THE SERENDIPITOUS BOOK

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  I've been thinking a good bit lately about the joys of browsing. We tend to get stuck in book ruts. (Come on, now, admit it.) If we read, or write, a particular genre, we naturally gravitate towards books in that genre. We see reviews, we get newsletters from our favorite indie bookstores (if you like mysteries, you probably want to read nearly every book in The Poisoned Pen monthly newsletter.) Our online retailers push us towards more books that are like books we've already bought, or that people who bought books we've bought have also bought.  All good... except that it begins to close down our reading world.

There is nothing like browsing in a bookstore or a library and picking up something completely unfamiliar, just because you like the cover or the title or the book calls out to you in some indefinable way. And there--a new author, new characters, a new world.

I thought I'd share two of my serendipitous recent finds. One was a gift from a friend, who discovered the book while browsing at our local B&N and loved it so much that she bought me a copy: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. This was a first novel, a gem about a retired and recently widowed British major who strikes up an unexpected friendship with the widowed Pakistani shop owner in his small English village--a friendship that will cause him to challenge everything he believed about himself. The book is delightful, moving, and often laugh-out-loud funny--a book you want to give to all your reading friends.
Find # 2 was at the library, on the featured fiction display. I walked over and picked it up, intrigued by the title--A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar--and the cover. This is also a debut novel by author Suzanne Joinson; two interwoven stories, one a journal of a lady cyclist accompanying female missionaries in 1920s Turkestan, the other a modern-day woman in London who has inherited the contents of a stranger's flat. It is lyrical, intriguing, and drew me into worlds outside my experience.

So, my challenge, Reds, is to give us a book you've read in the last year, a book not in the genre you usually read, a serendipitous book that has given you that jolt of unexpected delight.

RHYS BOWEN: I adored Major Pettigrew, Debs. I often read outside the crime genre and this is exactly the kind of book I adore. The second one also sounds like my cup of tea. And I have Amazon credits waiting for my Kindle. It's so easy to buy with one click. Of course if one isn't careful it can be a disaster. I found I had clicked on one of my own books the other day when I was checking my Amazon stats! But two books I've read recently that I can recommend: The House at Riverton, by Kate Moreton, and The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons. Obviously I'm in my "HOUSE AT" period. They have a certain amount in common--the narrator of each is a servant girl at a big house in England during the earlier years of the Twentieth Century.

ROSEMARY HARRIS: I picked up my latest serendipitous find at the airport of all places. Every once in a while - in the brief blink of an eye when there is no new James Patterson to be enshrined - I find something at the airport I'd never have picked up or even known about. This year it was Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. It has a fabulous, arresting cover reminiscient of an old photo by Diane Arbus (it's not.) Very difficult to decribe - photos and fiction combine to tell the fantastic story of a remote island and some very unusual children. I loved it.

JAN BROGAN: Okay, that's decided, I am definitely picking up Major Pettigrew.   I read a lot outside the mystery genre, a lot of non fiction, real history and historical novels. My most recent favorites were  The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom and Rules of Civility by Amor Towles, but I think a lot people know about those books.  A really terrific book I didn't expect was Mother, Father, God by Lucia Greenhouse.  I read this because I interviewed her for a non-fiction story, and I thought I should read her book. It's a memoir and absolutely riveting. It's about growing up as a daughter in a devote Christian Scientist family and how the family gets torn apart when it has to confront an illness - her mother's cancer - that needs real life, modern medicine.   It's all about family, values, and how our belief systems can bind us together and tear us apart.  She is an absolutely TERRIFIC writer and I could not put this book down.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Ah, you know I'm on book tour and working at the same time and trying to edit the new book and it's all wonderful but it doesn't leave much time for exploration. Or even knowing exactly where I am.  But if I may bend the rule a bit..I did  love Linwood Barclay's Trust Your Eyes--it's such fun when a great thriller just presents itself...you know it instantly, right?  Highly recommended. I just started Julia Keller's A Killing in the Hills, and that seems like it's going to be really good. And I blurbed a fabulous new book called Rage Against the Dying. You saw it here first--just saying--AND I've asked the author to come blog.  And I also read a YA called Girl, Lost, about a girl who is kidnapped for ransom, but the bad guys don't know she's blind. I want to read The Art Forger!  And the Lighthouse book.

DEBS: Jan, you will love Major Pettigrew. Simonson has been compared to Jane Austen in the reviews for her witty and often cutting social commentary, but I hadn't read a review when I picked up the book--I just thought it was wonderful.

Rhys, I think I have The House at Moreton somewhere in my to-read shelves. Must look. And so many of these I think I would love... I see what I've done here--added books to all our TBR piles. 

Hank, I HAVE read The Art Forger, and it's fab! 

Ro, my own airport find when on book tour last year, when nothing I had with me seemed just right--a book called A Little Night Magic by Lucy March.  I adored it, and am keeping an eye out for a sequel.

What am I reading now (found browsing when I was doing an event at B&N last weekend)? Pete Townshend's memoir, Who I Am. It's brilliant.

So how about you, readers?  Do you succumb to the lure of browsing? Will you share your serendipitous finds with us?  

B.A. Shapiro: The highs and lows of publishing

JAN BROGAN - This may be one of the happiest interviews I have ever posted on this blog.  Today, I am welcoming Barbara Shapiro, who I first met 23-years ago in a novel writing class.  We were both aspiring authors and we formed a writer's group. In the years that followed, we have beaten up each other up over structure and prose,  drank champagne over successes, (it became a rule) cried over disappointments (involuntary) and stuck together as others came and left our group. 

Barbara was the first to get published, but after five novels, she hit a  dry spell. For eight years, she couldn't get published and even with this last manuscript, The Art Forger, she heard a lot of rejection.  Inexplicable rejection. The book was terrific, which made the rejection worse. Editors kept saying it didn't fit neatly into one of their genres. After being insanely persistent, Barbara started talking about retiring from this crazy, nonsensical industry.  How much rejection, she asked me, can one person take?

But she had a wonderful agent, Anne Collette of the Rees Agency, who wouldn't give up and one day Barbara got the call we all wait for.  Algonquin Books wanted to publish The Art Forger.  Not much later, it became an in-house favorite. They started to view it as a big book. The publishers planned to send her on a 30-city tour.  Publishers Weekly named The Art Forger as  one of Ten Promising Titles of the 2012 BEA (Book Expo of America), Amazon chose it as Editor's Pick for fall;  The Art Forger was named the number 1 Indie Nextpick for November.

 The Art Forger, which Booklist praised as   “an entrancingly visual, historically rich, deliciously witty, sensuous, and smart tale of authenticity versus fakery," is about down-and-out Boston artist, Claire Roth who subsists on painting reproductions until she gets her big break.  Her big break arrives in the form of an offer from a Newbury Street galley owner and kingmaker who will give her her own show, if she agrees to forge a painting for him.  The painting he wants her to forge is Degas' After The Bath - one of the paintings stolen in the storied Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum heist. 

JAN:  How did you come up with the idea for The Art Forger?

B.A. Shapiro: I started with the idea of writing a novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner, which led me to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in which $500 million dollars of art was stolen – the largest unsolved art robbery in history – which led me to art theft and art forgery. I suddenly had a book about many things at many different points in time, but no real story nor any idea of how to weave it all together. So I started playing with the idea of a contemporary character who might interact with all of the things I was so fascinated by, and after many iterations I came up with a working outline that became the skeleton for The Art Forger.

 JAN: The novel also interweaves the story of Isabella Gardner's procurement of the Degas painting. How did you handle the  historical and the contemporary stories?

B.A. Shapiro: There actually are three stories in the book: the present story about the eponymous Claire Roth, Claire’s backstory which takes place three years earlier and the story of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Edgar Degas which takes place in the late nineteenth century. I developed each story separately, using charts and diagrams and other such obsessive tools, and then pulled each one apart and put them back together as a whole in which one story pushed the next story forward which pushed the next story forward. It was really fun.

JAN: How much of your own experiences with rejection helped inform the creation of Claire, your struggling protagonist?

B.A. Shapiro: It’s funny, when I was writing the novel, I wasn’t really thinking that Claire’s struggles were mine – I’m a writer after all and she’s an artist – but in retrospect, I’ve got to say that there are strong similarities. So much so that when I was doing the final edits for the book – once it had become clear that my publisher was getting behind it in a major way – I realized that I was experiencing the same emotions Claire had under similar circumstances. I guess I was being a wee bit thick.

JAN: How much do you think moving to Boston from the suburbs may have shaped this novel?

B.A. Shapiro: A lot. In two different ways. The first is that I could suddenly walk to hundreds of museums and art galleries, which I took great advantage of. I visited as many as I could, multiple times, took classes at the MFA and joined a group that wandered museums and galleries with an artist/art historian who opened my eyes to everything art. The second is that we moved to the South End of Boston, home to many artists, which is where Claire lives and works.

JAN: How did you survive the eight years you went unpublished? What kept you going and what advice would you give other authors struggling in this tough market climate?

B.A. Shapiro: The support of my family and my friends as well as a driving desire to tell stories. It wasn’t easy – and I’m not sure “survived” is even the correct term – after five published novels I wrote four more that couldn’t find a home. I was thinking about a career change when The Art Forger was acquired by Algonquin Books after many, many rejections by other publishers. I immediately bagged the change idea and started writing a new novel. As far as advice goes, all I can say is that sometimes – not always – but sometimes when you want something badly enough, it can happen. You’ve just got to get your butt into the chair so that you’re there when it strikes.

JAN: The Art Forger doesn't hit the shelves until mid-October, but you can pre-order it online today.  Barbara will be stopping by to ask any questions you have about the book or how to stay positive in this grueling business. 

One name will be chosen at random from the comments page to receive a free copy of The Art Forger, stop by with your questions or comments for Barbara.

And please come back  tomorrow when John Barylick talks about why he had to write Killer Show, America's Deadliest Rock Concert, a narrative non-fiction account of  The Station Nightclub fire that killed more than 100 people in 2003.  It's like Christmas around here at Jungle Red, three free copies will be given away.