early 90’s—the struggles of that time (AIDS, the recession, the first Gulf War) along with the youthful energy and blithe naivete, which really does seem lost forever, swept away by the economic boom that put the city out of reach for young hopefuls and by, more broadly, 9/11 and our country’s wars in the Middle East. Then it was my dear friend Xavier, who works for the Red Cross, telling me his headquarters in Libya had been bombed; that was in 2012, less than a year before I heard on the news about an American serviceman being held by the Taliban. I started thinking about these two types of overseas work—military and humanitarian aid—and ideas for the book began to percolate.

What I loved so much about your book was how it zoomed from NYC to Afghanistan, from issues of race and class and how they impact our lives. This seems especially timely today.

I’m struck by the ways that...[read on]

Visit Daphne Kalotay's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sight Reading.

The Page 69 Test: Blue Hours.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monique Truong

Monique Truong's new novel is The Sweetest Fruits.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: You note that "sugar and cornbread led me to Lafcadio Hearn." At what point did you decide to write a novel about him?

A: I first read about Hearn in a Southern foodways encyclopedia--I was fact-checking my second novel Bitter in the Mouth in which I wrote that traditionally Northerners added sugar to their cornbread recipes, while Southerners did not--and I saw an entry on Hearn that included a brief sketch of his life including his contribution to Southern food--he's credited with writing the first Creole cookbook in the U.S.--and almost instantaneously I decided to write about him.

The first hook for me was that he had written a cookbook. I think of food writers as a tribe apart and very much my tribe. I feel that we look at the world through a particular set of lenses, and by lenses I mean bowls, dishes, glasses.

The second hook for me was that Hearn was a consummate traveler and an immigrant twice over. As a former refugee and someone who now often writes far from home, I also consider migratory people to be part of my tribe. I was also intrigued that Hearn in 1890 had chosen East over West (Japan over the U.S.), the reverse of...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue