"The Glass Wives"

Amy Sue Nathan lives and writes near Chicago where she hosts the popular blog, Women's Fiction Writers. She has published articles in Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times Online among many others. Nathan is the proud mom of a son and a daughter in college, and a willing servant to two rambunctious rescued dogs.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Glass Wives, and reported the following:

What a shock to turn to page 69, which is the last page of Chapter 5, and find the crux of The Glass Wives within the few lines printed there.

Beth reached into her pocket and pulled out her smartphone. “Let’s make a list of everything you need.”

Evie knew what she needed, and Beth wouldn’t find her at the grocery store.

This is a turning point in the novel—the actual premise itself—when Evie, the main character, cautiously agrees to share her home, and living expenses, with her ex-husband’s young widow and baby. It’s this admission, acceptance—this resignation, if you will—that leads Evie on the path to altering her own perception of what it means to be a family.

And that’s what The Glass Wives is all about.

Learn more about the book and author at Amy Sue Nathan's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Amy Sue Nathan & Mitzi and Lizzie.

My Book, The Movie: The Glass Wives.

Writers Read: Amy Sue Nathan.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Where You Can Find Me"

Sheri Joseph is the author of the novels Where You Can Find Me (Thomas Dunne Books 2013) and Stray (MacAdam/Cage 2007), as well as a cycle of stories, Bear Me Safely Over (Grove/Atlantic 2002). She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Grub Street National Book Prize, among other awards. She lives in Atlanta and teaches in the creative writing program of Georgia State University.

Joseph applied the Page 69 Test to Where You Can Find Me and reported the following:

I’d actually looked at my book awhile back with “The Page 69 Test” in mind and was disappointed that it seemed to fall in a lull. Just a few pages before, or after, there was strangeness and drama. On page 67, Marlene Vincent is in the cloud forest of Costa Rica with her 14-year-old son, Caleb, newly recovered after a three-year disappearance; one minute she’s rapturous and the next gripped with an illogical rage, the feeling that this is a stranger and not her child. On page 72, we’re in Caleb’s head as he encounters what he believes to be the ghost of a girl he knew while he was missing. In comparison to either, Page 69 struck me as kind of blah: a visit to a wildlife center where Marlene’s mother-in-law, Hilda, has taken her family to show them a pair of jaguars she hopes to reintroduce into the wild.

So I was surprised when a writer friend who’d offered to interview me on stage at my first book event asked me to read from, of all pages, 69. At this point in the story, Marlene is fixedly observing Caleb as he interacts with a new friend his age, Isabel; meanwhile Stancia, who run the wildlife center, inquires after Hilda’s “missing son” (Marlene’s husband Jeff, left behind in the States). Stancia gives the group a tour of her makeshift wildlife hospital while explaining how some of the orphans came into her keeping:

“Critical age is very important,” Stancia was saying. “It is the time each animal learns what it is, if it is a coati or a motmot or a spectacled owl.” They had stopped at the cage of the owl, which blinked at them from a near branch and clacked its beak softly. “This one, he was kept by a farmer from when he was a baby, so he thinks he’s a person. He can’t unlearn that. Now he must live here always.”

So page 69, while quieter on the human drama, offers a useful glimpse of the novel’s central themes. Questions of critical age, in as much as they can be applied to human beings, have everything to do with this boy who was abducted at age 11 into a life with strangers, under traumatic and largely unknown circumstances. The key question for Caleb, and for the book, is one of identity: whether he can truly return to his family or whether he has been, like the owl or possibly the jaguars, too altered by his experience to safely fit.

Learn more about the book and author at Sheri Joseph's blog and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Slippage"

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Superworse, and A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love. His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All Story, McSweeneys, and Opium, and he has been widely anthologized.

Greenman applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Slippage, and reported the following:

On page 69 of my book, the title has just been introduced: or rather, the concept of the title. The book is called The Slippage, and the concept of the slippage, which is actually part of page 67, comes from something that Tom, one of the main characters, says to William, the main character. Tom is an artist who makes charts and he defines the slippage as the moment when you start to lose your footing in the world—not your grip on reality, exactly, but your sense that your actions are especially meaningful, or that your choices truly direct the course of your own life. Instead, you start to see that maybe things happen without your input, and out of your control, that the universe is less hostile or friendly than ultimately indifferent. A different kind of crisis settles in. Tom tells William about the slippage at the end of a chapter, and page 69 is the beginning of the next chapter, and William is waking up in bed at night only to discover that his wife is not beside him. Don't worry! She's not missing or kidnapped or anything! She has just gone to the living room, where she was "sitting with her legs folded under her...television...on, but not the volume." A little while later she plays with a tube of lipstick, "swiveling it up and down, and William started to feel transfixed by the way it always went back where it came from." There are some of William's first conscious experiences of the slippage, and some of his last—one of the things about the book, I think, is that no one really learns. It's not based in epiphany. People go up and come back down like lipstick in a tube, and also like lipstick mostly what they do is leave a little trace of themselves, no less but no more.

Learn more about the book and author at Ben Greenman's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both.

Writers Read: Ben Greenman.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Is This Tomorrow"

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, which sold to six countries, went into five printings, and was a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick" and a NAIBA bestseller. Pictures of You is also a USA Today ebook bestseller and is on the Best Books of 2011 List from the San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks Magazine. It's also one of Kirkus Reviews Top 5 books of 2011 about the Family and love.

Leavitt applied the Page 69 Test to Is This Tomorrow, her tenth and latest novel, and reported the following:

This is so funny, this page 69 test, because when I chose a portion for my readings, I actually chose pages 66-72.

This section is when 12-year-old Jimmy has vanished and the 1950s suburban neighborhood is in chaos. They’re already paranoid about the threat of Communism and a child vanishing disrupts their belief that the suburbs are paradise, that nothing bad can possibly happen in such an environment.

Cops are swarming around, questioning all the neighbors. Ava Lark, Jewish in a Christian neighborhood, divorced at a time when such a thing is pure scandal, a working mother at a time when women’s work was tending house and kids, with more than a few boyfriends and a relationship that seemed a bit too close with Jimmy, is suspect. These pages are about the cop questioning her, and as he does, we learn that he’s more interested in how she’s different from everyone else, than whether or not she has any real information about what really happened that terrible day.

View the trailer for Is This Tomorrow, and learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Dream Machine"

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book about the motion picture The Sting. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and Salon.com, among other publications. He is a senior editor and founding member of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Specktor applied the Page 69 Test to American Dream Machine and reported the following:

Page 69 of American Dream Machine catches its characters in mid-argument. Beau Rosenwald, the novel's protagonist, is going up against his boss, a natty, closeted master of Old Hollywood named Sam Smiligan. It's 1968, and everything is coming apart at the seams. The argument is about whether Beau's client, the director Stanley Donen, should do a movie called Staircase (which Donen actually did direct in real life) or a hipper, shaggier film called Mellow Yellow, a sort of deadpan comedy in the vein of Blake Edwards' The Party. Beau, who represents the new Hollywood, is advocating for the latter. He will lose this argument, and within a page or three will lose any number of other things: temper, dignity, perhaps a button or two on his fly. He's about to let it all hang out.

"Why don't you get a job for those circus geeks you represent," Sam sneers at Beau, speaking of the sorts of actors, the Harry Dean Stanton types, represented by the younger agent, naturally unintelligible to one more inclined to Cary Grant and Rock Hudson.

Because they don't need me, Beau wanted to say. Because that's the way the business is turning. It's men like Stanley, your clients, who are in danger of extinction.

American Dream Machine is filled with such collisions. The book is a series of such clashes, really, a sequence of battles in which the irresistible force of one person's imagination comes up against the immovable object of another's. It how films are made, companies are built, and really, if you look at the tectonic plates of our country's political life--to say nothing of our own, personal, private ones--it's easy to see a scene like this as representative of all kinds of things. Besides which, there is the question of extinction, of obsolescence, which Beau himself will come up against later in the novel. We all do. Any shapely novel, I think, contains itself in microcosm over and over again. This one does, at least.

Learn more about the book and author at Matthew Specktor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Quintessence"

David Walton won the 2008 Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel, Terminal Mind.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Quintessence, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Quintessence is representative of one of the three main characters, that of Catherine Parris, a young, independent, aristocrat's daughter who will run away to join a voyage to the end of the world. She has just told her father about a creature she saw... a creature that can turn invisible, walk through walls, and is armed with sharp teeth, pincers, and a scorpion-like tail. Far from frightened, Catherine draws the creature and analyzes it in her characteristically scientific style. Her father, however, is more concerned with her safety:

Father stared at the parchment silently for a long time. He tapped where she had written 'insubstantial'. "You saw Sinclair's beetle?"

"I saw it. This manticore is just as real."

He seemed to come to a decision and stood abruptly. "We'll search the house. Wherever you go, I want Henshawe with you, or one of the other servants. Someone is to sleep with you at all times. If you see it again, or even think you do, scream for help."

"How will you search the house for something invisible?"

"Maybe Sinclair will know." He pointed a finger at Catherine. "But no more experiments. I don't want you luring this thing anywhere near you."

"If I set out more meat, it might come again. You could see it yourself, and we could try to catch it."

"No. That's an order, Catherine. I'll talk to Sinclair, but in the meantime, I want you safe."

It doesn't tell you much about the other main characters, but it does capture the spirit of scientific discovery and sense of wonder that is so central to the book, as well as the danger of uncovering too much.

Learn more about the book and author at David Walton's website.

Writers Read: David Walton.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Clover House"

Henriette Lazaridis Power is a first-generation Greek-American who has degrees in English literature from Middlebury College; Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar; and the University of Pennsylvania. She taught at Harvard for ten years, serving as an academic dean for four of those. She is the founding editor of The Drum, a literary magazine publishing exclusively in audio form. A competitive rower, Power trains regularly on the Charles River in Boston.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Clover House, and reported the following:

The entirety of page 69 from The Clover House:

glass ceiling of the atrium should be and see a panel of white-painted wood with a light fixture hanging from it. Two of its three bulbs have burned out.

“Got a three-story ladder?” the man asks with a laugh. “The landlord won’t bother until that third bulb goes.”

“That used to be glass,” I say.

“Used to be a lot of things, young lady.”

And this is why my mother never tried to take me inside. If anyone had waved to her as we stood before the house all those summers, she would have ignored the signal, all the better to preserve in her memory what would always be the most important version of the house. I take a few steps into the foyer, toward the tall oak door that must have led to the front sitting room. Boots and umbrellas lean against the corner by the door. A peephole has been drilled through the oak and covered over with scratched plastic.

I know the man is watching me with amusement as I spin around slowly, taking in the handful of things about the house that I assume have not changed. There is a wide expanse of wall where the walnut mirror once stood--I am sure of it--and the swinging door Irini, the cook, would push through coming in from the kitchen, and the railing around the landing on the third floor, where my aunts and Nestor dangled their baskets and hooks. Yes, it is changed now, but the space is still the same, redolent of everything I have ever imagined in it.

“When did you lose the house?” the man asks.

“We didn’t lose it,” I say, turning to face him. But I don’t know that this is true. Perhaps we lost it in the Second World War, or in the civil war that came after it, or during the junta. No one has ever explained this to me.

“Well, when was the last time your family lived here?”

“Sometime after the war.”

It turns out that this page does present some of the key issues in the novel through a scene in which the protagonist, Callie Brown, visits her family’s former home in Patras, Greece, and asks to be let inside to look around. The house is a grand, neo-classical structure once occupied by her mother’s well-to-do family, but it has passed out of the family’s possession at some point--sometime after the war, as Callie says. Callie has long been bewildered by the mystery of what happened to the family--their wealth, their social standing--but more importantly by the bitterness and sadness that cloud her mother’s life and that seem to have something to do with the loss of the house. This little scene introduces the idea that, to paraphrase the man, things used to be different and that loss is an essential part of existence. Unlike her mother, Callie has no memory to lay over the reality before her. She has come there to recapture something of what her family has lost--by reimagining it, or by discovering it.

Learn more about the book and author at Henriette Lazaridis Power's website and blog.

Writers Read: Henriette Lazaridis Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Book of Killowen"

Set mostly in Ireland, Erin Hart’s archaeological crime novels (Haunted Ground, Lake of Sorrows, False Mermaid) have earned praise as “emotionally and intellectually gorgeous,” (Publishers Weekly), “exceptionally crafted” (Library Journal), and “intelligent, eerie, utterly compelling” (Jacquelyn Mitchard).

Hart applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Book of Killowen, and reported the following:

From page 69:

...here and there a chair, or a table with a vase of flowers, that beautifully set off the paintings. What was it like to have such an eye, Stella wondered, thinking of her own drab sitting room with its insipid wallpaper and matching suite.

The young man left her alone while he went upstairs, giving her a chance to look around. The paintings in the front room were angry seascapes, thick-painted stormy skies and waves and weather, the paint applied with such passion that you could almost hear the surf. Not just grays and blues and greens, but also shades of yellow, brown, and purple. Stella went up close, and studied the nearest canvas. How did a person work at close range like this, and understand what effect the brush strokes would have at a distance? There was mystery in it, how the eye perceived the parts and the whole. She glanced up the stairs and saw no sign of the young man returning. So she made a quick round of the ground floor, from the rooms in front with their large casement windows that looked over the street, to the back rooms—a galley kitchen stocked with wine glasses, coffeemaker and tea urn, industrial dishwasher. The kitchen adjoined a tiny room that functioned as an office, with desk, file cabinets, and a glowing laptop. On the laptop screen was a spreadsheet with recent sales to museums. Stella had to stifle a curse as she glimpsed the number of zeroes behind each figure. She slipped from the room and took up her previous position just as the young man appeared again at the top of the stairs.

“Mairéad says she’ll talk to you in the studio. I’m sorry I neglected to introduce myself—Graham Healy—I’m her assistant.”

Stella followed him up a graceful cascade of pale marble held in place with a wrought-iron railing. Orchestral music poured down from above, louder and louder as they traveled upward, past the living areas on the first floor, all the way up to a garret at the very top of the house, transformed by a bank of windows on the north wall into a painting studio. A whiff of mineral spirits assaulted the nostrils, and music blared loudly from speakers all around the room, filling the airy space with the throb of violins and cellos, the crash of cymbals and booming kettle drums. Mairéad Broome signaled the young man to turn down the music, and as he did so, Stella’s gaze traveled through an open doorway to a bedroom where the walls, sheets, and furniture were all stark white. Amid the rumpled luxury of bedclothes she spied a few discarded garments—his and hers, from every appearance.

The character in this scene is Stella Cusack, the Garda detective who becomes the third protagonist in The Book of Killowen. She’s just arrived at a Georgian house in the center of Dublin to interview the wife of a man whose body has been found in the boot of a car buried in a Tipperary bog. The wife, Mairéad Broome, is an artist and—as this passage makes clear—a suspect in her husband’s brutal murder. Stella’s got her own problems (wandering husband, stroppy seventeen-year-old daughter), which aren’t outlined here, but I think this passage is an early glimpse of the way she approaches her work, and offers an insight into her powers of observation. I think Stella’s own troubles allow her to see all the messy layers of other people’s everyday lives, and enable her to read situations like this for nuances and interactions between people that will help in her investigation. Some readers have very little patience for descriptive writing; I’ve met people who admit that they just skip over passages like this. But description is absolutely essential to my kind of story. I especially love showing what physical spaces reveal about the people who inhabit them. I hope this passage shows how setting can underscore and illuminate character, both the observer and the observed.

Learn more about the book and author at Erin Hart’s website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Gila Wars"

Larry D. Sweazy's Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger western novels include The Rattlesnake Season, The Scorpion Trail, The Badger's Revenge, The Cougar's Prey, and The Coyote Tracker.

Sweazy applied the Page 69 Test to The Gila Wars, the latest novel in the series, and reported the following:

From page 69 of The Gila Wars:

The room was empty. Darkness surrounded Josiah, and for a long moment he listened to see if he could hear anything other than his own breathing and heartbeat. There was nothing, not even the distant cluck of a chicken. A black cloak had fallen over the world, covering him along with it.

He stared at the ceiling, glad that he felt very little pain. His face still stung, but the salve that had been placed there seemed to have worked. The bandage was off, and thankfully, infection hadn’t set into that wound. Taking a branding iron to his face was beyond the grasp of his imagination. The pain would last long beyond the initial sizzle, and the scar would ride with him for the rest of his life. A reminder of his failure to see what was coming next with the two unnamed men in the cantina. A closer fight, one with worthier opponents, and the same outcome would have been easier to carry. But he didn’t have to worry about that. The deeper scar he would carry, if he lived on to see another day, would be hidden, like most of his other scars.

In this scene, Josiah Wolfe has been shot in the face with a shotgun during a confrontation in a cantina on the Texas border. His very survival is in question. Since this is the last planned book in the Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger series, this section of the novel captures the book perfectly.

If Josiah does survive, he will be scarred by this incident, externally and internally, for the rest of his life. It also brings to light the immediate dangers of living in the time (1875). Medicine had not evolved, and a simple infection could kill a man just easy as a gunslinger. The wound on his face was cauterized to alleviate any existence, or spread, of infection, and he has yet to see the consequences of this act on the rest of his life.

Ultimately, this scene is an example of Josiah’s spirit. He’s made mistakes, he’s fallible, all too human, definitely not a super hero. Although this is a “genre” novel, a paperback Western, it has always been my goal to write fully realized adventures, and not skimp on character development. Whether I have been successful or not, is up to the reader, but for me, this has been the adventure of a lifetime. It has been a great pleasure writing Josiah Wolfe’s stories.

Learn more about the book and author at Larry D. Sweazy's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Badger’s Revenge.

The Page 69 Test: The Devil's Bones.

My Book, The Movie: The Devil’s Bones.

The Page 69 Test: The Coyote Tracker.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Larry D. Sweazy & Brodi and Sunny.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Dual Inheritance"

Joanna Hershon's books include Swimming, The Outside of August, and The German Bride. Her writing has appeared in One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Post Road, the literary anthology Brooklyn Was Mine, and was shortlisted for the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, A Dual Inheritance, and reported the following:

From Page 69:

…people were climbing steps and walking in clusters toward dinner on Mass Ave. “Not you. You’re different.”

“Is that right?”

“You know you are. Listen to you. You’re taking me to task! You are so disappointed in me right now. You are disappointed in everything and everyone, and it kills you. That’s why you’re different. Because you can’t stand it. And also, although you have shown nothing near your potential and you are in some ways—let’s face it—kind of lazy, you want to save the world.

Hugh looked down at the sidewalk and, despite himself—Ed could tell—he smiled. “And you’re going to help me do that?”

“No,” Ed said, “of course not.”

They started to walk again, and when Ed suggested they eat dinner, when he said he was starving and Hugh expressed little surprise, because Ed was always hungry—always starving—Ed finally said, “I apologize.” But it lacked a certain sharpness.

“That’s okay,” Hugh replied. But it wasn’t, not exactly.

As it happens, page 69 of A Dual Inheritance is eerily representational of the whole novel. Here are Ed and Hugh as seniors at Harvard: unlikely friends who will have an unforeseen influence over each others lives, even as their friendship goes on to end just as abruptly as it began. They have just come from a particularly intense visit to Ed’s fairly squalid childhood home. This was a spontaneous trip, and not only was Hugh (from decidedly grander digs) unprepared, but Ed’s father was taken off guard. After Ed’s father behaves true to character and Ed becomes enraged and saddened, they leave, and Hugh quietly suggests that perhaps they should have both—Ed’s father and Hugh—been given fair warning. Ed knows Hugh is right, but instead of apologizing, he attacks Hugh’s character. After this outburst, Ed tries to be just as honest as he assesses Hugh’s more promising traits. The tension and love that’s evident here on page 69 is at the heart of the novel and asks the question: can a friendship define your view of the world?

Learn more about the author and her work at Joanna Hershon's website.

The Page 69 Test: The German Bride.

My Book, The Movie: The German Bride.

Writers Read: Joanna Hershon.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bristol House"

Beverly Swerling novels include the City of Dreams series, a four-volume historical saga set in old New York.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Bristol House, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Dom Justin

From the Waiting Place

the great mercy you have shown in assigning me to this place in Purgatory where I might atone for my many sins.

I must go on, for as yet I have not told the worst of them, and I sense that on the other side time grows short and the woman’s danger increases...

When I left the Jew’s house, Rebecca was again waiting in the stand of trees beside the river. But this time when she pressed against me, the hair shirt of the Carthusian rule, a garment we wear always beneath our habits, scraped against my skin, and I was reminded of the suffering of eternal damnation. It was enough to overcome the carnal heat that burned my flesh, though my cock stiffened at the mere thought of the sin to which I had not as yet succumbed.

I returned quickly to the Charterhouse, but despite the urgency to be back in my cell before the bell rang for the midnight office, I was forced to pause when I saw nailed above the great doors the quarter part of the carcass of the Venerable Father. It had been put there since I left, and below it was a notice saying the thing must not be removed, “on pain of an even more terrible death for he who did the action and all who encouraged him therein.”

Giacomo the Lombard, known also as the Jew of Holborn

From the Waiting Place

I do not know why I am commanded to tell my story, nor who it is who listens. But I am grateful to be in this place that is neither earth nor Gehenna, where the eternal fire burns. I have, I know, much for which to atone, and I am promised that to tell what happened between me and my daughter and he who was known in the Charterhouse as Dom Justin will help erase their stain. So be it.

I am not required to tell everything: not how I came to leave Lombardy and smuggle myself into London to seek greater fortune, nor of the sweet young maiden I married there, a Lombard who was secretly a Jew like myself and a number of others, nor of her death hours after she gave birth to our first

Bristol House is a novel that takes place in London during both the 21st and the 16th centuries. I think anyone opening the book to page 69 after having looked however briefly at the information on the inside cover flap will know they're reading something from the historical section.

And as it happens, this page is truly evocative of the Tudor story. For one thing it offers an introduction to the two voices that tell the historical part of the novel. For another, it has just that blend of sacred and profane that I've used throughout. Mostly because that's what I think life is – sacred and profane in equal measure. Page 69 also illustrates the themes of sin and reparation which are so much a part of the story, as well as drawing attention to the mystery that links the two periods. "I sense," Dom Justin says, "that on the other side the time grows short…"

The "other side" is where Annie, the contemporary young American heroine and an architectural historian, is staying in a London apartment building known as Bristol House. And where she's trying to unravel the mystery which reaches from Justin's time into her own. You also know at once that Justin is breaking his monastic rule when he speaks of the "urgency to be back in my cell before the bell rang…" And perhaps you'll be intrigued that a man known as the Jew of Holborn is speaking from Purgatory.

I wasn't sure what genre I was writing in when I started this book. The publisher decided to call it a "supernatural thriller." I'm content with that. I hope readers are as well.

Learn more about the book and author at Beverly Swerling's website and blog.

Writers Read: Beverly Swerling (August 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Pink Hotel"

Anna Stothard studied English at Oxford and then moved to Los Angeles, where she was awarded a screenwriting scholarship with the masters program at the American Film Institute. Her first novel, Isabel and Rocco, was published in 2004.

Stothard applied the Page 69 Test to her second novel, The Pink Hotel, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and reported the following:

In The Pink Hotel a nameless seventeen-year-old girl attends her estranged mother’s raucous, drug-fuelled wake at a hotel on Venice Beach. Most of the novel is set in Los Angeles as the daughter returns her mother’s love letters to the men who knew Lily, but parts of the story flash back to the girl’s childhood in North London – like page 69.

She grew up with her father and grandparents in an apartment above a chip shop, playing football and getting into fights. It’s an emotionally drained childhood, where nobody touches each other or connects, in contrast to the decadent and sensual world she finds at the Pink Hotel.

Page 69 is actually quite sad – her grandfather dies of a stroke. The air in the room congeals slightly when he slips away and my narrator wonders if the death even matters, since he’d been ill and “not-himself” for so long. The protagonist is interested in identity, throughout the novel, so she debates when exactly her grandfather’s identity ceased. He has one lazy eye, which is looking at her when he stops breathing, the other is looking at the narrator’s father.

Most of the novel isn’t as somber as page 69!

Learn more about the book and author at Anna Stothard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue