What is Jason Gurley reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jason Gurley, author of Eleanor: A Novel.

His entry begins:

I wish I had all the time in the world to read all of the books on my to-be-read list. (It’s less a list and more a collection of towering bookshelves, full of books, already purchased, that I am slowly working my way through.)

Lately I’m alternating between two books:

The first is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s sobering, powerful Between the World and Me. I adore it for all of its difficult truths, its perspective that is so different from my own, and I’m grateful, not only that it exists, but that it has been so widely read. “I resolved to hide nothing from you,” Coates writes to his son, and the book fulfills that statement. It’s beautifully written, and...[read on]

About Eleanor, from the publisher:

Eleanor and Esmerelda are identical twins with a secret language all their own, inseparable until a terrible accident claims Esme’s life. Eleanor’s family is left in tatters: her mother retreats inward, seeking comfort in bottles; her father reluctantly abandons ship. Eleanor is forced to grow up more quickly than a child should, and becomes the target of her mother’s growing rage.

Years pass, and Eleanor’s painful reality begins to unravel in strange ways. The first time it happens, she walks through a school doorway, and finds herself in a cornfield, beneath wide blue skies. When she stumbles back into her own world, time has flown by without her. Again and again, against her will, she falls out of her world and into other, stranger ones, leaving behind empty rooms and worried loved ones.

One fateful day, Eleanor leaps from a cliff and is torn from her world altogether. She meets a mysterious stranger, Mea, who reveals to Eleanor the weight of her family’s loss. To save her broken parents, and rescue herself, Eleanor must learn how deep the well of her mother’s grief and her father’s heartbreak truly goes. Esmerelda’s death was not the only tragic loss in her family’s fragmented history, and unless Eleanor can master her strange new abilities, it may not be the last.

Visit Jason Gurley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Eleanor.

My Book, The Movie: Eleanor.

Writers Read: Jason Gurley.

--Marshal Zeringue