30 women novelists you should know

30 Novelists You Should Know – #11 Dara Horn

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Dara Horn writes exuberant, brainy novels about slices of Jewish life that might surprise you. For example, her 2009 novel All Other Nights is about a Jewish woman who served as a spy during the Civil War – for the Confederacy.

Race, class and the pull of conflicting loyalties

On one level of this multi-layered novel, the book is a thriller, with a driving plot about spies conducting their high-stakes activities on opposite sides of a war that split families as well as the nation. At another level, the novel is an exploration of race, class and the pull of conflicting loyalties, and a brilliant depiction of a society poised for extinction. Yet another layer examines a marriage that starts out as an act of espionage and evolves into something else.

Horn’s descriptions of the daily challenges and compromises that faced Jewish families in the South during the 19th century were eye-opening. I was particularly struck by a detail that has stayed with me in the years since I read the book: On Sunday mornings, all the Jewish families in Richmond, Virginia strolled the streets, finally able to breathe freely and relax because for a few hours all the Christian families – who normally judged them and worse – were in church.

 A thriller stuffed with ideas

Her latest novel, A Guide for the Perplexed, is a roller-coaster ride that hurtles you from the present day to the 19th century to the 12th century, all in search of answers to compelling questions about memory, history, identity and loyalty.

It sounds heady, but there is a gripping plot to propel you through the story. An American software genius has created an app that records every moment of users’ lives. She is abducted in Egypt, and her sister, always jealous of her success, must decide if and how to save her. And why did the Egyptians kidnap the genius? Not for the reasons you might expect.

All of this is tied up, in ways both wildly imaginative and practical, with the discovery of a rare manuscript more than 100 years ago, and a book written by the 12th century rabbi and philosopher Maimonides. The novel is stuffed with ideas and incidents, and you can feel the author’s glee as she knits together strands of history and philosophy.

Giddy with intellectual delight

Dara Horn’s four novels aren’t beach reads. But if you enjoy fiction that’s packed with historical detail and giddy with intellectual delight, Horn is a writer for you.

Dara Horn

Dara Horn

 

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #10 Elliott Holt

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Only 29 days until my novel, Her Own Vietnam, is released, and we’re on #10 in my countdown of 30 women novelists.

The power of the particular

Elliott Holt’s first novel, You Are One of Them, came out in 2013. Her website describes it as “A novel about secrets, betrayal and the friend who got away.”

This is a compelling tagline, but it could apply to a lot of books. It also misses the particularity of this novel, which in my opinion is the source of the book’s power. All of the secrecy, betrayal and unraveling of friendship in the novel take place in the shadows of two titanic historical forces: the Cold War and the global reshuffling that followed its conclusion.

A many-layered novel

In 1982, two 10-year-old girls growing up in Washington, DC write letters to the Soviet premier to advocate for peace. Jennifer’s letter gets published in the newspaper to great acclaim, and she is invited to travel to Moscow with her family to meet Yuri Andropov. Sarah’s letter seems to get lost.

The close friendship between the two girls also gets lost, as Jennifer becomes a celebrity while Sarah becomes an awkward and lonely teenager. Three year later, Jennifer and her family are killed in a plane crash.

Sarah grows into adulthood still obsessed by what happened to their friendship and by the Cold War that overshadowed both their childhoods. She decides to visit Russia – no longer the ominous Soviet Union – to learn the truth about Jennifer’s fate and the demise of their friendship.

I enjoyed this adroit novel on a number of levels. I love novels in which regular people recognize that politics and current events have a profound impact on their personal lives. Also, much of the book takes place in familiar Washington locales. Other sections are based in Moscow, as Russia and its citizens try to find their identities in a world that has radically shifted its shape.

A writer to watch

Holt is an interesting writer whose career has already taken intriguing turns. In 2007, New York magazine called her “one of the stars of tomorrow.” In 2010, she wrote a mystery story – on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Her short stories have been widely published and praised, including this one, published in Guernica.

I’m looking forward to Elliott Holt’s next novel. In the meantime, take a look at You Are One of Them. Both the title and the novel will send a chill skittering up your spine.

Elliott Holt

Elliott Holt

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #9 Masha Hamilton

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In the waning days before my novel Her Own Vietnam is released, I’m writing about 30 Women Novelists You Should Know. Today – Masha Hamilton.

I know this isn’t fair

It’s not really fair to consider a novelist’s non-writing life when you think about her literary work. For example, we all know of highly lauded male writers who are famous for being misogynistic jerks in real life. (OK, I admit I don’t read those writers for that very reason.)

But with the novelist Masha Hamilton, it’s difficult for me to separate my admiration for her books from my admiration for the way she conducts her life.

 Are you tired yet?

She spent most of her career as a journalist, reporting from Afghanistan, Kenya, Moscow and the Middle East, among other places. She served as the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan. Now she works for Concern Worldwide, an NGO that seeks to eliminate extreme poverty around the world. In her spare time, Masha founded two world literacy projects, the Camel Book Drive in Kenya and the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

Oh, and she’s written five acclaimed novels.

It’s true Masha Hamilton is a friend of mine. But c’mon, who could fail to be impressed by this level of literary and humanitarian accomplishment? Just reading about it makes me tired.

Oh, right – the books

Masha’s novels are Staircase of a Thousand Steps (2001), The Distance Between Us (2004), The Camel Bookmobile (2007), 31 Hours (2009) and What Changes Everything (2013), which has a wonderful book cover.

Her books deal with the vital issues of our time through the lens of compelling human stories. To enjoy the novels, you don’t need to know anything about the concerns she addresses – the lives of women in the Middle East, the toll of war on journalists and civilians, the challenge of spreading literacy in Kenya, the dangers of cultural naiveté, the lure of radicalism, the power of parental love. You can just let yourself be gripped by the plot, the suspense, the characters, and the tactile details that make you see, hear, smell and feel the locations, whether Afghanistan or Brooklyn.

I happen to be fond of books that persuade you toward a point of view. But Masha’s novels don’t do that.

They invite you instead to look behind all the warring points of view and find compassion for the striving, suffering human beings who are simply trying to do the best they can – for themselves, their families, their nations – with their one fleeting life.

Masha Hamilton

Masha Hamilton

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #8 Rene Denfeld

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There are many more than 30 wonderful women novelists you should know. But there are only 36 days left until my novel, Her Own Vietnam, is released. So I’m using this time to talk about women storytellers, both new (to me) and vintage.

Having a Rene Denfeld moment

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I had never heard of Lana del Ray. Then suddenly her name and her music were everywhere: on the radio, on TV, playing in friends’ cars, showing up on Facebook.

I’m having that kind of a moment with Rene Denfeld. First I started seeing rapturous reviews for her novel, The Enchanted. Later I came across this powerful article by Denfeld.

Beautiful, strange and stirring

One night I started to read her novel. The next morning a comment from her appeared in my Facebook feed. (Apparently we have friends in common.)

If you’ve read the beautiful, strange and stirring novel The Enchanted, you will understand how disconcerting it was to have the creator of that hallucinatory universe pop up on Facebook.

The Enchanted takes place largely in an old stone prison, inside a basement dungeon that serves as the prison’s death row. The narrator, Arden, is waiting his turn to die for a crime so horrific he will not describe it.

Even The Lady, the intrepid death row investigator who is the novel’s main character, walks a little faster when she passes his cell. Her job is to find evidence that will get a prisoner’s death sentence commuted to life in prison. But her current client, a murderer named York, is different from all the rest. He wants to die.

Not the standard ingredients

An unnamed investigator with her own troubled past, a fallen priest, a heartbroken warden, a clutch of death row inmates, and a narrator who is a condemned murderer and is certainly twisted if not mad – these are not the usual ingredients for a thing of beauty. And yet the novel is beautiful. Open the book anywhere at random, and you’ll find an idea, a description, a piece of dialogue that is fresh and lovely.

The Enchanted is not one of those novels where you turn the last page and lament the need to leave the world it created. You rejoice at your freedom to leave that “enchanted place.” But you have learned to see that world in an entirely new way.

Rene Denfeld

Rene Denfeld

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #7 Jennifer Haigh

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Only 40 days until my novel Her Own Vietnam is released! In the meantime, I’m blogging about 30 women novelists you should know.

The quiet power of Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh is one of those writers, like Alice McDermott, whose quiet and modest narrative voice hides how beautifully she creates complex, breathing characters and situations.

Her first novel, Mrs. Kimble, told the story of three women who, over time, all make the same mistake of marrying Ken Kimble. While not my favorite of her books, it won the 2004 Pen/Hemingway Award for debut fiction.

Families and communities on the cusp of change

Baker Towers blew me away with its exploration of life in a Pennsylvania mining town called Bakerton in the years following WWII. The towers in question are not church steeples or university spires, but two gigantic piles of coal waste – which tells you all you need to know about why the daughters and sons of the Novak family try so desperately to escape or resign themselves to the town.

This year Haigh came back to Bakerton with News from Heaven, a collection of interconnected short stories that provides a ground-level glimpse of small-town America as it vanishes before the eyes of its dwindling residents. The town has been mined out and is now collapsing in on itself, and its families must learn to live in the empty skeleton of their hometown, or go elsewhere to build new lives.

The Condition portrays a family in dissolution. A daughter has Turner’s syndrome, which keeps people perpetually in a childlike state; the afflictions of the other family members are less easy to diagnose.

The moment before it all falls apart

My current favorite of Jennifer Haigh’s novels is Faith, a surprisingly fresh take on a situation we are all too familiar with: a Catholic priest has been accused of sexually abusing a young boy. The novel is narrated by the priest’s sister, who illuminates the situation from several points of view, including those of her brother and the mother of the child he is accused of violating.

The book provides an intimate view of a working class, devoutly Catholic community in New England as their faith in the Church is beginning to crumble. You can watch the book trailer here.

What happens next

Jennifer Haigh told the novelist Caroline Leavitt, “I write novels for the same reason I read them: to find out what happens next.” Read Haigh’s books for the plot – or for the breathtaking portrayals of familiar worlds in the process of disintegrating.

Jennifer Haigh

Jennifer Haigh