The Algonquin Reader: Spring 2019

Get an inside look at Algonquin’s outstanding forthcoming fiction with the Spring 2019 Algonquin Reader. Discover the inspiration behind each book through an original essay by the author. Then enjoy a short preview of each novel. 

IN THIS ISSUE:

Louis Bayard, author of Courting Mr. Lincoln, discusses how even though 9,100 books have been written about our sixteenth president, “we still don’t have a handle on him.” As Bayard dove into the historical record and discovered a surprisingly charming young Mary Todd, he also “found another figure lurking in the shadows. His name was Joshua Speed” (p. 3). 

While writing her post-apocalyptic debut, The Lightest Object in the Universe, Kimi Eisele wondered not so much about the end times, but about “what we’d do after the end times—together, with our creativity, not just out of necessity but also out of love” (p. 11).

Set on the Great Plains in the early twentieth century, Michael Parker’s new novel, Prairie Fever, follows two sisters who have a seemingly unshakable bond. But, as Parker writes, as years pass, “remembering a familiarity weakened by time, by choices, by circumstances, is difficult for all of us” (p. 20).

While working as an ethnographer in a bustling slum in Bangalore, India, Mathangi Subramanian met many “women whose survival is the ultimate revenge.” Their stories came to inspire Subramanian’s debut novel, A People’s History of Heaven (p. 28).

Australian author Felicity McLean tells how her great-grandfather might have had a ghost that grew older with him. This family history, as well as the novels The Virgin Suicides and Picnic at Hanging Rock, heavily influenced her debut, The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone (p. 36).

Tim Mason, author of The Darwin Affair, describes how Inspector Bucket from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House came to haunt him “in the best way.” Add his father’s love for Charles Darwin and his own fascination with Victorian England, and Mason’s exciting historical thriller began to take shape (p. 44).