novels

A book tour with coffee and pajamas

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Virtual Book Tour Banner

You may have read stories in which authors recount the travails of their book tours: the exhausting travel, the cold motel rooms, the bookstore audiences composed of one compassionate bookseller and a person waiting out a rainstorm.

Not me. Next week I’ll be doing a virtual book tour – visiting a range of very cool blogs and discussing everything from the challenges of naming characters to the thoughts and inspirations behind specific lines in Her Own Vietnam.

From Monday through Friday, every day I’ll visit a new blog – two blogs on some days. And you’re invited to each one.

Check out the tour schedule here: http://grabthelapels.weebly.com/home/lynn-kanters-virtual-book-tour.

Best of all, you can pour yourself some coffee and join the tour in your pajamas. And if only one person shows up, I’ll never know.

 

Update from Book World

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It’s taken so long, but now that it’s almost here, I can’t quite believe it. Her Own Vietnam will be published on November 1, 2014 – a little more than 48 hours from now.

So what exactly happens on the publication day?

On November 1, the book becomes available for sale on book websites and in some brick and mortar bookstores. (It’s already available from the publisher, here.) You’ll be able to read Her Own Vietnam as a paperback, a Kindle book, or any other ebook format.

If you belong to Goodreads, they will be giving away two signed copies of Her Own Vietnam starting October 30 at midnight. I’ll post that link when it goes live.

I’ll be skipping around the Internet, being interviewed and posting guest articles at a variety of really cool book blogs and sites. And my publisher is expecting reviews of the novel to appear in some key outlets over the next few weeks.

There’s a way you can get into the act too: by reading Her Own Vietnam and writing a brief review (1-2 sentences will do) on book sites like Amazon and Goodreads.

I’ll be sharing with you all the details as we get closer and closer to the book launch. And after that, Her Own Vietnam will no longer be mine. It will belong to you, the reader.

 

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #13 Caroline Leavitt

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As I count down to the publication date of Her Own Vietnam, I’m counting up to 30 fantastic novelists you should know.

Empty-handed but not for long

I met Caroline Leavitt once, for 30 seconds. She was about to do a reading at a book festival; I was in the audience.

I planned to pick up her book after the reading, so when we met I was a little embarrassed to be empty-handed. I did buy the book afterwards, and I’m glad I did, because it turned out to be my favorite of her novels: Is This Tomorrow?

Is This Tomorrow?

In the novel, Ava Lark and her young son Lewis move into a lovely Boston suburb, hoping for a new start. Instead, they are snubbed and ostracized.

The year is 1956, and everything about Ava is wrong for her new community. She’s divorced, she’s Jewish, she works for a living – and she’s beautiful, which the local husbands have noticed. When a child in the neighborhood disappears, a child who is friends with Ava’s son and has spent time at her house even when Lewis was gone, the town’s suspicion turns sinister.

Leavitt does a powerful job of creating the atmosphere of casual anti-Semitism and rabid anti-Communism that permeates the leafy suburb. Anyone with a different style, anyone with different values, anyone Jewish is immediately suspected of being a Communist.

Ava Lark is a compelling character: lively, compassionate, bold but vulnerable. She’s the kind of outsider you long to befriend, but Leavitt makes you wonder: if you lived in that town, with its harshly enforced code of conformity, would you dare to reach out to someone like Ava?

 She’s a little busy

Caroline Leavitt keeps herself busy. She writes essays, screenplays and book reviews. She teaches writing. She maintains a lively Facebook presence and writes a wonderful blog, on which she interviews all kinds of authors. And she’s a New York Times bestselling author who has written ten novels, with another coming out in 2015, called Cruel Beautiful World.

I know where I’m going to be when that new book of hers is released. On the couch, reading and falling deeply into the fraught, luminous world created by Caroline Leavitt.

Caroline Leavitt

30 Women Novelists You Should Know – #12 Lily King

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As I count down the days to the launch of my novel Her Own Vietnam, I’m writing about wonderful women novelists.

Gorgeous writing and powerful emotional pull, if you like that sort of thing

I’ve now read three of Lily King’s four novels, and I still can’t say exactly what it is that stamps a novel as a work of Lily King. The books are so different, set in different times and places with characters who share little in common, united only by the gorgeous writing and the powerful emotional pull of each novel.

The Pleasing Hour is about a young American woman who goes to Paris to work as an au pair and escape a tragedy in her past, only to find that the past is more alive in Europe than anywhere, and that tragedy shadows us all.

In The English Teacher, a high school English teacher with a teenaged son marries a man with teenagers of his own, and her world begins to unravel. Once you read this book, you’ll never think of Tess of the D’Ubervilles the same way again.

Euphoria

Her latest book, Euphoria, is about three anthropologists in the 1930s, studying and living among tribes in Papua New Guinea. The three scientists – an American woman who has written a shocking and best-selling book about the sex lives of a tribe, her Australian husband and an English man they know only slightly – plunge into a love triangle that’s a vortex of passion, intellectual zeal, rivalry, ambition, and perhaps a dash of madness.

The novel immediately creates an atmosphere of peril and strangeness. By the time I read the first five sentences, I was hooked: I had to know what had happened and what would happen next, even though I suspected it would be harrowing. And it was – harrowing, and uplifting and most of all, fascinating. The details about how anthropologists conduct their work and their lives were astounding.

A growing sense of dread

As I read, I was gripped by a growing sense of dread, both that something awful was about to happen and that the book was coming to an end. You know that feeling of grief you have when you finish a beloved book? Well, authors feel that too, as Lily King wrote here.

On my bookshelf, Lily King’s Euphoria stands next to Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. It seems fitting.

Lily King

Lily King

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