Her entry begins:I’m on a writer’s residency in Key West, Florida right now, very generously provided by the Key West Literary Society—many thanks to them! It’s marvelous here, powder-blue skies and skittering lizards on the gravel in the yard. So I have plenty of time to read, and to write, and here’s what I’m poring over.About Jane Steele, from the publisher:
The non-fiction book I’m devouring with great interest is A Force for Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936. Few people know about this, but the Jim Crow situation in Oregon during that time period was terrible, and the Ku Klux Klan was extremely active there especially from 1921-1925. Burning crosses, hooded parades, the works. Cannady’s legacy is somehow skipped when we talk about civil rights leaders. But she was...[read on]
A reimagining of Jane Eyre as a gutsy, heroic serial killer, from the author whose work The New York Times described as “riveting” and The Wall Street Journal called “thrilling.”Learn more about the book and author at Lyndsay Faye's website.
“Reader, I murdered him.”
A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.
Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito, and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange newresidents—the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: can she possess him—body, soul, and secrets—without revealing her own murderous past?
A satirical romance about identity, guilt, goodness, and the nature of lies, by a writer who Matthew Pearl calls “superstar-caliber” and whose previous works Gillian Flynn declared “spectacular,” Jane Steele is a brilliant and deeply absorbing book inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre.
The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Gotham.
The Page 69 Test: Seven for a Secret.
My Book, The Movie: The Fatal Flame.
Writers Read: Lyndsay Faye.
--Marshal Zeringue
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