"This Isn’t New"

Cynthia Swanson is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the psychological suspense novels The Bookseller, The Glass Forest, and Anyone But Her, and the new short story collection This Isn’t New: Women’s Historical Stories. Swanson was named 2025 Indie Author of the Year by the Indie Author Project, has received the Colorado Book Award (twice) and the WILLA Literary Award, won the Indie Author Project contest, and been a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, the WILLA Literary Award, and the CAL Award. She is also the editor of the award-winning anthology Denver Noir. She lives with her family in Denver.

Swanson applied the Page 69 Test to This Isn’t New with the following results:

Because This Isn’t New: Women's Historical Stories is a relatively short book (170 pages), page 69 is not quite halfway into the text. It’s part of a story called “The Unlived,” the fourth of nine in the collection. The scene on page 69 is toward the end of this story. Because I don’t want to give away the full story, I’ll summarize the situation: Claire, the main character in “The Unlived,” has an abortion in 1932. The procedure was illegal then in all of the United States, but Claire lives in Denver, which I learned via my research was at the time considered an “abortion capital of the country.” Claire also gets lucky: she’s given the name of a doctor who performs her procedure safely and she suffers few physical repercussions.

However, the event impacts her emotionally for the rest of her life. On page 69, it’s fifteen years later, and Claire reads an article in the newspaper titled “Smashing Denver’s Abortion Racket!” (This is an actual article that I found via my research.) Claire wonders, as she reads the article, if the chief investigator in the case asked the women who were given procedures by the arrested doctors what their stories were—why each woman sought an abortion in the first place.

Is this a good test of the entire book? I think it is. The intent of This Isn’t New is to demonstrate, via the power of storytelling, that many of the same things women fight for today, many of the same issues they face, have been happening throughout time. While I’m sensitive to the fact that not everyone believes abortion should be legal, my personal view is that people deserve the right to control their own bodies. This is an issue that has, in my opinion, taken a backslide in recent years. Are we in the same space that Claire was in 1932? Not completely, but Claire chose abortion for medical reasons, and women today in many parts of the country face the same challenge. They either have to go elsewhere for an abortion or carry on with their pregnancies, regardless of risks.

“The Unlived” is one of nine stories in the collection. While it’s mostly about Claire and what she experiences, the story is indicative of the collection as a whole. Each of the stories features a different woman, in a different era, facing a particular challenge. By highlighting stories spanning more than a century, my intent with This Isn’t New is to provide, via a storytelling lens, a view into women’s challenges historically and how they relate to today’s world.

Visit Cynthia Swanson's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Bookseller.

The Page 69 Test: The Glass Forest.

Writers Read: Cynthia Swanson (February 2018).

Q&A with Cynthia Swanson.

The Page 69 Test: Anyone But Her.

My Book, The Movie: This Isn't New.

Writers Read: Cynthia Swanson.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine"

Robert J. Sawyer -- "the dean of Canadian science fiction," according to the CBC, and a Globe and Mail and Maclean's bestseller -- is the only Canadian to have won all three of the world's top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. A member of both The Order of Canada and The Order of Ontario, Sawyer has won more Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras") than anyone else in history.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, and reported the following:

Here’s page 69 of The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine in its entirety. The first character speaking is cosmonaut Mikhail Sidorov. He’s talking to Roscoe Koudoulian, mayor of their small community of postapocalyptic survivors in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Roscoe has fractured his spine in an accident that also killed a woman named Marie. The other speaker, Chang, is the only medical doctor left alive on Earth.

The Russian looked at me, beaming. “So you can download!”

Download? That didn’t make any sense — I was already in the real world. “Pardon?” I said.

Mikhail was excited, even for him. “You can do same as I have done! Download into another body!”

What in hell was he proposing? Killing one of the Mennonite men — who I guess he figured would be dead soon anyway — so I could appropriate the corpse? “Jesus, Mikhail,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

“You can!” he insisted. “Marie’s body is right here!”

The idea stunned me. My wonderful Marie was dead, but apparently the Martian technology had indeed restarted her heart, so she was more or less now on the equivalent of life support.

“Would … would her legs heal?” I asked, very aware that my own ones would never work again.

Chang frowned, considering. “If someone downloaded into her body, you mean? It’d take time, but sure.”

“And internal injuries?” demanded Mikhail, moving back to scrutinize her bio-scanner.

Chang nodded slowly. “They’d heal, too.”

“So you see!” the Russian crowed.

My head was pounding. Yes, it was true that Mikhail had adapted to a different body, but … but it had been Valentina’s discarded male body. And, yes, I’d fallen in love with a trans woman once, but I had no desire to be trans myself. “No,” I said. “That’s not …” I trailed off, but then, after a moment, I simply said, “No” again.

Mikhail looked shocked, but eventually he nodded, accepting my decision. “Still,” he said softly, “body of Marie should not go to waste.”

“It won’t,” said Chang, almost gleefully. “I’ll harvest her organs and tissues. The ark has liquid nitrogen for cooling its reactor; I can siphon some off to cryopreserve the organs until they’re needed.”

The Downloaded, my twenty-fifth novel, came out as an Audible Original in 2023, followed by print and ebook editions in 2024. It ended up being a big hit for Audible, peaking at #1 on their science-fiction bestsellers list (and #5 for all fiction titles store-wide). The print edition did just fine, too, getting a starred review in Publishers Weekly (denoting a book of exceptional merit) in the US, being named one of the month’s best SF novels by New Scientist in the UK, and hitting several bestsellers lists in my native Canada, including #1 for both the Calgary Herald and the Hamilton Review of Books.

And so Audible commissioned a sequel from me. Only problem was, I’d done everything I could to wrap up almost all the storylines in the original, including tacking on an epilogue set centuries in the future. Not only had I never intended to write a follow-up, but I had to rack my brain for weeks to even come up with a notion for one. But in the end, I did, and I think this second volume, The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, is even better than the first.

Academy Award-winner Brendan Fraser had narrated the original The Downloaded along with Dora Award-winning Broadway actress Vanessa Sears, and we got them both back into the recording studio for the sequel; it was pure joy sitting in on their sessions and hearing such talented performers bring my words to life. Brendan again read the part of Mayor Roscoe Koudoulian (named after my friend Greg Koudoulian, who chronicles genre history, including that of San Diego Comic-Con), and Vanessa, who is currently starring as Juliet in the Toronto production of the hit musical & Juliet, and who sang the Canadian and US national anthems at the 2026 Toronto Blue Jays opening baseball game, returned to voice starship captain Letitia Garvey.

In October 2025, two years after the original came out, The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine dropped on Audible, and the print and ebook editions were published on May 19, 2026. And, speaking of the print edition, how representative of the whole thing is its sixty-ninth page?

Actually, I couldn’t have asked for a better teaser for what’s to come! See, the original The Downloaded dealt with people who’d had their consciousnesses uploaded for centuries finally decanting back into physical bodies on Earth. One of them, an astronaut, had transitioned in cyberspace from male to female, and she was traumatized when she was forcibly downloaded back into her original male body. Nonetheless, she and Roscoe fell in love — and their story was the one thing left unresolved in the original. Readers and listeners had been clamoring for me to provide a suitable conclusion to their star-crossed romance, something I finally get to do here in The Downloaded 2.

When I conceived the original The Downloaded in 2020, the rights of trans people were finally being respected in much of the United States and the rest of the world. But by the time I was writing The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, Donald Trump was once again president of the United States, and those rights are being heartlessly clawed back. And so what started as a simple love story has ended up being part of the resistance … and I’m very proud of that.

Visit Robert J. Sawyer's website.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Wake.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Watch.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Wonder.

The Page 69 Test: Triggers.

The Page 69 Test: Red Planet Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Quantum Night.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Crossing the Bronx"

David Hirshberg is the pseudonym for a biotech executive who prefers to keep his business activities separate from his writing endeavors. He adopted the first name of his father-in-law and the last name of his maternal grandfather as a tribute to their impact on his life.He is the author of two previous novels, My Mother's Son and Jacobo's Rainbow, each of which has won multiple awards. In addition, he has published four short stories and written the introduction for a nonfiction book. Hirshberg holds an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives with his wife and two dogs in Westchester County, New York.

Hirshberg applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Crossing the Bronx, and shared the following:

From page 69:

Nicky picked up street English within a few months and proper English at school, where his foreignness was offset by the fluent French that his family spoke at home. He’d never been taught Arabic, a sign that his parents had already made the decision to abandon Lebanon and head west, literally and figuratively. He excelled at school to such an extent that he was able to enroll at Columbia, a finishing school of a sort that gave him the wherewithal to navigate through and around a different class of people—a trait that would serve him well when he became a thread in the fabric of upper-crust New York life. Nicky was as much at home at the fish market, the Arthur Avenue clubs, ball parks, subways, newsstands, and shoe shine parlors as he was at the Fifth Avenue mansions, exclusive clubs on the upper east side, and private offices of the leading Catholic clergy within the five boroughs.

Eric recounted Nicky’s description of how the construction scheme unfolded in detail; here’s how I remembered what he told me. Nicky entered the office of Billy O’Boyle, the director of the Department of Buildings, despite not having an appointment after being waved in by the secretary once the intercom squawked, “Okay, send him on in.” Billy was close to sixty, yet never used William, preferring the name his mother used, an acknowledgment that her youngest was still her little boy. The pleasantries went on for longer than Nicky preferred. He wanted to get down to “bidnez,” yet he understood that to interrupt Billy would deprive him of the pride he felt being solicited by a personality as famous as Nicky Shark. So, Nicky played the game, remarking on the lovely photos of Billy’s family, knowing full well that Billy dipped his stick in Asian sauce, habituating Chinese whorehouses at noon while telling his staff he was going out to get something to eat in Chinatown—a double-entendre that he shared with his drinking buddies. It was through one of them that Nicky first got the tip and then the photos, which was the reason he knew he could always get a meeting with Billy even without having scheduled it in advance. Nicky signaled to Billy that it was time to talk about buildings issues by making a pretend camera with both of his hands and moving his right index finger up and down to resemble the clicking that would indicate a photo had been taken. I practically memorized the back and forth between Nicky and Billy that Eric told me, recalling it from how Nicky mentioned it to my father…

In a nutshell, the Page 69 Test works well as it pertains to the style, tone, and intrigue of the novel, which is set in the mid-nineteen fifties in New York, when certain ethnic groups dominated particular industries, such as the Italians in construction, the Irish in the police force and bureaucracy of city government, and the Jews in retail establishments. The language reflects how representatives of groups speak in terms of vocabulary, colloquialisms, and off-color remarks. The tête-à-tête interaction of a Lebanese social-climbing immigrant of Greek origin with an Irish immigrant head of the buildings department presages hints, feints, and misdirections that are characteristic of how the novel is constructed.

Page 69 includes two minor characters—Nicky Shark and Billy O’Boyle. But the way the novel is set up, minor characters can have a major impact on the story. Nicky Shark is the ‘Inquiring Fotographer’ for the New York Mirror, a character whose photos have caught many prominent New Yorkers in compromising positions, and thus is able to squeeze his marks for cash and favors. He is also on the payroll of Alberto (2-Cig) Giaquinto, the mobbed-up boss of a construction company which has managed to win the bid on the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway (and, by definition, the firm that is going to tear down the middle of the Tremont section of The Bronx to make room for the highway). So, Nicky Shark showing up at the office of the head of the Department of Buildings is a ‘tell’ that something is up…and not on the up-and-up.

Billy O’Boyle represents the down-to-earth fellow who climbed the ladder slowly, step-by-step, by dint of hard work, his immigrant working class roots still embedded in his clothes and manner of speaking. However, his peccadillos open him up to manipulation by Nicky Shark, who was sent to his office to make sure that the decision to construct the Cross Bronx Expressway is through the route that 2-Cig knows will benefit the mob and the city officials who depend on the cash from bloated contracts to fuel their political campaigns. In the end, Billy O’Boyle knows he will bend the knee, as he is simply the pawn in a game that he knows he can’t win.

The pages that immediately follow number 69 show Billy folding his cards, and Nicky getting the information he needs to make sure the illicit scheme that is being cooked up is set in motion.

Forty one minor characters support the architecture of the novel, bringing their different ethnicities, eccentricities, and personalities in supportive, but critical roles, which illustrate the makeup of the city and how it works.

Visit David Hirshberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Foursome"

Christina Baker Kline is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including Orphan Train, The Exiles, Please Don’t Lie (with Anne Burt), and the newly released The Foursome. Published in more than forty countries, her novels have received the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Award, among others, and have been chosen by hundreds of communities, schools, and universities as “One Book” selections.

Kline applied the Page 69 Test to The Foursome with the following results:

Page 69 of my new novel The Foursome contains only a few lines of dialogue, but it cuts straight to the heart of the novel.

Sallie Yates is on the porch with her father, who is trying to dissuade her from marrying Eng Bunker, one of the world-famous conjoined twins. He wants her to choose an easier life, or at least a more conventional one. Her sister Addie is already entangled in the same extraordinary arrangement with Eng’s brother, Chang.

Their father has tried reason, tried offering alternatives — a trip to Charleston, the promise of a "normal" young man with prospects. Now he's out of strategies, and what surfaces instead is something more honest: his thoughts about his own flawed marriage. When Sallie questions him, he answers, “Happiness is relative, Sallie. I sought security. Respectability. I have those things.”

That sentence could stand as one of the novel’s central questions. What do people choose freely, and what do they accept because the world has narrowed around them? What is the difference between love, duty, ambition, and accommodation? In nineteenth-century North Carolina, especially for women, marriage was rarely a simple matter of the heart. It was bound up with property, family reputation, social standing, and survival.

Page 69 doesn’t show anything about the spectacle surrounding Chang and Eng, or the sweep of the Civil War years to come. It is an intimate scene, a father warning his daughter against a life he cannot imagine, even as his own life has been shaped by compromise. “The road you’re considering – I fear where it leads,” he tells her.

He’s not entirely wrong. But neither is Sallie.

She hasn't said yes to anything yet. She's still in the space between curiosity and commitment. Her father's warning isn't villainous or unreasonable — it comes from love, and from his own experience of settling. But it also reveals the limits of his imagination. He cannot conceive of a life outside the narrow bounds of what their community considers acceptable.

The Foursome lives in these charged, quiet moments: two people on a porch, not quite saying what they mean, the real conversation happening underneath the words. The novel spans five decades, but its engine is the small negotiations of loyalty, desire, and self-knowledge that happen inside families, behind closed doors, in the silence between what's spoken aloud and what's left unsaid.

Visit Christina Baker Kline's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Christina Baker Kline & Lucy.

The Page 69 Test: Bird in Hand.

Writers Read: Christina Baker Kline (March 2017).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Kindness of Strangers"

Emma Garman, a Brighton-based writer and critic, has been a columnist for The Paris Review and a contributor to Literary Review, The Daily Beast, Lapham’s Quarterly, and History News Network. She has an MA in creative writing from the City College of New York and an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London.

Garman applied the Page 69 Test to The Kindness of Strangers, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Four of the six residents of 42 Tregunter Road—Mina, Honor, Robbie, and Saul—are gathered for breakfast in the kitchen. 17-year-old Mina has slept in her hair rollers (“One must suffer to be beautiful”), and muses about getting a perm. The others, uninterested in Mina’s hair, are preoccupied with the two housemates not present, Georgina and Jimmy. Honor tries to divert the conversation onto George’s whereabouts, only for Saul to redirect it towards Robbie’s opinion of recent arrival Jimmy.

On page 69, then, very little actually happens—and yet the book’s mood and themes are illustrated quite effectively. The murder mystery plot is driven by secrets and masquerades of various kinds, and here we have interactions that, while mundane on the surface, expose private tensions and dissimulations to the reader.

In asking Mina about George, Honor half-yawns “with apparent disinterest.” As Mina begins to answer, Saul puts a hand on her wrist—a peremptory gesture—because he wants to talk about Jimmy. Yet Robbie is reluctant to do so, as signaled by his fidgeting with breadcrumbs on the tabletop.

We also get a representative glimpse at the characters’ personalities: Mina is confident and a bit self-absorbed; Honor is controlled, steely, and scheming; Saul is charming and persuasive; Robbie is nervy and unassertive. We get a tiny sense of George, who’s still in bed—her favorite place! Even Jimmy’s absence is significant, because (not a spoiler), he’ll soon be dead.

The British location is obvious from the mention of a teapot and marmalade. However, the test does fail in one important way: a reader wouldn’t guess the era from reading page 69 alone (although Mina’s use of the dated term “permanent wave” suggests a historical setting). We’re in 1953, when homosexuality and abortion were illegal under English law and murder was still punishable by death—all social realities that mold these characters’ fates and, in combination, lead to the disaster depicted in the prologue: Jimmy bleeding out on the living room floor, with no one trying save his life.

Visit Emma Garman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Enormous Wings"

Laurie Frankel is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of six novels. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, People Magazine, Lit Hub, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Washington State Book Award and the Endeavor Award. Her novels have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and been optioned for film and TV. A former college professor, she now writes full-time in Seattle, Washington where she lives with her family and makes good soup.

Frankel applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Enormous Wings, and shared the following:

This prompt is my favorite because it’s always so uncannily, hard-to-believe accurate. For every book I’ve written (now six!), page 69 never fails to be a perfect microcosm of the whole. And the Page 69 Test — and the fact that it works so well — never fails to blow my mind.

Enormous Wings is the story of Pepper Mills, a seventy-seven-year-old grandmother who moves into a retirement community, falls in love, and then falls ill, but when she goes to the doctor, she finds out she’s not sick; she’s pregnant. She comes home from that doctor’s appointment and, on page 69, tells Moth, her seventy-nine-year-old boyfriend, the news. At first, naturally, he thinks she’s joking. Smack dab in the middle of the page, he says, laughing, “Old age and pregnancy share a lot of the same symptoms, now I think about it.” This single sentence could be this book’s tagline and is for sure the seed of it, its central metaphor, and the point it explores for its other 284 pages.

Also on page 69, we get Pepper’s frustrations with the limitations of the health care system, her lack of options and agency on any number of fronts, her sweet relationship with Moth. We get the very present threat Pepper and Moth both live with, as people in winter of their years, that a simple moment of confusion could in fact be a stroke or the first signs of dementia, that exhaustion could just be feeling tired but might be early symptoms of something much worse, that even getting up off the bed and crossing the room saps more energy than they always have to spare. All of the above is exactly why I chose this admittedly strange premise and why I thought a pregnant seventy-seven-year-old was the perfect character to explore issues of agency, bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, family, health care, elder care, and love love love.

Visit Laurie Frankel's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Laurie Frankel and Calli.

The Page 69 Test: The Atlas of Love.

My Book, The Movie: Goodbye for Now.

The Page 69 Test: Goodbye for Now.

My Book, The Movie: This Is How It Always Is.

The Page 69 Test: This Is How It Always Is.

Writers Read: Laurie Frankel (February 2017).

The Page 69 Test: One Two Three.

Q&A with Laurie Frankel.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Delivery"

Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a son of the Finger Lakes, a Kenyon College graduate, and now a longtime Ohio resident, is the author of more than a dozen crime novels and multiple short stories.

Welsh-Huggins’s new book in the Mercury Carter thriller series, The Delivery, was selected by CrimeReads as one of the most anticipated thrillers, mysteries, and crime novels of 2026, while the first book in the series, The Mailman, was named one of the best mysteries of 2025 by Library Journal.

Welsh-Huggins's 2023 stand-alone crime novel, The End of the Road, was named one of the best thrillers of the first half of 2023 by Library Journal. Kirkus called it “A crackerjack crime yarn chockablock with miscreants and a supersonic pace.”

Welsh-Huggins is also the author of the Shamus Award-nominated Andy Hayes private eye series featuring a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned private eye, including the most recent book, Sick to Death, which Deadly Pleasures Magazine called, " … a solid p.i. novel with likeable characters, realistic situations and good detection."

The author applied the Page 69 Test to The Delivery with the following results:

Page 69 of The Delivery is told from the point of view of Randy Carmichael, a Providence, Rhode Island, grifter, who is obsessing as he often does about the cost of long-term care needed by his daughter, Michelle, who was left permanently disabled by a swimming pool accident as a child. Randy has cooked up a healthcare fraud con with his wife, fellow criminal Monica Carmichael, and he needs every penny from the scheme for the medical assistance required by Michelle. The page also introduces a major thorn in Randy’s side, a mafia wannabe named Pauley Carnivale, who has inadvertently stumbled upon Randy and Monica’s grift and is demanding a piece of the action.

In this case, page 69 sets the reader in medias res and doesn’t connect directly with the book’s main plot, which finds freelance mailman Mercury Carter searching for a missing trafficked woman so he can return a ruby ring she lost in a previous misadventure. At this point in the book, Carter hasn’t met Randy and Monica yet, although their paths will soon cross in violent fashion.

Carter, a freelance mailman who has never missed a delivery, is bound by his personal code of honor to find the trafficked woman—Terri Watkins—and return her ring, regardless of who gets in his way. As often happens with Carter’s deliveries, an unexpected obstacle launches the action. In the case of The Delivery, Carter is in town to drop off a valuable item of baseball memorabilia to an ardent fan when Carter stops to rescue a woman injured in a car crash. As a result of the rescue, he finds himself sidetracked by the new assignment delivering the ring, a job that comes with deadly consequences.

Visit Andrew Welsh-Huggins's website.

My Book, The Movie: An Empty Grave.

Q&A with Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

The Page 69 Test: An Empty Grave.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (April 2023).

My Book, The Movie: The End of the Road.

The Page 69 Test: The End of the Road.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (November 2024).

My Book, The Movie: Sick to Death.

The Page 69 Test: Sick to Death.

The Page 69 Test: The Mailman.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (March 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Republic of Memory"

Mahmud El Sayed is a British Egyptian science fiction and fantasy writer and translator. A former journalist, he won the 2023 Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Color for his work focusing on Arabic and Islamic–inspired themes in a genre he is calling Arabfuturism. He lives in East London where he spends his time pondering linguistic oddities and running story ideas by his cat.

El Sayed applied the Page 69 Test to The Republic of Memory, his debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 comes in the middle of Chapter 5 which is the third chapter from the POV of Translator Iskander Ezz – a low-ranking bureaucrat on the city-ship Safina. This is a generation ship divided not according to race or religion, but language, with translators serving as something akin to lawyers. On page 69, Iskander is heading down to Stasis – where all the ancestors are asleep in cryo-stasis – to try and convince his cousin Lebanon, who works in Stasis watch, to help him with a favour. However, before he can even get on deck, he must blag his way past the ever-present Security.

“It’ll take five minutes, I promise.”

Vic blew out a breath. “Fine, but you owe me one.”

Iskander nodded and moved past the big Security officer – but not before jotting down a quick note in the secret ledger of his tab: Corporal Victory Kamunda. One favor owed for letting me into Stasis against standing orders.

I think page 69 is a pretty good introduction to TROM as a whole. It’s from one of the book’s main POV characters and catches him doing one of the main POV character things that he does, namely facilitating and negotiating between the various factions on the ship. Page 69 gives readers a nice, clean, snap-shot of who Iskander is and, just as importantly, what the ship he lives on is like. Yes, there’s Security barring his way but he knows how to circumvent them.

I would conclude that the test works with TROM but only partially. The strength of multi-POV (and my book is very multi-POV with 12 POV characters) is that it allows writers to tell multiple disparate stories, and even genres, at the same time. Polyphonic storytelling. Iskander’s chapters might give readers the sense of a low-key slice-of-life story set on a generation ship. But if page 69 had fallen on a different chapter, they might just as easily think they were reading a sci-fi detective novel, a revolutionary bildungsroman, even experimental literary fiction based on a constructed language. Multi-POV is never just one thing.

Follow Mahmud El Sayed on Instagram.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dead Room"

Catriona McPherson (she/her) was born in Scotland and immigrated to the US in 2010. A former linguistics professor, she is now a full-time fiction writer and has published: preposterous 1930s private-detective stories; realistic 1940s amateur-sleuth stories (The Edinburgh Murders is latest); and contemporary psychothriller standalones (The Dead Room is the brand-new one). These are all set in Scotland with a lot of Scottish weather. She also writes modern comic crime capers about a Scot-out-of- water in a “fictional” college town in Northern California sneezedavissneeze. Scot’s Eggs, No. 8 just won for best humorous novel at Left Coast Crime in San Francisco. Her other novels have won Agathas, Anthonys, Leftys and Macavitys and been finalists for an Edgar, a CWA Dagger and three Mary Higgins Clark awards.

McPherson is a proud lifetime member and former national president of Sisters in Crime.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Dead Room, and shared the following:

From page 69:

‘Lord’s Yard,’ he says. ‘You’re sniffing round for a house clearance.’ I open my mouth to tell him that the house is clear, but he sails on. ‘We work pretty hard to stop funeral directors, furniture dealers, e-scooter reps or anyone else from bugging our friends. Take a hike.’

I find myself smiling. I’ve had the sharp end of it but it’s still good to know how well-protected these people are.

‘I will go,’ I say. ‘ I mean, you’re wrong about me but I can’t prove it so . . . I’ll try something else.’

‘You do that,’ he says, turning away. He’s back in the office before I’m out of the front door and whoever it is who’s lurking in there says something I don’t quite catch. It sounds like “Now shave,’ but even if that was his wife, it surely can’t be.

Page sixty-nine of The Dead Room happens to be the end of a chapter so it’s short. I’ve stuck with it nevertheless because, as Monica says in an episode of Friends, “Rules control the fun!” Also, it’s a good excerpt for its size in the terms of this game.

First off, Lord’s Yard is the scrapyard full of old furniture, house clearances, overstock and assorted other junk where Lindsay, the narrator grew up. It’s central to the story. And in this passage, Lindsay is searching for a lost old lady – another core aspect of the book – by asking around local nursing homes. In this one, she’s getting short shrift from a manager who assumes she’s preying on vulnerable elders to make money selling them stuff.

Lindsay’s response to being suspected is revealing of her personality. She’s pleased to find out that the guy in charge of this nursing home won’t let his residents be sold any bridges. It’s always seemed to me to be a mark of someone’s character whether they can understand that they’re not owed trust in the absence of evidence and that, if they take themselves off centre- stage, the world’s a better place because whoever is standing up to them is standing up to them.

You see it when parents are investigated for child abuse if a little one suffers a suspicious injury. I’m always really impressed with parents who get that the system protects tiny people and are grateful that it’s currently protecting their tiny people, rather than protecting the adults’ feelings and image. Moving on, finally there’s what Lindsay overhears as she’s leaving to try the next place. “Now shave.” Now shave? Campaigned-for-the-American-Readers, that – drumroll – is a clue.

All in all, a pretty neat little package of promises regarding what you’ll find in The Dead Room, eh?

Visit Catriona McPherson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Go to My Grave.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2018).

My Book, The Movie: The Turning Tide.

The Page 69 Test: The Turning Tide.

My Book, The Movie: A Gingerbread House.

The Page 69 Test: Hop Scot.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Beneath Us.

Q&A with Catriona McPherson.

The Page 69 Test: The Witching Hour.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (September 2024).

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (December 2024).

The Page 69 Test: Scotzilla.

My Book, The Movie: Scotzilla.

The Page 69 Test: Scot's Eggs.

Writers Read: Catriona McPherson (November 2025).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ways to Find Yourself"

Angela Brown is the author of Some Other Time and Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time. In addition to her novels, Brown’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Real Simple, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University. Brown lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Ways to Find Yourself, with the following results:

In Ways to Find Yourself, page 69 falls in the middle of a chapter. The protagonist, Grace, has recently arrived back at the beach house where she once stayed with her mother every summer, and is on a phone call with her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Adam. During the call, Adam reflects on the idea of “signs” (ex: seeing a coin on the sidewalk, finding a ladybug on your hand, spotting a red cardinal at the window). Although Adam has never much believed in “signs,” Grace has followed them all her life; in no small way, the whole reason she’s back at the beach house is because of a “sign” she saw one day earlier. Through the conversation, it’s clear Adam is second-guessing their split and using “signs” as a way to express his hesitation. About midway through the page, their call pivots to a brief flashback from an early (and bittersweet) moment in their relationship when their future together still felt full of promise.

Although page 69 doesn’t provide a big reveal (which comes a few pages later), it does highlight important details about the story. First, it sets up an event that comes at the midway point, one that ultimately pushes the rest of the plot forward. I’d argue that without this scene, that later twist probably wouldn’t have the architecture in place to logically exist. Likewise, the specific conversation between Grace and Adam is significant not only to this moment, but to the book as a whole. Since losing her mother, Birdie, the practice of looking for signs has become even more meaningful to Grace—she’s lost, searching for a new path, and hoping Birdie will send her guidance about how to move forward. On this page, Adam—who has never much believed in the practice but mostly humored Grace about her beliefs—is suddenly interested in the idea. Without him ever saying so directly, it shows he’s had a change-of-heart and is second-guessing their split. All in all, this page captures several themes central to the book—a feeling of regret about things not working out the way you’ve planned, and an uncertainty about how to take the next step.

Visit Angela Brown's website.

The Page 69 Test: Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time.

Q&A with Angela Brown.

The Page 69 Test: Some Other Time.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Drop Dead Famous"

Jennifer Pearson is a former teacher and author who lives in the northeast of England with two energetic boys and her somewhat energetic husband. She’s the author of several middle grade novels, writing as Jenny Pearson, and has been short-listed for the Costa Children’s Book Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, and was the winner of the Lollies (Laugh Out Loud Book Awards). When she’s not writing, Pearson can either be found doing something sporty or binge-watching true crime documentaries while eating astounding quantities of cheese.

Pearson applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Drop Dead Famous, and reported the following:

In Drop Dead Famous, global superstar Blair Baker rises above the stage for the opening number of her hometown concert. The cheers quickly transform into screams when the crowd realises Blair has been shot. On page 69, we find her sister, Stevie scrolling through video footage from the concert, searching for clues as to who the killer could be.

She brought her eyes to the screen. Finger steady this time, she hit Play. And she focused on the details. The faces in the crowd. The people on the stage—behind the stage. Security and merchandise vendors. She zoomed in on every shot, trying to look past heads that were blocking her view. She relived it all. Frame by frame. Blair’s entrance. The missed cues. Bex Lyons running onto the stage. The screams. The panic. The announcement. That para medic. Again and again, angle after angle. But there was nothing she hadn’t seen herself in the flesh. Doubt crept in. Then anger. What was she hoping to find? Some guy tiptoeing out with a gun in his hand and an I Murdered Blair Baker T-shirt? But she kept scrolling. And scrolling. Reel after reel replaying her sister’s murder. Her desperation growing, her mind slipping—letting go of the details, leaving a path for her pain. Blair was dead. Her sister was dead. It tore through her—carved her open. She dropped her eyes from the screen. Sobs racked her body, shook her from the inside out. She gave in to it—cried violently and uncontrollably.

The Page 69 Test works because it shows that the book deals with grief and mystery and portrays Stevie’s desperate need to find answers about her sister’s death as she obsessively replays the footage and spirals into an emotional breakdown. So, it does a solid job of showing the novel’s darker side and the main character’s motivation.

However, Drop Dead Famous is not a relentlessly depressing book, and this passage doesn’t have much of the humour that appears elsewhere. Maybe this is because it only shows one character. We don’t meet Colby Green (and her cowboy boots), who is the Blair Baker superfan who helps Stevie investigate and much to Steie’s surprise becomes her best friend.

So, while the page effectively represents the emotional intensity and mystery of the book, it does not capture its full range of themes and character dynamics.

Visit Jenny Pearson's website.

My Book, The Movie: Drop Dead Famous.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fair Chase"

Travis Mulhauser was born and raised in Northern Michigan. His novel, The Trouble Up North, was one of NPR's Books We Love in 2025, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, was an Amazon Editor's Choice Pick, and an Apple Audio Must Listen selection. His novel, Sweetgirl was long-listed for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, was a Michigan Notable Book Award winner, an Indie Next Pick, and was named one of Ploughshares Best Books of the New Year.

Mulhauser is the author of Greetings from Cutler County: A Novella and Stories, and received his MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro. He is also a proud graduate of North Central Michigan College and Central Michigan University. He lives currently in Durham, North Carolina with his wife, two children, and dog.

Mulhauser applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Fair Chase, and shared the following:

Fair Chase passes the Page 69 Test!

Page 69 is the opening of a chapter in which most of the novel’s main characters are present, and discussing the wolf that is the centerpiece of the story.

A gray wolf, an endangered species, has arrived in northern Michigan for the first time in over a century, and the Sawbrook family has assigned itself to protect the animal from a scared community.

Cutler County faces a construction stoppage and real economoic hardship if the federal laws designed to protect endangered species are engaged, and nobody, including the politicians and state government agencies, want that to happen. The Sawbrooks view protecting the wolf as both the right thing to do, the best way to stop the development projects that continue to threaten their property and way of life. Even if it means taking on some poachers.

The page also provides an opportunity for Lucy, a park ranger, to helpfully explain that the wolf is an alpha, not because it asserts thoughtless dominance, but because it’s a leader who would be trusted to make decisions on the pack’s behalf because of its intelligence, toughness, and empathy.

Visit Travis Mulhauser's website.

Q&A with Travis Mulhauser.

--Marshal Zeringue