What is Laura McNeal reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Laura McNeal, author of The Incident on the Bridge.

Her entry begins:

I’m reading three things right now: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, David Copperfield by (of course) Dickens, and At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell. Olive Kitteridge is a book I always meant to read, but I have a self-defeating aversion to bestselling books, and I wrongly thought that the book could not possibly be as good as everyone said it was. It’s every bit as good, though, and maybe better. I find it devastating, yet somehow inspiring; lyrical and yet unpretentious. It makes me want to write and it makes me despair of ever writing that well, which is...[read on]

About The Incident on the Bridge, from the publisher:

From National Book Award nominee Laura McNeal comes a riviting, tautly told novel that is at once hopeful and harrowing. Perfect for fans of We Were Liars and Bone Gap.

When Thisbe Locke is last seen standing on the edge of the Coronado Bridge, it looks like there is only one thing to call it. But her sister Ted is not convinced. Despite the witnesses and the police reports and the divers and the fact that she was heartbroken about the way things ended with Clay and how she humiliated herself at that party, Thisbe isn't the type of person to end up just an "incident."

While everyone in town prepares to mourn the loss (some more than others), Ted and Fen, the new kid in town, set out to put the pieces together and find her sister.

But if Thisbe didn't jump, what happened up on that bridge?

Visit Laura McNeal's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Incident on the Bridge.

Writers Read: Laura McNeal.

--Marshal Zeringue