Will > Books: books-of-the-year-2017‎ (16)

It was clear from the start that they were not like other children, therefore Susanna felt she had no choice but to set down rules. No walking in t

It was clear from the start that they were not like other children, therefore Susanna felt she had no choice but to set down rules. No walking in the moonlight, no Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black, no going shoeless, no amulets, no night-blooming flowers, no reading novels about magic, no cats, no crows, and no venturing below Fourteenth Street. Yet no matter how Susanna tried to enforce these rules, the children continued to thwart her.

The set of the film was built in two locations. The exterior of the house was constructed on a small island off Washington State (so gorgeous and realistic that Barbra Streisand is said to have wanted to buy it) while the interior was built in a hanger at a Hollywood studio. I went to visit in California, invited by star and producer Sandra Bullock, and when I walked into the house I had first created in my novel, I was stunned. There I was in the Owens kitchen, a place I had only imagined, now brought to life. I realized then, the person on the film whose work was most like mine was the set designer. We both created the world for the characters to step into.

I might have continued on with the Owens family then, for certainly there was more to their story - a mysterious past, and a relative who had begun a curse that still affected the family, but on my return from Hollywood I was diagnosed with breast cancer. During my treatment, ideas of returning to the Owens family of Practical Magic evaporated. During my treatment, and after my illness, I moved on to other books. Still, I felt haunted by the world I had created, as if the family had been trapped in time, waiting to come alive. - from the Foyle’s article

It is my favourite time period, a time of enormous change when the attitudes of young people, women, gays and lesbians, and of people of colour radically changed, and when an unjust and unpopular war was affected by protests in the streets. A cultural revolution took place, one in which young people were able to change attitudes during a time when America was horribly divided, as it is now… Artistically, the sixties was a thrilling, magical time…The sisters, and their…mysterious brother, Vincent, live in Greenwich Village, the epicenter of music, art and politics in the States in the sixties. - from the Foyles article

I’ve always been interested in witchcraft, and I’ve done research my whole life. I did a bit more for The Rules of Magic because I was writing specifically about a particular judge, Judge Hathorne, at the witchcraft trials in Salem. I read whatever I could find about him, and I found him a really interesting character. As to magic, for me it’s always a pleasure to study magic and to find out more and more. Everything in the book about magic lore was something that I researched. For instance, the use of medicinal plants and herbs. Still, while the research is interesting, it’s not what’s important. Really, the most important thing is writing the novel and creating the characters. That’s the big difference between an historical novel and a history. What I’m mostly interested in is the novel part of it. All the research that I do is in service to that. - from the writermag interview

Ella stared west. She imagined the great mountains foggy and raindamp in the distance, the blue ridges rolling away in great swells. She opened her m

Ella stared west. She imagined the great mountains foggy and raindamp in the distance, the blue ridges rolling away in great swells. She opened her mouth, paused for a moment, gathered the story of her life around her as she would lift the hem of a long dress before stepping across a stream. She did not think, did not stop to look at [anyone]. She simply began to speak.

first started cooking in 2003 when I was in graduate school in Louisiana. I had never heard of the Loray Mill Strike. I asked my parents about it, and they’d never heard of it either. My mom was born in Gastonia in a mill village in 1945, and my dad in 1943, in a mill village in Shelby, and my mom’s maiden name is Wiggins. All my family came from mill people. My mom’s dad, Harry Eugene Wiggins, was living in Enoree (S.C.) in 1929 when Ella May was murdered. He would’ve known about it. But I never heard the word Loray. This story was buried. Nobody talked about it.

Women were beaten. Soldiers pressed guns to men’s heads. The strikers’ first headquarters had been destroyed by a nighttime mob. The union commissary attacked, the food stores ruined.

Woody Guthrie considered her one of our nation’s best songwriters. Alan Lomax published her stark union ballads in his acclaimed collections of American folksongs. Pete Seeger recorded a version of her most famous song on a Cold War folk revival album. …Ella May Wiggins… is not well known today, [but] she was one of a handful of southern grassroots composers who combined traditional balladry with leftwing politics to forge a remarkable new song genre just prior to and during the upheaval of the Great Depression. - from the Southern Culture article

After her death, pressure from local strikers, North Carolina liberals, and national political organizations led Gaston County mill owners to reduce working hours to fifty-five per week, to improve conditions in the mills, and to extend welfare work in the textile villages. - from NCPEdia

We leave our homes in the morning,
We kiss our children good-bye,
While we slave for the bosses,
Our children scream and cry.

And when we draw our money,
Our grocery bills to pay,
Not a cent to spend for clothing,
Not a cent to lay away…

And on that very evening
Our little son will say:
"I need some shoes, Mother,
And so does Sister May."

How it grieves the heart of a mother,
You everyone must know.
But we can't buy for our children,
Our wages are too low.

It is for our little children,
That seem to us so dear,
But for us nor them, dear workers,
The bosses do not care.

But understand, all workers,
Our union they do fear.
Let’s stand together, workers,
And have a union here.

Prologue:
Trump Victory Party
New York Hilton Midtown
10:59 P.M. Election Day

I’m about to throw up.

Prologue:
Trump Victory Party
New York Hilton Midtown
10:59 P.M. Election Day

I’m about to throw up.

“I don’t know why he did it,” she said, shrugging. “But I will say this: I know that had I exhibited any sign that I was intimidated or scared of him, he would have rolled over me.”

…don’t misunderstand me. The Hilton is nice. It’s been host to many grand events. But it can’t hold the kind of ten-thousand-person rallies that Trump has built his campaign around…There isn’t even free booze. The bar is charging seven dollars for sodas, eleven dollars for beers, and thirteen dollars or mixed drinks. Trumps advisers claim that Trump is just superstitious. He doesn’t want to jinx himself with a big show event. Cynics—or, as Trump calls them, “haters”—say he’s just cheap. About that cash bar: Red State calls it an “abomination.” GQ rates it pure Trump. “Let history show that up until the moment his fate became official, Donald Trump remained true to himself, a serial grafter and shameless carnival barker who let nothing come between him and the opportunity to get his grubby hands on a few more dollars.”

Fascinating to watch people writing books and major articles about me and yet they know nothing about me & have zero access. #FAKE NEWS!

As a science, wildlife management [in the early 20th century] was still in its infancy, and park officials genuinely believed that predators would eventually decimate the park’s prey population if left to their own devices. They didn’t realize that wolves and elk had coexisted in Yellowstone for thousands of years, that the two species had in fact evolved in tandem with each other—which explained why the elk could run just as fast as the wolf but no faster. Wolves were the driving force behind the evolution of a wide variety of prey species in North America after the last ice age, literally molding the natural world around them. The massive size of the moose, the nimbleness of the white-tailed deer, the uncanny balance of the bighorn sheep—the architect of these and countless other marvels was the wolf.

Even before 21 left his natal pack, Rick had known he was unusual. One morning in the spring of 1997, two years after Doug Smith and Carter Niemeyer rescued 21 following the death of his father, Rick watched the handsome young wolf returning from a hunt. With him was the big male who had become the pack’s new alpha when 21 was still a tiny pup. The pair had killed an elk, and 21, already an outstanding provider, had brought a massive piece of meat back to the den, where a new litter of pups had been born.

The pups, his new brothers and sisters, showered him with affection, but 21 seemed tense, pacing back and forth across Rick’s scope. Finally the wolf found what he was looking for: a troubled pup that he had recently taken an interest in. There was usually one pup who held the lowest rank in a litter’s pecking order, but this pup was different; he had some physical problem that held him back. Rick couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong with him, though his littermates clearly recognized that he was different and shunned him. But 21 seemed to have empathy for the pup, the way a dog seems to know when his owner is feeling depressed or lonely. As Rick looked on, the strapping 21 played with the tiny wolf as though he were still a pup himself, giving him the attention he so seldom enjoyed from his siblings.

Will any of your fine choices for husbands take me raiding with them? Or will it be halls and children and first wives whose rule is law? Will I be left at home while my men go out and live?

In the sagas the women got their way by being bolder than the men who surrounded them. What they could not do with steel, they did with will.

Her mixture of ruthlessness and innocence was charming, and he could never decide whether he wanted her to keep her pretty pictures of the world, or learn his own cruel lessons. “What would you do, Svanhild, I wonder, to save your life? To save the life of your child?”

Another woman might have bent then, acknowledged that he knew of things she could not. Svanhild lifted her chin and said,” “I don’t think you know what mothers must do, have done, to save their children’s lives. My mother”—she shook her head—“my mother sacrificed her spirit, I think sometimes, so that Ragnvald’s land could be protected until he grew up. I wonder if it was worth the cost, her marriage with Olaf.

I wanted my women characters to be plausible for the time-period, while reflecting the fact that women are people, every bit as much as men, and would rebel, have ambitions, and struggle against their limitations. I’ve tried to represent different ways that women would deal with a violent society in which they had fewer rights than today: Hilda goes along to get along, Ascrida is nearly broken by what she’s endured but still tries to make choices to keep her family safe, Vigdis uses her sexuality to further her ambitions, and Svanhild, the heroine, makes rash and idealistic choices, and then has to face the consequences. - from the Qwillery interview

When I was in my teens, my family embarked on a project to trace our ancestry and identify our living relatives. Through church records in Sweden and Norway, we found that Harald Fairhair (Harfagr), the first king of Norway is one of our ancestors. - from her blog

I grew up in the middle of the woods in upstate New York, and my family that is very into doing things by hand. We baked our own bread, and did fiber arts like weaving, sewing, and knitting. We heated the house with wood and coal fires, and had to split and chop wood all summer. I think that is why I’ve always been drawn to history, eras which required more physical labor than our own, and making things from scratch. - from the Qwillery interview

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe s

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.

I wanted Cyril to represent the country and how it has evolved over those 70 years. Although Cyril is gay, he is very frightened of that fact when he is a younger man and is terrified of the consequences of anyone finding out. He lies to himself, he lies to his friends and he lies to a woman he plans to marry. Homosexuality was still illegal in Ireland until the early 1990s, so it was a very difficult place for any gay man or woman to be. But eventually he starts to change, he begins to accept who he is and becomes proud of that. And so it is with Ireland itself, which has evolved for the better over those years. - from the BookBrowse interview

We’re none of us normal. Not in this fucking country.

“Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ireland,” he said, leaning forward now and pointing a finger at me. “Nothing will ever change in that fucking place. Ireland is a backward hole of a country run by vicious, evil-minded, sadistic priests and a government so in thrall to the collar that it’s practically led around on a leash. The Taoiseach does what the Archbishop of Dublin says and for his obeisance he’s given a treat, like a good puppy. The best thing that could happen to Ireland would be for a tsunami to rise up in the Atlantic Ocean and drown the place with all the vengeance of a biblical flood and for every man, woman and child to disappear forever.

“What’s wrong with you people?” he asked, looking at me as if I was clinically insane. “What’s wrong with Ireland? Are you all just fucking nuts over there, is that it? Don’t you want each other to be happy?”
“No,” I said, finding my country a difficult one to explain. “No, I don’t think we do.”

“Do you enjoy being a writer, Mrs Avery?” asked Julian.
“No, of course not, she said. “It’s a hideous profession. Entered into by narcissists who think their pathetic little imaginations will be of interest to people they’ve never met.”

“Was everything you said in your book true?” asked Julian. In Borstal Boy, I mean.
“Christ, I hope not,” said Behan, shaking his head as he lifted his next pint. “A book would be terribly boring if everything in it was true, don’t you think? Especially an autobiography. I can’t remember half of it anyway, so I presume I’ve slandered a few people along the way.”

I read The Cider House Rules when I was 17 years old and quickly devoured all of John Irving's novels. Since then, he has been my favourite novelist. I admire his storytelling abilities but also his empathy for what he has always described as "sexual misfits." John was writing about transgender people, for example, in The World According to Garp, long before that was a subject that was talked about. – from the bookbrowse interview

“It happens,” he said with a shrug. “We all fall in the shit many times in our lives. The trick is pulling ourselves out again.”

They are so dark that pupil and iris are virtually indistinguishable, fringed by long lashes that might make them pretty until you take a closer lo

They are so dark that pupil and iris are virtually indistinguishable, fringed by long lashes that might make them pretty until you take a closer look, and then you will see that they absorb all the light around them and refuse to budge an inch. When looking into them, if you ever do, you will suddenly remember appointments that you should be making and previous engagements that you’ve forgotten to put on your calendar.

About two years ago, I was working as a TV researcher for a crime drama series when an idea began to form for a project of my own. A dark, psychological suspense novel. I’d never written a novel before, but the idea wouldn’t let go and I found myself at a crossroads. In a moment of righteous conviction, I took the least logical path available. I quit my job and moved across the country to Vancouver, because this is where my story would be set. I had no employment prospects on the West Coast, no money, no friends, nothing but the drive to write. For the next year, I took day work in the film and television industry to make ends meet, ate out of cans, pocketed food from set. One week I had nowhere else to go so I lived in a tent. I’m told some people do this for fun. I am not one of them. - from the Thrillerfest interview

I can tell that the coffee here is terrible, but the muffins are not too bad. People exiting with takeout cups in their hands peel back the lid, gulp, and then grimace. Those with muffins never bat an eye. They shrug and move on, seeing the muffins as money well spent.

At first I thought it was a manifestation of my hangover, but after an hour of huddling in the corner, wrapped in a blanket, I got angry. Okay, that’s not true. I got paranoid, drank a beer to calm my nerves, and then got angry. When I went out, steel pipe in hand, I found a huge ball of matted furs sniffing distastefully at a carton of spoiled chow mein I had put in the garbage the night before. The ball of fur looked at me with baleful eyes, but made no move to beat a hasty exit when I tried to shoo her away. I’ve called her Whisper ever since.

I could get into my complicated parentage. I could point out to him that my dubious genes are at least part indigenous from my father’s side and part something I don’t even know from my mother‘s. Because she left when I was a child and I don’t know a thing about her, not even where she came from. What I do know is that I look somewhat like my father, and girls who look like me are more likely to go missing, and less likely to have their disappearances investigated.

[image]
S.A. Chakraborty - image from her site

It actually started not as a novel, but as sort of a passion project/exercise in world-building that I never intended to show a soul! I’m a big history buff and with The City of Brass I wanted to recreate some of the stunning worlds I’d read about while also exploring traditional beliefs about djinn. A bit contrary to Western lore, djinn are said to be intelligent beings similar to humans, created from smokeless fire and living unseen in our midst—a fascinating, albeit slightly frightening concept, this idea of creatures living silently among us, dispassionately watching the rise and fall of our various civilizations. - from the Twinning for Books interview

there’s a djinn version of Baghdad’s great library, filled with the ancient books humans have lost alongside powerful texts of magic; they battle with weapons from Achaemenid Persia (enhanced by fire of course); the medical traditions of famed scholars like Ibn Sina have been adapted to treat magical maladies; dancers conjure flowers while singing Mughal love songs; a court system based on the Zanzibar Sultanate deals justice to merchants who bewitch their competitors… not to mention a cityscape featuring everything from ziggurats and pyramids to minarets and stupas. - from the Twinning for Books interview

this is something I know: no matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.

this is something I know: no matter how far you have run, no matter how long you have been lost, it is never too late to be found.

I think the fantastical elements are important, as they show how the narrator copes with being in solitary confinement for so many years. He escapes through his imagination, including astonishing interpretations of his world. I've worked with men and women facing execution, and am often thunderstruck at how humans can persevere despite horrific circumstances. - from the GR Q/A

As always, after having the dream, she tried to uncover the truth. What part was reality and what part was fantasy? Are the stories we tell ourselves true or based on what we dream them to be?

‘Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience—I only mean with freedom to think

‘Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience—I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that…’ Frowning, she ran her thumb along the serpent’s spine and said, ‘I’ve never said this before, not to anyone, though I’ve meant to: but yes I’ve sold my soul, though I’m afraid it didn’t fetch too high a price. I had a faith, the sort I think you might be born with, but I’ve seen what it does and I traded it in. It’s a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad—to turn your back on everything new and wonderful—not to see that there’s no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!’
‘You think—you really think—that it is one or the other: your faith or your reason?’

I wanted to portray a late nineteenth century which was in many respects ‘modern’, rather than a sort of Victoriana theme-park of pea-soupers and smelling-salts. By the 1890s you could travel by Tube and walk along an Embankment lit by electric lights, you could have a tooth pulled under anaesthesia, join a union, read the Times, buy frozen lamb shipped over from New Zealand, and so on. I suppose the obverse of saying 'they were rather like us' is to say 'and we are rather like them', and I do fear that we are regressing to a decidedly Victorian state when it comes to housing, and a tendency to think of those who live in poverty as in some way deserving it due to a lack of virtue rather than mere ill fortune.

It struck her that everything under that white sky was made of the same substance—not quite animal, but not merely earth; where branches had sheared from their trunks they left bright wounds, and she would not have been surprised to see severed stumps of oak and elm pulse as she passed. Laughing, she imagined herself a part of it, and leaning against a trunk in earshot of a chattering thrush held up her arm, and wondered if she might see vivid green lichen stippling the skin between her fingers.

William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his; children of the earth and lost in wonder.

It was Sarah Perry’s husband who told her, on a car journey through Essex, having spotted a sign to the village of Henham, about the legend of a serpent. Perry felt her scalp tighten, the better to grasp the idea and keep it safe inside her head – a feeling she has become used to when she thinks of something she knows will make a great book. “Immediately, I thought if that beast came back in the Victorian era, post-Darwin, when there was a trend for natural history and people were fossil-collecting, people would have a very different response from those in the 17th century, who had seen this beast.”- from The Guardian interview

What I absolutely didn’t want to do was to write a book about two people who madly fancy each other and at the end of the book they fall in love and they get married. That’s so tiresome and life is so much more rich and complex and complicated than that. I wanted to write about a relationship that is intimate and tender and exciting and even erotic but not a conventional ‘boy-meets-girl and they’re soulmates and they live happy ever after’ story.

Perry aimed to write about as many different kinds of friendship love as I could find. Ones which blur the boundaries between romantic love and friendship, seeing sexual desire as something cathartic and benevolent, even when it’s not connected to any kind of romantic attachment. I still maintain that Cora and Will are basically friends but that their friendship is capacious and different and subject to change - as human relationships are.” - from the Waterstones interview

When the rain set in, she delved deeper between the trees, turning her face to the featureless sky. It was a uniform grey, without shifting of clouds or sudden blue breaks, and no sign at all of the sun: it was an unwritten sheet of paper, and against it the bare branches were black. It ought to have been dreary, but Cora saw only beauty—birches unfurled their strips of bark like lengths of white cloths, and under her feet wet leaves were slick. Everywhere bright moss had taken hold, in dense wads of green fur swaddling the trees at their foot, and fine pelts on broken branches that lay across the path.

’It was just the light,’ she said, ‘up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?’

…he started out with his eyes firmly on the guiding star, his feet planted on the path, but that’s the thing about the life you walk—you start out poi

…he started out with his eyes firmly on the guiding star, his feet planted on the path, but that’s the thing about the life you walk—you start out pointed true North, but you vary one degree off, it doesn’t matter for maybe one year, five years, but as the years stack up you’re just walking farther and farther away from where you started out to go, you don’t even know you’re lost until you’re so far from your original destination you can’t even see it anymore - Don Winslow

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown - Henry IV Part 2 – W. Shakespeare

The street stays with you.
It sinks into your pores and then your blood.
And into your soul? Malone asks himself. You gonna blame that on the street too?
Some of it, yeah.
You’ve been breathing corruption since you put on the shield, Malone thinks. Like you breathed in death that day in September. Corruption isn’t just in the city’s air, it’s in its DNA, yours too.
Yeah, blame it on the city, blame it on New York.
Blame it on the Job,
It’s too easy, it stops you from asking yourself the hard question.
How did you get here?
Like anyplace else.
A step at a time.

Malone drives past the Wahi diner and the mural of a raven on 155th. Past the church of the Intercession, but it’s too late for Intercession, past Trinity Cemetery and the Apollo Pharmacy, the Big Brother Barber shop, Hamilton Fruits and Vegetables and all the small gods of place, the personal shrines, the markers of his life on these streets that he loves like a husband loves a cheating wife, a father loves a wayward son.

The little town of Sycamore struck her as something out of a fairy tale in its smallness, in its cluster of businesses along Main Street, its small

The little town of Sycamore struck her as something out of a fairy tale in its smallness, in its cluster of businesses along Main Street, its small college on one side, her new high school on the other. Though it seemed to emit a gentle sigh, a sleepy breath, she thought not of sweetness but of Frankenstein: “By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.”

As Laura watched the Padres lose to the Giants again and picked at the dirt under her fingernails, it dawned on her that she and her parents were on a parallel path. All starting over. Except, of course, her parents’ do-over was part of a long-held plan—their fortieth anniversary was in two months. Hers was an attempt at an entire split from the past. Burn the whole fucking thing down and see if she could rise from the ashes.

…stories always come to me first through that seemingly small scope of the everyday. There’s an assumption, even in the language itself—ordinary vs. extraordinary—that the ordinary doesn’t have the spark, that the value lies beyond, in the extra. I like to complicate that.  I don’t always know that I will find something extraordinary in the ordinary, but I always believe it’s there. 

Ms. G showed slides of the work, pausing on a painting called The Floor Planers, which showed three shirtless men on their knees scraping a wooden floor. This was scandalous, Ms. G said, not because they were shirtless but because they were workers. The Salon did not value depictions of ordinary life, working life. In their view this was not the subject of art. “But look at that light,” Ms. G said, and she touched the screen, tracing the shine on the floors, and on the men’s muscled backs. “Shivers!” she said, holding up her arm, and Jess got them, too. “The beautiful in the ordinary,” Ms. G said, and Jess wrote it down.

I grew up in northern Arizona, in a small town turned famous town: Sedona. There, with no transit save for the tourist trolley and parents who worked full time, I walked everywhere. To and from the school bus stop… walked at a slow, rock-kicking pace, cursing people for not giving me rides…I learned that I had to flee this beautiful place, my home, before it swallowed me whole. - from the story prize blogspot interview

She’d stood on a balcony naked and watched the sunrise while her new husband slept. Watching the shimmering expanse of the Gulf, she’d thought, There’s the whole wide world, and she stretched to her tiptoes, reaching for it.

She walked in a land of strangers instead of in the land of her parents, her older brother and nephews, her colleagues and friends. her husband of eleven years. She walked in her alien landscape, in her ridiculous visor, and she told herself: Buck up, Drennan, you chicken shit. This ain’t summer camp.

I’m most drawn to works that have deeply complex, original characters in whom I’m absolutely invested. My mantra is “Come on, break my heart.” I want to feel something at the end, to go through the fire. If I’m weeping at 3 a.m. when I finally close the cover, success!

Arriving in a Roaring Twenty
at a time of hope and plenty
Full of vim and joi de vivre
Aimed to stay and wouldn’t leave

Lilly made her mark with Macy
w

Arriving in a Roaring Twenty
at a time of hope and plenty
Full of vim and joi de vivre
Aimed to stay and wouldn’t leave

Lilly made her mark with Macy
writing rhymes to make the case he
needed to attract the shopper.
Many tried, but none could top her.

Used her wit to publish books
of poems with a jaundiced look
At romance. And with each edition
earned more cash and recognition.

A true and very public spinster
’till a special guy convinced her
She should wear his golden band.
And risk some tarnish to her brand

The street provided inspiration
all her eighty-plus duration
As she walks this night we see
a passage through our history

When life seems gray
And short of fizz
It seems that way
Because it is.

They are so dark that pupil and iris are virtually indistinguishable, fringed by long lashes that might make them pretty until you take a closer lo

They are so dark that pupil and iris are virtually indistinguishable, fringed by long lashes that might make them pretty until you take a closer look, and then you will see that they absorb all the light around them and refuse to budge an inch. When looking into them, if you ever do, you will suddenly remember appointments that you should be making and previous engagements that you’ve forgotten to put on your calendar.

About two years ago, I was working as a TV researcher for a crime drama series when an idea began to form for a project of my own. A dark, psychological suspense novel. I’d never written a novel before, but the idea wouldn’t let go and I found myself at a crossroads. In a moment of righteous conviction, I took the least logical path available. I quit my job and moved across the country to Vancouver, because this is where my story would be set. I had no employment prospects on the West Coast, no money, no friends, nothing but the drive to write. For the next year, I took day work in the film and television industry to make ends meet, ate out of cans, pocketed food from set. One week I had nowhere else to go so I lived in a tent. I’m told some people do this for fun. I am not one of them. - from the Thrillerfest interview

I can tell that the coffee here is terrible, but the muffins are not too bad. People exiting with takeout cups in their hands peel back the lid, gulp, and then grimace. Those with muffins never bat an eye. They shrug and move on, seeing the muffins as money well spent.

At first I thought it was a manifestation of my hangover, but after an hour of huddling in the corner, wrapped in a blanket, I got angry. Okay, that’s not true. I got paranoid, drank a beer to calm my nerves, and then got angry. When I went out, steel pipe in hand, I found a huge ball of matted furs sniffing distastefully at a carton of spoiled chow mein I had put in the garbage the night before. The ball of fur looked at me with baleful eyes, but made no move to beat a hasty exit when I tried to shoo her away. I’ve called her Whisper ever since.

I could get into my complicated parentage. I could point out to him that my dubious genes are at least part indigenous from my father’s side and part something I don’t even know from my mother‘s. Because she left when I was a child and I don’t know a thing about her, not even where she came from. What I do know is that I look somewhat like my father, and girls who look like me are more likely to go missing, and less likely to have their disappearances investigated.

Suddenly she saw everything in its harsh, naked state. She felt the pulse of the lives lived inside the mean little house she passed: selfish or g

Suddenly she saw everything in its harsh, naked state. She felt the pulse of the lives lived inside the mean little house she passed: selfish or generous, kind or unkind, ugly or tolerable, almost all of them sad. And she saw the histories of the people passing by like x-rays stamped on their faces—ugly, mutinous tracings of dark and light: a woman who had ratted out a neighbor, a man who had shot children, a soldier who had held his dying friend in his arms. Yet here they were, carrying groceries, holding children’s hands, tuning their collars up against the wind. As if their moments of truth—the decisions by which they would be judged and would judge themselves—hadn’t already come and passed. What a sham this new German present was! An irrelevant time—a mad scramble to cast votes after the verdict had already been reached.

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Jessica Shattuck - from her site – Photo by Dorothea von Haeften

Unlike her half-brothers, Mary had grown up without typhoid and diphtheria and rape. She had not been pressed into overcrowded trains and transport vehicles and fetid, swarming, waterless DP camps full of war-hardened souls. She had always had school, and clothing, and medicine, and a roof over her head. And most of all she had never had to lie.

All a question gets is an answer, and in her experience you don’t always want those. As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find some worms and potato bugs. Sometimes even a snake. And as a German, she knows that if you start poking through a shoebox of photographs, you’ll find Nazi uniforms and swastikas and children with their arms raised in Heil Hitler salutes.