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JEFFERY RENARD ALLEN
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Rails Under My Back
Farrar, Straus & Giroux (Feb.)
Jeffery Renard Allen found the inspiration for his first novel during a trip to New York City in 1990 and, although he began compiling notes on the way home, he spent the next eight years writing and revising the fruits of that inspiration, Rails Under My Back. At the end of the decade in which Allen began the project, he now finds himself a resident of the city that inspired his novel, though the novel is not actually set in the city that never sleeps. Instead, it takes place partly in a fictional metropolis that is an amalgam of New York and Allen's native Chicago, and partly in Memphis and elsewhere.
The story itself is also an amalgam, this time of two of Allen's literary aspirations: to tell a story loosely based on his family history, and to write a detective tale. Rails, which centers on two African-American families, accomplishes both of the author's goals, while centering on the theme of abandonment. Two brothers from one family, Lucius and John Jones, marry two sisters from the other, Gracie and Sheila McShan. The mother of the McShans had abandoned her daughters before the novel's beginning, and one of the Jones brothers leaves his family in the novel. Both families and their histories are loosely based on Allen's family. The book involves issues family members did not like to discuss and what Allen calls his "search for possible answers."
The title, he explains, came to him in a dream early in the writing process, and the idea for the railroad as a running metaphor throughout the novel soon followed. The railroad holds the family together by taking them from locale to locale, whether on long journeys, short commutes or more metaphysical travels, such as those from one form of bondage to another.
According to Allen's editor, Elisabeth Sifton, the novel "is an extremely ambitious, accomplished, complex, beautiful piece of writing. It's the prose that's so strong and intelligent." She adds that she knows of no other American writer who has similarly explored the lives of an extended African-American family in the inner city in a novel as literary and intelligent.
The long writing process surprised the fledgling author, who teaches at Queens College in New York City. His next novel, he promises, will be very different -- and won't take eight years to complete. -- MICHAEL KRESS
SALES TIPS:With a first printing of 15,000, Rails is part of the publisher's "First Look" Program (in which early galleys of books that the publisher hopes to "break out" are sent to key bookstores), and a recording of Allen reading from his novel is featured on the "World of FSG" promotional audiocassette. According to senior publicist Peter Miller, "We're hoping that Jeffery's novel will apeal to readers of John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison; we're thinking of him as an important young American writer who has the erudition of a Faulkner or a Joyce."
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WES CRAVEN
Fountain Society
Simon & Schuster (Oct.)
Wes Craven, director of the hugely successful Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream screen-scare franchises, describes his long-delayed debut novel as "a near-future love story." Talk about time warps. The idea for Fountain Society began to tantalize him in 1972 -- long before Dolly the sheep appeared in duplicate. The cloning procedure in the novel has more lethal consequences. "Writing a novel is an old dream from before I became a filmmaker," confides Craven, a former humanities professor with a master's degree in writing and philosophy from Johns Hopkins. "I taught because I wanted to be a novelist." He explains that, raised in a strict fundamentalist Baptist household, he was forbidden to attend movies -- and he didn't until college. "The written word was my first exposure to art. I was always in awe of authors," he discloses. Although Craven wrote a novel years ago, "Nothing came of it. I despaired. I entered film at the lowest level." (He didn't stay down there long.)
Says S&S senior editor Chuck Adams, "Craven is quite serious about writing. He's an intelligent man, and his intelligence is in the book." The brain of an older scientist, Peter, who is dying of pancreatic cancer, is transplanted into the body of Hans, a fabulously wealthy young businessman -- and Peter's genetic clone. Peter is deeply devoted to his wife, Beatrice. Hans had been involved in a passionate extramarital affair with the beautiful Elizabeth. After the brain transplant, it is assumed that Peter's brain will take over. But numerous complications ensue -- not all of them pleasant.
Comments 60-year-old Craven, "America is so obsessed with youth. I wanted to explore the values of age and long-term relationships. For Elizabeth, Peter has the same personality as Hans, only set ahead 30 years." He adds, "Fiction gives you the most mature audience you can come up to. In genre films, you have to skew yourself to a young audience. -- CHARLES HIX
SALES TIPS: Given Craven's high profile as a film director known for bloody effects, Adams emphasizes, "The book is not horror or gore. Yet for Wes Craven fans, it has his trademark mordant wit. The very strange love story is what makes the book special." Aggressive national print and TV advertising are scheduled, plus radio promotion giveaways and a 25-city TV satellite tour. DreamWorks has purchased film rights for what Variety called "a total mid-seven figures." (Craven will direct but not write the screenplay).
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PATRICK REDMOND
Something Dangerous
Hyperion (Sept.)
Yes, says Patrick Redmond, he did board at public school as a youth growing up in England. But no, the institution was nothing like Kirkston Abbey, the ominous setting for his psychological chiller in which two young teens -- one meek and bullied, the other handsome, smart and confident -- are drawn together in a threateningly insular friendship that leads to horrific happenings among their schoolmates and professors.
An antitrust lawyer in London until Something Dangerous earned him £100,000 from Hodder & Stoughton last year in a two-book deal, Redmond is now a full-time writer, a situation that he calls "a dream come true. Pardon the cliché." Now 33, he began writing stories as a child and as an adult "wrote two novels, one a historical epic and the other a thriller about reincarnation. I didn't get either published." Then came the inspiration for Something Dangerous (which was a bestseller when published earlier this year in England). "I was watching the film Dead P t's Society on TV, which is set in an American boarding school of the 1950s," he recalls. "It got me thinking. What would happen in a far more repressive English school of the same period? I knew that the ending would have to be much bleaker."
The more Redmond got into the book, the more the friendship between the two boys crept to the fore. "I became interested in how much power a strong person can exert over a weaker character," he explains. "The earlier novels were more plot driven, but writing Something Dangerous taught me that my strength is in character study." Despite the apparent virtues of the more powerful lad, looks are deceiving. "The closer you get to him, you see that he is really a very damaged individual."
Redmond's professional experience helped, he says: "As a lawyer, you have to be able to construct arguments, and I was very aware that the book had to be carefully structured." He is now at work on his next novel, this one set in contemporary London, but also unraveling the ways in which personalities can manipulate and be manipulated. "What I'm really interested in," he acknowledges, "are the things people try to hide." -- ROBERT DAHLIN
SALES TIPS: Hyperion's promotion blitz has already entailed sending booksellers ersatz letters from Kirkston Abbey personnel; more are on tap. ARCs have elicited positive bookseller response, reports associate publisher Ellen Archer, and BOMC and QPB have bought club rights. A 150,000 first printing and a $150,000 ad/promo budget have been announced. Archer reports that Hyperion is positioning Something Dangerous as "a gothic novel in the tradition of Lord of the Flies and The Secret History."
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LILY KING
The Pleasing Hour
Atlantic Monthly Press (Sept.)
"I would love to go abroad again," says Lily King, recalling the four years she spent as a cook and English teacher in France and Spain, respectively, when she was in her 20s. "I'd love to live in Italy or Africa. It's always interesting to redefine yourself, and you can do it in another country very easily." That process of redefinition is richly portrayed in the story of Rosie, the motherless, 18-year-old protagonist of King's first novel, who is working as an au pair in Paris. Rosie is not your usual naive American in Europe; she is grieving for the baby she recently bore for her older sister, who is infertile. As she struggles to weather not only her personal loss but also the disdain of the family's beautiful, coolly sophisticated mother, Nicole, Rosie finds herself falling in love with Nicole's husband, Marc.
The 36-year-old King calls the dalliance that develops between Marc and Rosie "inevitable," and notes that it was the fallout that intrigued her: "I was more interested in what happens after." As it turns out, the affair's most profound, if unexpected, impact is on the relationship between Rosie and Nicole, who also lost her mother when young. "I often thought about it as a love story between Nicole and Rosie -- although it is not a sexual love," explains King. "They end up knowing each other, through Marc."
King, who began writing "seriously" as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, got her MFA from Syracuse University in 1991. She began The Pleasing Hour in 1993, while teaching in Spain, and completed it in 1998. King submitted the completed manuscript, unsolicited, to agent Wendy Weil. Rights were sold to Atlantic Monthly Press after a three-way auction. "The house that I chose was not the one that submitted the highest bid, but they -- and editor Elisabeth Schmitz -- came so highly recommended that I went with them," she says.
Already at work on a second novel, the Cambridge, Mass.“based King says the linguistic challenges were the best part about living overseas. "I used to love doing the most mundane things in France and Spain, because it was always to much harder to do it in another language," she recalls. But her current domestic situation temporarily obliges her to put her wanderlust on hold: in March, she gave birth to her first child, Calla, with novelist husband Tyler Clements. -- MALLAY CHARTERS
SALES TIPS:Schmitz is hoping that the book will tap the same curiosity about French expatriates that helped sell Diane Johnson's Le Divorce. She reports a "great response from booksellers to the advance copies" and praises the novel's "subtle, seductive" writing. Rights have been sold in three countries, and there is a $150,000 paperback floor. The publisher plans a 35,000-copy first printing and a seven-city author tour.
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JAKE ARNOTT
The Long Firm
Soho (Sept.)
Jake Arnott's settling into digs in London and trying his best to deal with sudden literary superstardom. His first novel, The Long Firm, has just been published in Great Britain to dazzling reviews ("compulsive reading, powerful writing," said the Times; "astonishing," said the Guardian) and the BBC has included him in a documentary about new writers. "They have film crews coming along to my interviews," reports a slightly mystified Arnott. "It's all been a dangerous amount of attention."
Just last year, a very anonymous Arnott was working two days a week at a center for disabled adults in the North of England. "Then a friend phoned up to ask if I was interested in three weeks film work as an extra on The Mummy -- they were looking for people who had theater experience and were willing to wear latex mummy suits." Arnott didn't hesitate. Not only would he be earning Equity wages, the film would shoot outside London. And London meant ready access to literary agents.
"I had decided when I turned 30," reveals the 38-year-old Arnott, "that I either had to get a proper career or write." So, when not working as a mortuary technician, artist's model, hospital porter or sign language interpreter, Arnott concentrated on his writing. His first attempt was a novel about squatters in 1980s London. "It had far too many adjectives," remembers Arnott. "First novels are the time for working out which adjectives you'll never use again."
Four years ago, the death of the notorious gay British mobster Ronnie Kray got Arnott thinking about a story told from the viewpoint of a gangster's boyfriend. He set The Long Firm in the underworld of London's West End during the swinging '60s. Five narrators, including hit man "Jake the Hat" and Terry, the terrorized lover, recount the rise, fall and surprising resurgence of sadistic mob boss Harry Starks -- racketeer, porn king, prize fighter groupie and keen Judy Garland fan.
During his time off from The Mummy, Arnott went agent hunting, armed with a synopsis of his novel and a provocative (he hoped) cover letter pitching it as "a queer gangster epic." A friend recommended he send the novel to John Geller at Curtis Brown. Within 10 days, Geller had garnered the author a six-figure deal with the Sceptre imprint of Hoddard and Stoughton.
Hard at work on a new novel about police corruption, Arnott is wary of the pitfalls of sudden celebrity and prosperity. "You have to watch it, sometimes success can put you in competition with yourself. The most important thing now is that I have the means to carry on with my writing."
-- LUCINDA DYER
SALES TIPS:Described by Soho as a British Goodfellas or a campy James Ellroy, The Long Firm is being made into a five-part BBC miniseries. The publisher plans a 15,000-copy first printing, a postcard campaign, national advertising and a tentative U.S. tour for Arnott in the fall.
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RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO
Why She Left Us
HarperCollins (Sept.)
In 1992, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto embarked on a bus trip to visit a facility in Colorado where many Japanese-Americans, including her mother and her mother's family, had been detained during WWII. Rizzuto calls the journey "a pilgrimage" that inspired Why She Left Us. But the book's setting is not the one she originally envisioned: "Initially I intended to write about the internment, from my need to recreate what happened, to understand it. That proved impossible. The memories were so fragmented." After interviewing numerous survivors, "I discovered that nobody told the simple story from start to finish. There were always holes, either in knowledge or in memory, and always diversions." Relinquishing a linear tale about life in the internment camp, Rizzuto settled upon a more ambitious unfolding that shifts back and forth in time between four narrative voices.
"I was really bowled over by the depiction of the [generational] clashes of cultures within an immigrant family," declares Terry Karten, HarperCollins executive editor, who acquired the manuscript. "It's a culture that seemed foreign and exotic to me. I was surprised by what was not said."
Rizzuto, 35, who describes herself as "half Caucasian, half Japanese," was born in Hawaii. "The first time I heard about the internment," she remembers, "I was in high school. My history teacher invited my grandmother to talk to the class." She shared a heartrending incident that would show up in Why She Left Us. "I was outraged," Rizzuto recalls. "The story I heard was of my family being cheated out of their piano. My generation's immediate response is: How could this happen? Why did you go? Why didn't you fight? The impulse to write this book started with my outrage. I wrote the chapters in the order that they occurred to me. Some of it was pretty painful. I found myself wanting to leave the room and not be a part of what I was writing."
-- CHARLES HIX
SALES TIPS:Calling Why She Left Us "a literary novel with strong commercial potential," Karten emphasizes that it is "an immigrant story of perennial interest to Americans. The book deals with a slice of American history and with interesting settings not that much talked about." A five-city tour is planned, and appearances are scheduled in conjunction with various Japanese societies during regional trade shows.
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DAVID HUDDLE
The Story of a Million Years
Houghton Mifflin (Sept.)
With The Story of a Million Years David Huddle cleared a hurdle. After achieving critical success during his 30 years of writing short fiction, p try and essays, the author is understandably excited about the publication of his first novel. "If you're a fiction writer, it seems like a novel is what grown-ups write," he quips. "It wasn't a natural form for me. So I had to work very hard to make the jump."
Originally from Virginia, Huddle started to become interested in literature about the same time he was flunking out of Jefferson's famous university. As an enlisted man in the army during Vietnam he fell in love with Hemingway and Faulkner. After the war he returned to school and studied under Peter Taylor, a southern short-fiction writer. Now Huddle teaches writing at the University of Vermont and at the Bread Loaf School of English. "My only claim to being a teacher is that I am a writer," he remarks. "I guess I'm sort of a specimen for my students." As much as he enjoys teaching, Huddle considers himself a writer first: "Writing is the first thing I do with my day -- what I do with my good hours."
In many ways The Story of a Million Years reads like a collection of short stories, constructed around characters telling (or not telling) sometimes overlapping events from their lives. At age 15, the central character had a secret affair with the husband of her mother's friend. But this is no Nabokov knock-off. Huddle's novel might begin with the affair, but he explores the delicate dance of self-revelation that exists between spouses and close friends, presenting a new viewpoint in each chapter.
"The way I write is like the way improvisational actors work," Huddle explains. "You're cast in the role, and you simply have to start talking to let the voice come out of you."
While Huddle's work from Harper's, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine has been published in three collections, he says that his experience with this novel is "more exciting." He credits his new agent Bill Clegg of the Robbins Agency and Houghton editor-in-chief Janet Silver with helping him hone his work into a novel. "The amount of editorial attention that I have had on this book is maybe 50 times more than I've had on any other."
-- BRIDGET KINSELLA
SALES TIPS: Since this is the perfect hand-sell book, Houghton plans to ask New England booksellers familiar with Huddle's work to write fan letters to booksellers in other parts of the country. By ordering five copies, booksellers get an extra 3% discount. Already set for the book's jacket are blurbs from Ann Beattie, Julia Alvarez and Howard Norman.
SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN
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What the Body Remembers
Doubleday/Nan A. Talese (Oct.)
Few enough novels deal with the wrenching period in Pakistan's history known as partition; fewer still filter these events through a woman's eyes. Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers d s both, placing a heartbreaking family saga against a turbulent period in world history to explore how the personal becomes political. The book, set in colonial India during the two decades leading up to partition in 1947, tells the story of a polygamous marriage whose pivotal characters are Roop, a teenage girl who becomes the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner; Sadarji, the landowner; and the villainous first wife, Satya, who is unable to bear children with Sadarji. The rich, exotic language is filled with Punjabi words that become familiar only as the story g s along.
"If you had told me that I, a second-generation Indian living in the U.S., would write a book like this, I never would have believed you," says Baldwin, 37, an information technology consultant who was born in Canada, spent her childhood in India and now lives in Milwaukee, Wis., with her Irish-American husband. "The book deals with gender, class, colonialism, everything but the kitchen sink," she quips. More than just a story about a polygamous marriage, the novel is an allegory for the partition period.
Baldwin has been writing since childhood. A collection of short stories, English Lessons, was published in Canada in 1996 and in India earlier this year, and she coauthored A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America (John Muir, 1992). Baldwin's Canadian agent shopped the novel (which grew out of a short story, "Satya") before it was completed, according to Baldwin's desire to find out "if it was worth cutting down trees for." Knopf Canada thought it was, as did Nan Talese, who preempted the manuscript for her own imprint for "a sizable but sensible amount."
Among Baldwin's literary debts is one to Salman Rushdie. "He really opened the door for people of Indian origins to think we could write in English," she explains. "Midnight's Children was a groundbreaking book. But, boy, are our styles different! He's a satirist, and I try to get deep into the psyche of my characters."
-- SUZANNE MANTELL
SALES TIPS: Talese says she will be looking for intelligent women readers for this one; she notes that Baldwin, like Vikram Seth, provides "one of those experiences that touches a nerve from your own personal experience, yet opens you up to a wider world." Galleys will go out to reviewers and selected booksellers with rave quotes from BDD reps. Baldwin will tour and also do Internet publicity, including to the sizable Sikh community, which has a large Internet presence.
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GENE HACKMAN AND DANIEL LENIHAN
Wake of the Perdido Star
Newmarket Press (Oct.)
It started as a challenge over lunch between old friends, except the pals were Academy Award“winner Gene Hackman and renowned underwater archeologist Daniel Lenihan. "We said, 'why don't we do something fun like write a pirate novel?'' Hackman tells PW. That was three years ago. As the jokes subsided, Hackman realized his friend was serious, so he wrote a sample chapter as an "audition."
"Strangely enough, that chapter's still in the book," says Hackman. In fact, the stormy shipwreck sequence remains one of the pivotal plot twists in Wake of the Perdido Star. Lenihan and Hackman used their shared interest in books and deep-sea diving to spin the tale of a young man's coming of age, circa 1800. With a nod to old-fashioned seafaring stories, they created a lively cast of characters revolving around the adventures of Jack O'Reilly, who survives shipwrecks and pirates in his quest to avenge an injustice done to his family. The result is a cross between Treasure Islandand Raiders of the Lost Ark..
They established the basic premise early on: "We were trying to write a story that we would like to have read," explains Lenihan. The two Sante Fe neighbors often share books, including those by Ken Follett, Thomas Harris and Martin Cruz Smith. They both like Hemingway, London and Steinbeck classics.
Only once did they try to actually write together, but, says Hackman, "It never really worked." Instead, they met weekly. "We'd sit and talk, exchange pages and bad-mouth each other's writing a little," he adds. Writing as a tag team they'd feed off each other's ideas, one's continually surprising the other.
Part of the fun came out of not ever thinking the story would get published. Then Newmarket publisher Esther Margolis hooked "the boys" up with former Dutton publisher and editor Richard Marek, who discovered Robert Ludlum and worked with Harris, James Baldwin and David Morrell. "Not knowing much about publishing, we were not very intimidated by that," recalls Hackman. "He just seemed like a nice guy."
Marek kept the men on course. "The big bugaboo was viewpoint," Hackman explains. "We had too many characters." So they spent the last eight months in the not-so-fun editing process. "We probably threw a whole book out," Lenihan allows. "The one thing we can honestly say is that nobody wrote any of this except us," remarks Hackman. As for future writing projects, they're open to the idea -- but will wait and see how this one sails.
-- BRIDGET KINSELLA
SALES TIPS: With a 75,000 first printing and a $100,000 marketing budget, this is a big book for Newmarket. Margolis says that 3000 advance reading copies will go out this month "to whet the appetite." And with Hackman as coauthor, media attention is a given.
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PAUL GRINER
Collectors
Random House (Sept.)
For his first novel, Paul Griner began at the end. He had previously written the final chapter and then set about figuring out how the characters arrived there. The result is Collectors, the story of Jean Dubonnet and her destructive relationship with Stephen Cain. "It was comforting to have the end," Griner says, "because I knew where I was going, even if I didn't know how I'd get there." Griner's literary interest lies in "the intersection of fate and character," or how people become complicit, in some way, in their own fates by putting themselves knowingly in danger's path. People, he says, tend to understand the danger inherent in certain situations, but believe it will not affect them -- and they enter the situation knowing the danger remains real. Griner, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville, is fascinated by that choice and aims in his work to explore the factors that drive people to it. "It's something I like to explore. It's safer to do it on paper than in real life."
Collectors d s just that. Beginning with Jean and Stephen meeting at a wedding, Griner aims to draw the reader into Dubonnet's world, as she ignores the warning signs from Cain's past -- his wife drowned, his fiancé died in an "accident" -- and ends up a victim, her relationship spiraling downward and out of control. Says Griner, "The question is, always, how complicit are we in our own fate. I want people to emerge wrestling with that question and not having a clear answer."
As a side plot, both characters are collectors -- he of binoculars, she of pens -- an idea that Griner says hit him while rewriting and "just clicked." Griner, author of a book of short stories, Follow Me (Random House, 1996), tells PW that he will soon begin work on a second novel that, like Collectors, deals with the clash of circumstance and character. -- MICHAEL KRESS
SALES TIPS: Griner is being compared to Ian McEwan, John Fowles and even Stephen King. According to RH editor Daniel Menaker, "There's something in Paul's book that speaks to the slightly obsessive quality in any of our psyches -- it's for anyone who wants to be unsettled or shaken up a bit." He adds, however, "There's a certain appropriateness about what happens that won't leave anyone upset." The novel will be featured on barnesandnoble.com.
LINDA NICOLS
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Handyman
Delacorte (Jan.)
It all came down to discipline, remembers Linda Nicols. "I'd never been able to sustain a novel past page 150. I realized that if I didn't learn to discipline myself, I'd die with all these books in me." Six years ago, Nicols, the mother of three sons and wife of a Tacoma, Wash., attorney, decided it was time to give the literary dreams she had harbored since college one last chance. Just to hedge her bets, however, she signed up for the classes she'd need as prerequisites for nursing school admission.
Nicols steeled herself to write something each and every day; she joined a writing workshop that met once a week. Eventually, she finished first drafts of four novels. "I figured the first three were just for practice," relates Nicols, "but when I asked the workshop teacher which manuscript was the most publishable, she chose the first one I'd written."
Handyman, says Nicols, "is a romantic comedy about the way love ought to be -- that when you're in trouble someone will help you." Maggie Ivey, a struggling single mom in San Francisco with a lecherous boss and a dead-end job, is signed up by a sympathetic friend for a pop psychologist's "21-Day Overhaul." But when Maggie arrives for her appointment, the handsome man in the doctor's chair is not a therapist but a contractor there to do a remodeling job -- something Maggie d sn't discover till she's fallen in love.
Encouraged by the positive feedback from her writer's group, Nicols bought a copy of the Writers Guide to Literary Agents at her local bookstore, highlighted all the agents she felt might be interested and sent off almost 20 queries. Four days later, Theresa Park of the Sanford Greenburger Agency called asking to see the manuscript. Within three weeks, Handyman had been sold to Delacorte. Then came the phone call offering Nicols seven figures for the film rights. "I totally lost it and had an anxiety attack. I told them I'd have to call them back -- which really freaked them out." Fortunately, Universal and DreamWorks persevered, and screenwriter Gary David Goldberg, creator of TV's Family Ties and Spin City, and director Tom Shadiak (Patch Adams) are set to bring Handyman to the screen.
Several weeks ago, Nicols received a letter proudly announcing that she had been accepted for the nursing school term beginning in January. "Just when you think you know what life will be like for the next 20 years," muses Nicols, "something you would never imagine, happens."
-- LUCINDA DYER
SALES TIPS:According to Delacorte associate publicity director Theresa Zoro, Handyman is certain to appeal to fans of Nora Ephron. Special Valentine's Day promotions will include electronic greeting cards sent to booksellers and selected media. Foreign rights have been sold in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Holland.
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TOVA MIRVIS
The Ladies Auxiliary
Norton (Oct.)
In the tiny Orthodox Jewish community in Memphis where Tova Mirvis was raised, Yiddish was spoken with a Southern accent, and fried chicken and black-eyed peas joined the challah on the Sabbath table. For her first novel, Mirvis, now based in New York City, has re-created this world as seen through the eyes of its female members, conjuring both its sheltering warmth and sometimes suffocating insularity with affection and sensitivity. "Everyone there knows each other, everyone's parents know each other, and everyone's grandparents know each other, too," recounts Mirvis, 27, who is still a practicing Orthodox Jew. "I wanted to convey what it's like to be on the inside of such a close-knit world, which I am, and also what it's like not to fit into this world, which I don't."
The outsider in Mirvis's novel is 34-year-old Batsheva, a painter and recent convert to Judaism who moves to the neighborhood from New York with her five-year-old daughter, Ayala, after she is widowed. Batsheva's free-spirited, albeit deeply spiritual, interpretation of the traditional Jewish woman's role quickly draws both criticism and admiration, eventually embroiling the community in a fight for its very soul. "The way that this world is so interested in trying to preserve itself is true to the Memphis where I grew up," says Mirvis. But she notes that this way of life also has its "beauty and positive aspects," and uses the religion's elaborate, family-focused holiday rituals to frame the story.
Admission to Columbia College first drew the young author away from Memphis, and she took an MFA at Columbia's creative writing program in 1998. She found her agent, Nicole Aragi of the Watkins Loomis Agency, during an internship at the agency while she was finishing her master's thesis. "All year I tried to work up the nerve to ask Nicole to read my novel," she recalls.
The book was sold to Norton last September following a three-way auction, and Mirvis, who is married to a lawyer, worked on rewrites during a bedrest imposed by a difficult pregnancy. (She gave birth to a healthy boy four months ago.) "It was a very stressful time for me," she recalls. "I spent two and a half months in bed, out of touch with reality. When I wrote, I felt like the women in the novel were keeping me company."
-- MALLAY CHARTERS
SALES TIPS:Editor Jill Bialosky calls Mirvis's debut "a literary book with a wide appeal"; the publisher is comparing it to Allegra Goodman's Kaaterskill Falls and to Rebecca Wells's The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Norton is sending Mirvis on a seven-city tour, and has scheduled appearances at major Jewish book fairs.
