Excerpt of Chapter 1 The fan stopped with the screech of a dying animal. The heat, pushed aside all this time, invaded the room again. He remained motionless, staring into the darkness. Another power failure, he told himself, feeling immediate guilt for not jumping out of bed to unplug the refrigerator. The coils might burn […]
Chapter 1: Refuge Clara regained consciousness on a train, as if she’d been floating below the surface of a dark, stagnant pond and suddenly broke through to air and light. She blinked and glanced around with aching eyes and recognized the interior of a Metroliner and the blurred landscape rushing by, familiar from myriad trips […]
Although Speak Now is very much a literary novel like your previous four books, it also feels at times like a psychological thriller. When you were writing it, did it feel like you were moving in a different direction than your other novels? Yes, in the sense that I had to work out the “thriller” […]
CHAPTER ONE: 1994 Ten days after her grandfather died, Jackie Ishida pulled into the entrance of the Tara Estates, the apartment complex where he’d lived with her aunt and uncle. It was eleven a.m. on a Saturday, February, 1994. Normally at this time she’d be studying already—she was in her third year of law school […]
What gave you the idea for this book? There were two distinct seeds. The first was a story I heard in high school about a man who claimed to have killed some teenagers in the Watts riots. I heard this story from my history teacher, and what really struck me was that this man, my […]
Chapter 1 The Town THWAP. PLOINK-A-CHINK! “That little prick,” she muttered, opening her eyes. She’d been wrestling with insomnia since her mid-fifties, and she cherished what little sleep came her way. The woman knew the local sounds of the night: cats, dogs, the occasional backfire or squealing tire of an adolescent joy ride through the […]
PART I Last May my whole family drove out to JFK Airport to meet Raymond. He had been gone for six years, and Dad was carrying his camera as if Ray were some kind of movie star. Usually, I was nervous around Ray, but I wasn’t that day. Partly because I didn’t live at home […]
In a recent glowing review of Since You Ask, Booklist called the novel “potentially controversial.” Do you agree with this assessment, and if so, were you aware of this aspect when you were writing it? Yes, I think it is potentially controversial. We have this belief system set up that there are victims and perpetrators. […]