What is Deb Caletti reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Deb Caletti, author of Essential Maps for the Lost.

Her entry begins:

Pirate Hunters, by Robert Kurson

While I read quite a lot of literary fiction, story collections, and memoirs, some of my favorite reading feeds a very large part of myself that is, I swear, a ten-year-old boy. To be clear, Robert Kurson’s fabulous Pirate Hunters is for adults. But it’s for adults like me who hunger for a fascinating and page-turning read about true-life adventures. Fellow swashbucklers, I’m telling you - a pirate ship that goes missing in the 1600’s, and the intrepid divers who try to find it today make for a riveting, suspenseful story. I also loved Kurson’s Shadow Divers, about two deep-sea wreck divers who...[read on]

About Essential Maps for the Lost, from the publisher:

From beloved author and National Book Award finalist Deb Caletti comes a fresh and luminous novel about the grief that can tear us apart and the people who can make us whole again.

There are many ways to be lost.

Sometimes people want to be lost. Madison—Mads to everyone who knows her—is trying her best to escape herself during one last summer away from a mother who needs more from her than she can give, and from a future that has been decided by everyone but her.

Sometimes the lost do the unimaginable, like the woman, the body, Mads collides with in the middle of the water on a traumatic morning that changes everything.

And sometimes the lost are the ones left behind, like the son of the woman in the water, Billy Youngwolf Floyd. Billy is struggling to find his way through each day in the shadow of grief. His one comfort is the map he carries in his pocket, out of his favorite book The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

When three lives (and one special, shared book) collide, strange things happen. Things like questions and coincidences and secrets, lots of secrets. Things like falling in love. But can two lost people telling so many lies find their way through tragedy to each other…and to solid ground?

Learn more about the book and author at Deb Caletti's website and Facebook page.

Coffee with a Canine: Deb Caletti and Tucker.

The Page 69 Test: He's Gone.

Writers Read: Deb Caletti.

--Marshal Zeringue