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Because my reading time is taken up with manuscript submissions, the only outside reading I do is listening to audiobooks when I drive the longer distances demanded by living in a rural area. I just finished Home Fire by the British/Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie and it made me reflect on the power of narrative fiction to better illustrate through dramatization social and political truths that straight journalism, hewing to the facts, cannot quite deliver.
Like almost everyone, like you, probably, I remember certain things from before I was 12. But it’s from 12 that I can remember my life in a narrative way. Because my family got rearranged then? Some other reason? I don’t know. But the age was 12. And from then on, I can recall the broad sweep and the defining details of what has become my whole life.
The girl I’ve written about in The Mapmaker’s Daughter was 12 when she captured the attention of the most powerful man on earth. Her name was Cecilia Baffo Veniero. His was Suleiman the Magnificent. [Read more…]
Last November I was having dinner with David Plante, an American novelist who 
lives in Italy and just happened to ask if he had any fiction he wanted to publish. At the end of the evening, he emailed me a copy of a novel called American Stranger. I read it the next morning in one sitting and finished the novel in tears. [Read more…]