One again, we highlight 10 promising fiction debuts for our seasonal announcement issue. This time around, our selections have an international flavor, with authors from all points in the U.S., plus Northern Ireland, England and Zimbabwe. Jimmy Santiago Baca, an American poet and memoirist of Indio-Mexican descent, starts us off talking about how his first novel evolved.
BlacklandsBelinda Bauer, 46(S&S, Jan.)Born: England, now lives in Wales, via South Africa and CaliforniaFavorite authors: Stephen King, Bill Bryson, Jane Austen, Neal StephensonCareer arc: Dishwashing, bookmaking, journalism, screenwriting, gardening, novelist.Plot: A 12-year-old boy, determined to solve the mystery behind his uncle's disappearance, begins corresponding with an incarcerated serial killer. A dangerous cat-and-mouse game ensues.Author's toughest challenge: “Getting inside the head of a pedophile without making the book explicit. I wanted it to be a teenager's book as much as anything and hope I have pitched it just right so that people are chilled by [the pedophile's] thoughts without being repelled.”Publisher's pitch: Editor Marysue Rucci calls Blacklands “the best psychological suspense I've read in years—think The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time meets The Silence of the Lambs. This novel is fiendishly imaginative and terrifying—and compulsively readable.”Opening lines: “Exmoor dripped with dirty bracken, rough, colorless grass, prickly gorse, and last year's heather, so black it looked as if wet fire had swept across the landscape, taking the trees with it and leaving the moor cold and exposed to face the winter unprotected. Drizzle dissolved the close horizons and blurred heaven and earth into a grey cocoon around the only visible landmark—a twelve-year-old boy in slick black waterproof trousers but no hat, alone with a spade.”Moonlight in Odessa
Janet Skeslien Charles, 37
(Bloomsbury, Sept.)
Born: Shelby, Mont.; now divides time between France, Montana and South Carolina
Favorite authors: Tillie Olsen, Clarice Lispector, Barbara Pym, Haven Kimmel, John Berendt.
Career arc: From a wheat farm in Montana to Odessa, Ukraine, as a Soros Fellow to a writer in Paris, France.
Plot:A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian meets Desperate Housewives in this exploration of the booming business of Russian e-mail—order brides, an industry where love and marriage collide with sex and commerce.
Author's toughest challenge: “In college, I translated letters from Russian mail-order brides and interpreted for women who came to Montana. In Ukraine, I met women who married men they barely knew to escape poverty. I saw how nice guys could be corrupted by the power they had over foreign women who didn't speak the language. The challenge was to take this knowledge and experience and use it to create fictional characters.”
Publisher's pitch: Says editor Kathy Belden, “Moonlight in Odessa examines the choices and sacrifices people make in pursuit of love and stability. It's an absolute delight to read, with a dynamic protagonist in Daria and enough plot twists to keep any reader turning the pages.”
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Heidi Durrow, 40
(Algonquin, Feb.)
Born: Seattle, Wash.; now lives in L.A. and New York.
Favorite authors: Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, George Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez.
Career arc: From corporate attorney to life skills trainer for NBA and NFL players, Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival cofounder, novelist.
Plot: After surviving a family tragedy, 11-year-old Rachel is sent to live with her Southern black grandmother and aunt. The daughter of a white Danish immigrant and black G.I., she must confront her identity in a world that sees her as either black or white, while the terrible truth of the tragedy unfolds.
Author's toughest challenge: “Although inspired by a real event, it was a challenge to make this unfathomable tragedy fathomable. It was scary to put myself into the mindset of the mother as well as Rachel, to make it all add up.”
Publisher's pitch: “This moving portrait of a young girl will remind readers of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John,” says publicity director Michael Taeckens. The novel won the prestigious Bellwether Prize, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver, who said, “Haunting and lovely, pitch-perfect, this book could not be more timely.”
Opening lines: “ 'You my lucky piece,' Grandma says. Grandma has walked me the half block from the hospital lobby to the bus stop. Her hand is wrapped around mine like a leash. It is fall in Portland and it is raining. Puddle water has splashed up on my new shoes. My girl-in-a-new dress feeling has faded.”
Union Atlantic
Adam Haslett, 38
(Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, Jan.)
Born: Port Chester, N.Y.; now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Favorite authors: Edith Wharton, W.G. Sebald, James Baldwin, Amity Gaige, Nick Flynn, William Faulkner.
Career arc: Iowa Writers Workshop, Yale Law School, prize-winning author.
Plot: The novel revolves around four characters: Charlotte, a retired New England schoolteacher; her brother Henry, president of the New York Fed; Doug, a Boston financier whose garish home abuts Charlotte's property; and Nate, an impressionable teenager.
Author's toughest challenge: “Writing my first novel was akin to being lost at sea surrounded by flotsam and jetsam and asked to assemble from the debris a boat without aid of tools while treading water. Most days it sank. Two years in, I strapped myself to the raft I'd managed to cobble together and built from there. After four years I could sleep in it without being rained on. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.”
Publisher's pitch: Says editor Nan Talese, “Adam's great triumph, aside from his language, is that he has given readers this whole decade through marvelously realized characters and made our financial and moral reality alive and lived through story.”
Opening lines: “Their second night in port at Bahrain, someone on the Admiral's staff decided the crew of the Vincennes deserved at least a free pack of cigarettes each. The gesture went over well until the canteen ran out and then the dispensing machines, leaving fifty or so enlisted men feeling cheated of the one recognition anyone had offered of what they had been through.”
The Calligrapher's Daughter
Eugenia Kim, 57
(Henry Holt, Sept.)
Born: White Plains, N.Y.; now lives in Washington, D.C.
Favorite authors: James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Philip Pullman, Mary Oliver, Younghill Kang.
Career arc: From bartender to graphic designer, Bennington M.F.A. grad, debut novelist.
Plot: Inspired by the life of the author's mother and spanning 30 years, the novel follows a once privileged young woman who dares to fight for a brighter future in early 20th-century Japanese-occupied Korea.
Author's toughest challenge: “Originally I sought to convey the authenticity of my family's stories through nonfiction, but realized that the opportunities of fiction laid on the backdrop of history actually allowed for more emotional truth.”
Publisher's pitch: According to acquiring editor Helen Atsma, “Eugenia Kim's sweeping debut is at once the riveting story of one of the most winning protagonists I've ever encountered in fiction, and also a profoundly moving portrait of life in Korea during the Japanese occupation. It's perfect for fans of Lisa See and Amy Tan.”
Opening lines: “I learned I had no name on the same day I learned fear. Until that day, I had answered to Baby, Daughter or Child, so for the first five years of my life hadn't known I ought to have a name. Nor did I know that those years had seen more than fifty thousand of my Korean countrymen arrested and hundreds more murdered. My father, frowning as he did when he spoke of the Japanese, said we were merely fodder for a gluttonous assimilation.”
Mathilda Savitch
Victor Lodato
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept.)
Born: Hoboken, N.J.; now lives in Tucson, Ariz.
Favorite writers: Anton Chekhov, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Wislawa Szymborska, Ian McEwan, Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Jean Genet, Jonathan Franzen.
Career arc: From actor to performance artist, poet, playwright, novelist.
Plot: One year after the death of her beloved older sister, 13-year-old Mathilda Savitch sets out to unravel the knotty circumstances surrounding the sister's final months.
Author's toughest challenge: “I needed to exercise constant vigilance to insure that I remained true to a child's voice. I had to keep the adult in me at bay, in order to make this book feel like a report from the front lines of adolescence. For six years, I basically had to pretend I was 12 again.”
Publisher's pitch: Says executive editor Courtney Hodell, “This is a fierce, funny and wholly original novel about a young girl looking for the answers to everything from 'Why should I like boys?' to 'How did my sister die?' Savvy, vulnerable, hilarious and heartbreaking, it is a remarkable debut.”
Opening lines: “I want to be awful. I want to do awful things and why not? Dull is dull is dull is my life. Like now, it's night... and the two of them reading reading reading with their eyes moving like the lights inside a copy machine. When I was helping put the dishes in the washer tonight, I broke a plate. I said sorry Ma it slipped. But it didn't slip, that's how I am sometimes, and I want to be worse.”
Rizzo's War
Lou Manfredo, 59
(Minotaur Books, Oct.)
Born: Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Favorite authors: James L. Swanson, James Jones, Ken Follett, William Goldman, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mario Puzo, Ian Fleming, Stephen King, J.D. Salinger.
Career arc: From a court officer in New York to a crime fiction author.
Plot: Veteran cop Joe Rizzo, a charismatic operator with a questionable past, teaches his rookie partner, Mike McQueen, about the shades of gray involved in being a detective over a year of cases in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
Author's toughest challenge: “It was my intention to write a completely realistic novel, one which could be sharply pragmatic with only minimal cynicism. Crafting Rizzo so that he tempered cynical circumstances with a purer, less destructive pragmatism was, from a writer's perspective, a daunting tightrope.”
Publisher's pitch: “Fans of Ed McBain, Joseph Wambaugh and Richard Price won't want to miss Manfredo's exciting and authentic novel of real-world police work in the ethical minefield of New York City,” says editor Kelley Ragland.
Opening lines: “The fear enveloped her, and yet, despite it, she found herself oddly detached, being from body, as she ran frantically from the stifling grip of the subway station out into the rainy, darkened street. Her physiology now took full control, and her pupils dilated in the dim light to scan the streets, the storefronts, the randomly parked automobiles. Like a laser her vision locked on to him, indiscriminate in the distance. Her brain computed: one hundred yards away.”
The Ghosts of Belfast
Stuart Neville, 37
(Soho Crime, Oct.)
Born: Armagh, Northern Ireland.
Favorite authors: James Ellroy, John le Carré, Cormac McCarthy, Stephen King, William Goldman, Ted Lewis, early Thomas Harris.
Career arc: From struggling musician and composer to Web developer, then debut novelist.
Plot: Gerry Fegan, a former IRA hit man in Northern Ireland, is haunted by the ghosts of his victims. In order to appease them, he's going to have to kill the men who gave him his orders. Along the way, a woman and her daughter offer Fegan the prospect of a new life, but is it too late?
Author's toughest challenge: “The hardest part was keeping my head down until the book was done. It seems such a strange, pointless thing to devote yourself to, and the self-doubt can strip away your resolve if you let it. I never told anyone that I was writing until I had a publishing deal; it seemed such a ridiculous thing to be spending my time on.”
Publisher's pitch: Says Soho Press publisher Laura Hruska, “Stuart Neville transcends genres. He deals with guilt, redemption and spiritual salvation in a page-turning thriller. This is a great post-Troubles Irish novel, but also a major contribution to world literature.”
Opening lines: “Maybe if he had one more drink they'd leave him alone. Gerry Fegan told himself that lie before every swallow. He chased the whiskey's burn with a cool black mouthful of Guinness and placed the glass on the table. Look up and they'll be gone, he thought.”
The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
Gina Ochsner, 39
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Feb.)
Born: Salem, Ore.
Favorite authors: George Saunders, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Bohumil Hrabal, Milorad Pavic and Anton Chekhov.
Career arc: From dog walker to cheese shop clerk, teacher, author.
Plot: Tanya, a young woman in post-Soviet Russia, carries a notebook wherever she goes, recording her dreams of finding love and escaping her job at the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum. When the museum's director hears of a mysterious American group seeking to fund art in Russia, it looks like Tanya might get her chance at a better life.
Author's toughest challenge: “I remember somebody saying in a writing workshop, 'You shouldn't write about a culture you don't know,' and I was so depressed. It felt like the world had closed down if you could only write what you knew. I thought, Maybe they're right. Maybe I have no right to imagine what this Russian woman is thinking or feeling.”
Publisher's pitch: Says publicity manager Alia Hanna Habib, “Written by a critically acclaimed short story writer, this fairy tale for grownups is about finding hope and love in a place the world seems to have forgotten.”
Opening lines: “Olga had never been one for numbers, rarely thought in pictures, and couldn't carry a tune to save her soul—had in fact been asked many times to not sing. But as a girl she'd collected languages the same way people collected keys or buttons. At night she dreamt in other languages, and she woke in the morning with spoonfuls of those foreign sounds still on her tongue.”
The Boy Next Door
Irene Sabatini, 41
(Little, Brown, Sept.)
Born: Hwange, a coal-mining town in southern Zimbabwe; now lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
Favorite authors: Carol Shields, Jorge Amado, Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, Sarah Waters, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Mikhail Bulgakov, Uwem Akpan, Nick Hornby.
Career arc: from psychology graduate in Harare and London to traveler and teacher in Bogotá, researcher in Barbados, editor in Harare, author in Geneva.
Plot: In Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the son of Lindiwe Bishop's white neighbor, 17-year-old Ian McKenzie, is arrested for a terrible crime. A year later he returns home under mysterious circumstances. The brash, boisterous boy fascinates 15-year-old Lindiwe. Despite her mother's warnings to stay away, something grows between them—becoming stronger and stronger in a world that wants nothing more than to divide them.
Author's toughest challenge: “Ian is such a colorful character in the book, with a very off-the-wall vocabulary: I had to rein myself in because I was having so much fun with him and he was in danger of becoming a parody of himself.”
Publisher's pitch: Executive editor Judy Clain calls the novel “a moving and powerful love story set against the backdrop of political upheaval in Zimbabwe after independence.”
Opening lines: “Two days after I turned fourteen the son of our neighbor set his stepmother alight. A week later the police came. I was reading Sue Barton, Senior Nurse on the veranda, and I was at the part when Dr. Bill Barry proposes to Sue Barton.”
