The novelist and playwright Michael Frayn has a most philosophical bent. In his recent book of essays, The Human Touch—about humankind and science and snooker—he delights in the trouble that “counterfactuals” make for the determinists among us. He means those assertions that are contrary to facts as we know them, but which are true statements about states of affairs in alternative worlds. “If I'd known you were coming I would have baked a cake,” he cites, evoking a world in which someone knows something they did not, in fact, know, and proposing a consequential narrative.
This, of course, is the world of fiction—where tales are rooted in the not true, and which then follow a logic of their own, remaining answerable only to themselves. The author, far above lobbying for the reader to believe something about the real world, is content simply to persuade said reader for a few hours that another place might exist.
Twice a year, concurrent with our fall and spring announcement issues, we take a good listen to new voices in fiction—authors with their first novels coming in the new season. In the last few years we've noticed an increase in fiction either coming from writers born outside the U.S. or based on worlds that don't even pretend to be American. This spring season shows more of same. Four of the 10 authors that follow bring tales from faraway places, and were chosen from among a dozen other strong debuts with an international character or setting. Notable also among many of these books is an apparent return to a brand of fabulism not seen in several decades—Mohammed Hanif's comic farce about a political assassination; Ceridwen Dovey's political coup in an unnamed country; Sasa Stanisic's How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone—not at all unlike a Vonnegut work. These, together with a half-dozen home-grown first-timers, inject new promise into the new season. As Michael Frayn says, “What gives the world in front of us its significance... is that it is shot through with the iridescent gleam of all the other possibilities.”—Michael Coffey
Blood Kin
Ceridwen Dovey, 27
(Viking, Mar.)
Born: Pietermaritzburg, South Africa; now lives in New York City.
Favorite authors: John Cheever, Joan Didion, Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Naipaul, Norman Rush.
Career arc: From ethnographic filmmaker to anthropologist-in-training to debut novelist.
Plot: In the midst of a political coup in an unnamed country, the chef, barber and portraitist of an ex-president are held captive. In alternating first-person voices, the imprisoned characters and the women in their lives gradually reveal their complicity in the evil regime.
Author's toughest challenge: “I was concerned that setting the novel in a fictional country was simply a way of sidestepping the politics in post-apartheid South Africa. But in the end, using this form felt like a precondition for writing about my experiences growing up in South Africa without feeling hamstrung.”
Publisher's Pitch: Says editor Molly Hart, “Ceridwen's riveting and sensuous novel traces the silent creep of complicity among people close to those in power. The writing is utterly simple yet she elegantly grapples with humanity's most mercenary and animalistic instincts.”
Opening lines: “He came every two months for a sitting. Always early in the day, usually on a Friday, when he still had something vital in his face from the week's effort, but a mellowness in his eyes from the knowledge it was almost over. In the late spring, the fallen jacaranda petals lay luminous on the pavement... and his assistant would... strew them over the couch where he sat, or lay, or lounged for each portrait.” —Dick Donahue
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Mohammed Hanif, 42 (Knopf, May)
Born: Okara, Pakistan; now lives in London.
Favorite authors: Mario Vargas Llosa, Asad Mohammed Khan, Jorge Luis Borges, Jane Austen, J.M. Coetzee, Truman Capote.
Career arc: From flight cadet in the Pakistan Air Force (“I spent more time in libraries than on parade square”) to journalist to head of the BBC's Urdu Service.
Plot: The novel reimagines the mysterious 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistani dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq. The hero is Ali Shigri, a young air force pilot whose military commander father supposedly committed suicide. Assisted by colorful friends, Ali resolves to get to the bottom of his father's death and seek revenge.
Author's toughest challenge: “Juggling a full-time job with writing a novel. Scribbling in pubs and getting weird looks. Printing the first draft and realizing that it read like a first draft.”
Publisher's Pitch: “Hanif's voice is strikingly original and, for a first novel, remarkably assured, at once provocative, dark, hilarious, nimble and fiercely intelligent,” says publisher Sonny Mehta. “This portrait of a disheveled military reminds me of the classic Catch-22 or even MASH.”
Opening lines: “You might have seen me on TV after the crash. The clip is short and everything in it is sun bleached and faded. It was pulled after the first two bulletins because it seemed to be having an adverse impact on the morale of the country's armed forces. You can't see it in the clip but we are walking towards Pak One, which is parked behind the cameraman, in the middle of the runway.” —Suzanne Mantell
Child 44
Tom Rob Smith, 28
(Grand Central, May)
Born: London; still lives there.
Favorite authors: “Authors who've influenced this book: Thomas Harris, Graham Greene, Scott Turow, Dan Brown, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Harris.”
Career arc: From TV soaps script editor to creator of a Cambodian soap for the BBC to freelance TV and film writer.
Plot: In Stalin's Soviet Union, a former war hero and rising officer in the state security force is denounced by his enemies and confronted with the impossible: to save himself and his family, he must find a murderer that the government will not admit even exists.
Author's toughest challenge: “Child 44 started out as a screenplay pitch. My agent reasoned a Stalin-set thriller from an unknown would be a near-impossible sell. He suggested writing it as a novel. Working from the presumption I was writing a 'difficult sell' was tough. Every day I worried I was wasting my time. That concentrated me.”
Publisher's Pitch: “One of the most extraordinary debuts we've ever read,” says executive editor Mitch Hoffman. “On the surface, a propulsive, relentless page-turner. But at the same time, a terrifying evocation of a paranoid world where no one can be trusted, and a surprising story of love, family, hope and resilience.”
Opening lines: “Since Maria had decided to die her cat would have to fend for itself. She'd already cared for it far beyond the point where keeping a pet made any sense. Rats and mice had long since been trapped and eaten by the villagers. Domestic animals had disappeared shortly after that.”—D.D.
How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
Sasa Stanisic, 29 (Grove Atlantic, June)
Born: Visegrad, Bosnia; now lives in Leipzig, Germany.
Favorite authors: Eduardo Galeano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kurt Vonnegut, Ivo Andric.
Career arc: Failed poet to novelist.
Plot: Aleksandr Krsmanovic calls on the gift of storytelling to see him through his grandfather's sudden death. It is a gift he will have to call on again when soldiers transform his hometown of Višegrad, Bosnia, into a nightmarish landscape of terror and violence.
Author's toughest challenge: “Learning Latin. Learning to milk cows. Finding my way back home after that party at Sigrid's where someone thought it was a hilarious idea to mix absinthe in every single fluid, even the salad sauce. Living without a sink for a year, living without the Internet for three days.”
Publisher's Pitch: According to editor Lauren Wein, “Stanisic's haunting and addictive novel thrums with the joy of storytelling. It focuses on 1990s Bosnia, but it's really about seeing a small life in mythic terms. It is both a devastating lamentation for all that's lost and one big, refreshing, daring, original, tsunami-force wave of joie de vivre.”
Opening lines: “Grandpa Slavko measured my head with Granny's washing line, I got a magic hat, a pointy magic hat made of cardboard, and Grandpa Slavko said: I'm really still too young for this sort of thing, and you're already too old. So I got a magic hat with yellow and blue shooting stars on it, trailing yellow and blue tails, and I cut out a little crescent moon to go with them and two triangular rockets.” —Juan Martinez
My Name Is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare
Jess Winfield, 46 (Twelve, July)
Born: Lake Sherwood, Calif.; now lives in Hollywood.
Favorite authors: William Shakespeare, James Joyce, T.C. Boyle, Tom Robbins.
Career arc: From cofounder of the Reduced Shakespeare Company to London's West End performer to TV executive producer (Disney Television Animation; won two Emmys) to author.
Plot: After being cornered by DEA agents, a struggling UC—Santa Cruz grad student eats a giant mushroom and finds that his mind and stories have merged with William Shakespeare's.
Author's toughest challenge: “Writing dialogue for William Shakespeare. I remember thinking, 'Aren't you the cheeky one, putting words in the mouth of the greatest writer of all time?' Finding commonality with Shakespeare was what the book was about. As a youth, his life was just as chaotic as mine, so how could I go too far wrong?”
Publisher's pitch: Says acquiring editor Cary Goldstein, “A smart, mischievous, affecting picaresque, with Tom Stoppard smarts and the caustic, risky wit of a Sam Lipsyte. It should strike a chord with Bard aficionados and laymen alike. Not to mention slackers. Because there's hash. And lots of dirty sex.”
Opening lines: “Willie sat in the back row of a blocky white mini-bus, his hand cupped around an enormous psychedelic mushroom hidden under the denim jacket laid too-casually across his lap. The psilocybe cubensis was fresh, not dried; sweating lightly, it was smooth and moist to the touch.... Though he didn't know it, the mushroom's cap was exactly the size and shape of Queen Elizabeth I's left tit.” —J.M.
Occupational Hazards
Jonathan Segura, 29
(Simon & Schuster, July)
Born: Newport News, Va.; now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Favorite authors: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Martin Amis, Elmore Leonard, Graham Greene, Hunter S. Thompson, Nathanael West, David Gates, James Ellroy, James Cain.
Career arc: From alterna-rag hack to grad student to unemployed to editorial geek for hire to ballet program editor to PW Reviews editor.
Plot: A burnt-out, 30-something reporter stumbles on a lead that eventually uncovers a smalltown conspiracy that may lead him back to his editor-in-chief.
Author's toughest challenge: “I was stuck somewhere in like draft eight and couldn't figure out what was missing. And then a friend read it and said I needed a plot. You know: things have to happen. After that, the toughest challenge has been convincing people that the narrator isn't me. He's not.”
Publisher's pitch: Says editor Sarah Hochman, “Elmore Leonard meets Bret Easton Ellis in this fast-paced, tightly plotted newsroom thriller, in which our petulant hero finds his own sharply funny, endearingly dysfunctional self along the way. Segura demonstrates a pitch-perfect flair for dark humor and suspense.”
Opening lines: “Could be I'm still drunk. Or maybe this is the hangover that'll do me in. Bottom line: Shouldn't be speeding to cover a hostage situation. But it's early Monday, deadline's Wednesday and it's been a slow week. Began this errand at home. Got the car started on the first try despite the sub-zero temperature. Headed downtown, flipped on the scanner and heard the chatter.”—J.M.
A Richer Dust
Amy Boaz, 39
(Permanent Press, Mar.)
Born: Albuquerque, N.Mex.; now lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Favorite authors: “I cleanse the palate by reading French or German—Paul Éluard or the Brüder Grimm. Also, Richmond Lattimore's translation of the Gospels and, always, Saul Bellow.”
Career arc: From comparative lit student at NYU to stints at women's magazines and in publishing. “Now I review books and occasionally teach—all the while scribbling secretly.”
Plot: A near-deaf British painter, Doll, accompanies a famous philosopher and his German wife to Taos, N.Mex., to start an art colony in 1924. The experiment blows apart, but Doll braves it out in New Mexico, and as the novel cuts between then and 1963, she finds love for the first time.
Author's toughest challenge: “Being torn between wanting people to read my writing and guarding it for myself.”
Publisher's pitch: “The book is a fascinating period piece with evocative writing that makes things come alive without any false notes,” says copublisher Martin Shepard. “You get a great sense of the landscape and the characters. It shows where someone can go on their own when put into a new environment.”
Opening lines: “I set foot in New Mexico and I saw—crows. Sleek, oily blackbirds perched in cottonwood trees around the desolate station. They scolded us as we stumbled out of the train at Lamy. They sounded nothing like the thin old squawkers I had known back in London, scruffy and half-starved that winter of 1924. These ravens were as big as my new black sombrero, bartered from the Chinamen as we came through New York.” —S.M.
Sun Going Down
Jack Todd, 61
(Touchstone, May)
Born: Scottsbluff, Neb.
Favorite authors: Mark Twain (“has always been a huge influence”), Steinbeck, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy and Mari Sandoz.
Career arc: From journalist to Vietnam deserter (in Canada) to memoirist to retired sports columnist.
Plot: This multigenerational novel, the first in a projected trilogy, follows the Paint family from the Civil War to the Great Depression and the settlement of the American West. It was inspired by letters and diaries from the Todd family.
Author's toughest challenge: “I don't think this work would exist if I hadn't smashed my hip in 2002. I was laid up for two years, and that gave me a lot of time to think and do research. The one thing I decided to stick to was the family story; I thought that would give me a skeleton.”
Publisher's pitch: Says editor-in-chief Trish Todd (possibly a distant relation), “I compare this to Lonesome Dove. It's a great combination of commercial and literary; epic in the old-fashioned sense of the word. You can see the development of the country through the development of this family.”
Opening lines: “Eb Paint woke at dawn to a caressing fog, his eyelids fluttering where damp sycamore leaves dripped mist. He tried to cuss but the word stuck in his whiskey-parched throat; he was too dry to speak or spit. The fire was dead and the stink of wet smoke hung where blackened cottonwood boughs leaked steam. He tried to recall why he hated that smell so, gave up the effort and parsed the river without opening his eyes.” —Judith Rosen
Three Girls and Their Brother
Theresa Rebeck, 46
(Shaye Areheart Books, Mar.)
Born: Cincinnati, Ohio; now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Favorite authors: Dickens, George Eliot, Chekhov, Molière, Ross Macdonald.
Career arc: From playwright and TV writer (including a stint with NYPD Blue) to novelist.
Plot: When the New Yorker dubs a noted literary critic's granddaughters “The It Girls of the Twenty-first Century,” the trio is propelled into the limelight. The sisters' resulting rivalry prompts a virtual breakdown in their brother, while an incident with a famous movie star threatens to unhinge the whole family.
Author's toughest challenge: “Being a playwright, I think of language as attached to characters. I love novels told from the third-person point of view, but I can't write them, because I don't know who's talking. It took me a long time to write the first 50 pages. I was instinctively feeling my way through, learning how to hopscotch through time and place in a different way.”
Publisher's pitch: “I knew Theresa as a leading female playwright,” says Areheart. “From reading the first couple of pages, I thought that there's something really special here. It's so unlike anything else I've read. It's exciting and sexy—and a lot of fun.”
Opening lines: “Now that it's all over, everybody is saying it was the picture, that stupid picture was behind every disaster that would eventually befall my redheaded sisters. Not that anybody blames anybody. It's more like fate; the picture had to happen, and then everything else had to happen because the picture happened.” —J.R.
The Well and the Mine
Gin Phillips, 32
(Hawthorne, Mar.)
Born: Montgomery, Ala.; now lives in Birmingham, Ala.
Favorite authors: Toni Morrison, Tracy Chevalier, Lilian Nattel, David McCullough.
Career arc: Journalist to fiction writer.
Plot: In a 1930s Alabama coal-mining town, a nine-year-old girl witnesses a baby being thrown into a well in this story about death, race, hard work and family in the Depression-era South.
Author's toughest challenge: “Finding the balance of how to work in anecdotes from my maternal grandmother and her siblings who grew up in a coal-mining family in Carbon Hill, Ala., where the book is set, while building something totally new was one of the harder things to do. I wanted to be true to the spirit of what their lives were like while keeping it fictional.”
Publisher's pitch: “Gin takes an extraordinarily complex look at racial tensions in a small Southern town in a quiet way that is breathtaking,” says publisher Kate Sage. “You get one or two novels in your career that you would do anything to publish, and this is one of those for me.” Sage places Phillips on a par with Ellen Gilchrist and Anne Tyler.
Opening lines: “After she threw the baby in, nobody believed me for the longest time. But I kept hearing that splash. The back porch comes right off our kitchen, with wide gray-brown boards you can lose a penny between if you're not careful. The boards were warm with heat from the August air, but breathing was less trouble than it was during daytime.” —Hilary S. Kayle
