"The Black Highway"

Simon Toyne is the author of the internationally bestselling Sanctus trilogy (Sanctus, The Key, and The Tower), The Searcher, The Boy Who Saw, Dark Objects, and The Clearing, and has worked in British television for more than twenty years. As a writer, director, and producer he’s made several award-winning shows, one of which won a BAFTA. He lives in England with his wife and family, where he is permanently at work on his next novel.

Toyne applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Black Highway, and reported the following:

My new book starts with a headless, handless body washing up on the banks of the River Thames in the heart of London, and page 69 is right in the middle of the autopsy, so it’s a crucial scene that reveals key pieces of information that will propel the story forward towards an eventual solution to the mystery of who this man is.

Having a body with no head or hands – apart from being downright bizarre – also makes it incredibly hard to identify the victim, so this scene largely revolves around speculation as to who the man is and, by extension, who might have wanted to kill him in such a violent and brutal way.

It’s a very visual scene, a hallmark of all my books and a legacy of my previous career in television, and takes place in a makeshift morgue by the river, convened in haste because the body washed up somewhere very visible and is already becoming a big news story that the police want to get ahead of. As a result, the pathologist, Dr Evelyn Prior, a fearsome glamazon who looks like a 1950’s Italian film star, is in a couture dress she wore to the opera before her evening was interrupted, ninja uniformed river police watch on like attendant courtiers, and my two series characters Dr Laughton Rees, highly respected criminologist, and DCI Tannahill Khan, Metropolitan homicide detective, confer about the clothes the dead man was wearing, looking for clues in the well-cut suit and handmade shoes, and puzzled as to why someone who is a ‘someone’ and clearly not a vagrant has not yet been reported missing.

At the end of this scene - not quite on page 69, but close – they find a clue on the body, something that at first looks like a tattoo but is in fact something written in marker pen - P. Brannigan.

Is this the headless man’s name, they wonder? Or maybe even the man who killed him leaving a bizarre calling card. No, Laughton Rees, realises, it most likely refers to a building close by to where the body was found, the Brannigan building, with the P standing for the Penthouse. Laughton knows the building and the Penthouse well, because it’s not only where she lives, but also where her teenage daughter Gracie is currently home alone…

Visit Simon Toyne's website, Facebook page, Twitter perch, and Instagram page.

My Book, The Movie: Sanctus.

The Page 69 Test: Sanctus.

The Page 69 Test: The Tower.

My Book, The Movie: The Tower.

My Book, The Movie: The Searcher.

Writers Read: Simon Toyne (October 2015).

The Page 69 Test: The Searcher.

The Page 69 Test: The Clearing.

My Book, The Movie: The Clearing.

Q&A with Simon Toyne.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sunburned"

Katherine Wood also writes under the pen name Katherine St. John. She is a native of Mississippi and a graduate of the University of Southern California who spent over a decade in the film industry as an actress, screenwriter, and director before turning to penning novels. When she's not writing, she can be found hiking or on the beach with a good book. Wood currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and two daughters.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Sunburned, with the following results:

Page 69 of Sunburned is really a half-page, as it finds us at the beginning of Chapter 7. Our protagonist, Audrey, has been summoned to the swanky island of St. Barth’s by her ex-boyfriend Tyson, who has become a tech billionaire in the ten years since they broke up. Their relationship ended badly, and she wanted nothing more than to turn him down, but he’s being blackmailed about secrets they share, and has threatened to turn on her if she doesn’t help him find out who in his inner circle is extorting him.

On page 69, Audrey has just retired to her bedroom at Tyson’s lavish island estate after a tense dinner during which she met all the suspects, including the brother who has always been in his shadow, the celebrity business partner he's been butting heads with, the gorgeous young wife whose wings he’s clipped, and the sexy French butler who seems to know more than he should. In this scene, Audrey is eavesdropping on a conversation between the brother and the business partner while texting with her best friend about what’s going on, and she uses their code word to let her know she can’t talk for fear of being surveillance… that code word? Sunburned––which is of course the title of the book.

Is page 69 the most exciting page in the book? Nope. At this point, our victim hasn’t even been murdered yet! Things are definitely gonna get twistier and more thrilling as Audrey tracks down the murderer before she becomes the scape goat… or worse, the next victim. But is this page on theme and does it give you an idea of where the book might go? Absolutely.

Visit Katherine Wood's website.

Q&A with Katherine St. John.

The Page 69 Test: The Vicious Circle.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Typewriter Beach"

Meg Waite Clayton is the internationally bestselling author of nine novels, including the new Typewriter Beach, "an irresistible story of 1950s Hollywood..." (Publishers Weekly, starred review) "sure to be a big summer hit" (Library Journal, starred review), the New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and Good Morning America Buzz Book The Postmistress of Paris, and the National Jewish Book Award finalist The Last Train to London.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Typewriter Beach and shared the following:

Page 69 of Typewriter Beach recounts the afternoon after Léon Chazen, my blacklisted screenwriter, finds out he’s been blacklisted — a fact he learns when he shows up at his studio and is told by the security guard who has greeted him every morning for years that he cannot enter. Not knowing what else to do, he drives to a movie theater matinee, then leaves early only to have an FBI agent fall in beside him:

“Do you have time to answer a few questions, Mr. Chazan?” the agent said, lest there be any doubt that he knew exactly who Leo was, that he’d known that Leo was in that theater, that he’d waited for him.

Leo climbed into Buttercup and drove off, leaving the man watching him go. He knew as surely as the agent did that it wouldn’t matter, that answers weren’t what the man was after. The FBI simply wanted Leo to know he was being watched, that at any moment he could be seen— his world changed so quickly, just as it had been in France all those years ago.

He called about the cottage that afternoon and agreed to buy it sight unseen. And long before dawn the morning the sale was to close, he loaded Ole Mr. Miracle and a few things into Buttercup, leaving everything else behind once again.

What Leo earned after that, writing secretly due to the blacklist, was so little that he had to work constantly just to pay the mortgage…

The cottage referred to is in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where much of the story takes place. Buttercup us Leo’s beautiful pale yellow roadster convertible he bought with the money he earned from selling his first screenplay. And Ole Mr. Miracle is his typewriter.

The page is a pretty nice summary of where Leo finds himself in the 1957 thread of Typewriter Beach. And that story was where Typewriter Beach started for me, with this history of voices being silenced by our own government in ways that clearly violated people’s constitutional rights.

But the novel is much broader than that, too. It’s set in 1957 and 2018 Hollywood and Carmel-by-the-Sea, and is the story of the unlikely friendship between Leo and Isabella Giori, a young actress whose studio has in mind to make her the new Grace Kelly/Hitchcock’s new blonde—if she can toe the line. It’s told from four points of view, and the smallest one, page-wise, is Leo. Most of the 1957 story is told by Isabella. And in 2018, Leo has died and his granddaughter, Gemma, is in Carmel to clean out his cottage. There, she meets Isabella and the last point-of-view character, a creative tech guy who lives in the oceanfront mansion across the road from Leo.

The page exposes one aspect of the dark history underlying the novel: the Hollywood blacklist. But another thread of the story is the particular challenges women in Hollywood faced under the studio system, and also now, and the double standard between what transgressions men are allowed (lots) compared to women (none).

The page is also largely narration, whereas the great bulk of the novel is in scene. It opens, for example, with Isabella auditioning with Hitchcock, thanks to my wise editor, Sara Nelson at Harper Books. One of her first comments was that I should open with that scene, which she said was like nothing she has ever seen. And as usual she was right—although it took me some time to see that! And Typewriter Beach ends, also in scene, with an uplifting ending that I hope leaves readers laughing and crying at the same time.

Learn more about the book and author at Meg Waite Clayton's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Four Ms. Bradwells.

The Page 69 Test: The Wednesday Daughters.

The Page 69 Test: Beautiful Exiles.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Train to London.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Murder in Pitigliano"

Camilla Trinchieri worked for many years dubbing films in Rome with directors including Federico Fellini, Pietro Germi, Franco Rossi, Lina Wertmüller and Luchino Visconti. She immigrated to the US in 1980 and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Under the pseudonym Camilla Crespi, she has published eight mysteries. As Camilla Trinchieri, she has published The Price of Silence and Seeking Alice, a fictionalized account of her mother’s life in Europe during WWII.

Trinchieri applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Murder in Pitigliano, the fifth title in her Tuscan mystery series, and reported the following:

Celia, a red-haired little girl from Pitigliano, a medieval town on the southern border of Tuscany, discovers Nico is a detective and asks him to help her runaway father, who has been accused of murdering his business partner.

Page 69 takes place in the restaurant Sotto Il Fico (Under the Fig Tree) where Nico Doyle has become sous chef during the tourist season. It is now November. Nico and his rescue OneWag are eating pappardelle in veal stew sauce with his deceased wife’s cousin Tilde, her husband and her cantankerous mother-in-law, Elvira. Nico has decided to help Celia and her mother discover the truth. Never having been to Pitigliano, he asks for information. Elvira, after her usual criticism of Tilde’s cooking takes her time to answer him. She tells the story of a long-gone woman, a red-headed owner of a knit shop, whose pretty red-headed daughter ran away, not to be heard of since except for a postcard she sent from Pitigliano. Nico wonders if there is a connection to Celia and her mother. Redheads are not that common in Tuscany.

The page includes elements that are important to the whole series: Nico’s good heart, the joy of cooking and eating food, the important relationship between Nico, Tilde and her family. And it has Nico wondering. I’m glad you chose the 69th page.

Visit Camilla Trinchieri's website.

Q&A with Camilla Trinchieri.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Always Be My Bibi"

Priyanka Taslim is a Bangladeshi American writer, educator, and lifelong New Jersey resident. Having grown up in a bustling Bangladeshi diaspora community, surrounded by her mother’s entire clan and many aunties of no relation, her writing often features families, communities, and all the drama therein. Currently, Taslim teaches English by day and tells all kinds of stories about Bengali characters by night. Her writing usually stars spunky heroines finding their place in the world…and a little swoony romance, too.

Taslim applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Always Be My Bibi, with the following results:

Page 69 of Always Be My Bibi is actually the first page of chapter seven. On this page, Bibi—the bratty, American, Cher Horowitz-esque teenage heroine of the novel—is about to embark on her employee orientation for a tea estate in Bangladesh.

I think this page does a good job of giving readers a small glimpse into who Bibi is through her vibrant voice. You learn she isn’t especially excited about this new task, which is a punishment from her parents (for sneaking off with a boy back in New Jersey, although you won’t know this from page 69 alone). However, neither being in trouble nor the antiquated rules of the estate will stop her from making the most of her life, so she’s intent on being the best dressed on the farm.

Unfortunately, the page doesn’t perfectly encapsulate what the story itself is about as well as some other segments of the book. Always Be My Bibi is a YA romcom about a teenage fashionista jetting off to this tea estate for her older sister’s wedding to its heir, only to scheme with the younger brother of the groom to sabotage the engagement when they realize their families are destined for nothing but a Shakespearean-level feud. It’s a romance and a family drama all wrapped up in one, with ethereal descriptions of an underappreciated destination. You don’t get to see enough of that on page 69 alone, but if I were to choose a chapter that embodied some of the most fun elements of the book, chapter seven as a whole wouldn’t be a bad option. In the chapter, you get to see Bibi’s sense of style, some of her conflict with her older sister, her early impressions of the groom, and her banter with his brother, whom she still hates at this point. Plus, they take a tour of the tea garden and talk a little bit about the history of tea in Bangladesh, so if page 69 doesn’t quite pull you in, perhaps try finishing the chapter to see if it might be your cup of tea!

Visit Priyanka Taslim's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Love Match.

Q&A with Priyanka Taslim.

The Page 69 Test: The Love Match.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dark Library"

Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author, a writing professor, and she holds a PhD in English literature, a background that, as it turns out, was ideal for writing her new standalone, The Dark Library, the story of a woman still menaced by her dead father whose rare book collection holds the secrets she needs to escape him.

Evans applied the Page 69 Test to The Dark Library and shared the following:

On page 69 of The Dark Library, my protagonist Estella Ecker, who prefers to be called E, has reached rock-bottom. With her father dead and her mother missing, she’s been left alone to care for the family’s brooding Gothic mansion and for her beloved housekeeper (and substitute mother) Annie, but the money that her parents had thrown around so casually has disappeared. Desperate to meet her financial obligations, she’s landed a position as a research assistant at the local college, the best job available for a woman in her small hometown in 1942. She’s sold the car. She and Annie have sealed off most of the house to save on coal. They’re growing their own food, even foraging for mushrooms and berries to cut their grocery expenses. Even so, she can’t make ends meet. The time has come to sell the family treasures.

E spends the entirety of page 69 negotiating with an art dealer, Oscar Glenby, who has come to look at her father’s collection of paintings. He is breaking the news to her that the paintings are essentially worthless in wartime. She asks if her father’s rare book collection has any value and he says no, but he also asks to see it. This sets off her intuition. If it’s worthless, why does he want to see it?

This settles E’s mind about how she feels about Oscar Glenby. She doesn’t trust him, and she doesn’t want to do business with him. It’s a relief to see him go, but he takes with him her last hope to avoid financial ruin.

Is this a good enough sample of The Dark Library to tell readers whether it might interest them? I think so. It communicates just how impossible it would be for anybody, especially a woman, to find enough money during a war to save a money pit of a house like E’s. It shows her resolve to fight impossible odds. Annie doesn’t appear on page 69, but the rest of the chapter shows how much Annie and E mean to each other as they grapple with their next steps.

If the essence of a suspenseful plot is “a relatable character dealing with an impossible-to-solve problem,” then page 69 of The Dark Library gives a satisfying glimpse of E and her conundrum.

Learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans's website.

The Page 69 Test: Floodgates.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (October 2010).

The Page 69 Test: Strangers.

My Book, The Movie: Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Plunder.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (November 2013).

The Page 69 Test: Rituals.

Q&A with Mary Anna Evans.

My Book, The Movie: The Physicists' Daughter.

The Page 69 Test: The Physicists' Daughter.

Writers Read: Mary Anna Evans (June 2023).

The Page 69 Test: The Traitor Beside Her.

My Book, The Movie: The Traitor Beside Her.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Catalog of Burnt Objects"

Shana Youngdahl is a poet, professor, and the author of the acclaimed novel As Many Nows as I Can Get, a Seventeen Best Book of the Year, a New York Public Library Top Ten Best Book of the Year, and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year. Youngdahl hails from Paradise, California, devastated by the 2018 Camp Fire, which stirred her to write her latest novel, A Catalog of Burnt Objects. She now lives with her husband, two daughters, dog, and cat in Missouri where she is Associate Professor in the MFA in Writing Program at Lindenwood University.

Youngdahl applied the Page 69 Test to A Catalog of Burnt Objects and reported the following:

Page 69 of A Catalog of Burnt Objects begins a chapter called “Two and A Half Weeks Before,” The protagonist, Caprice is dropped off by her Gramps at Sierra’s Hole in The Dam Donuts to have a meeting about the app she is developing to promote tourism to her town. Here, she meets her best friend Alicia, who is “totally together,” and Caprice feels inadequate in her glued-together shoes. Gramps directs her inside and offers her money for donuts which she tries to refuse but he evades her. He suggests that it is her “job,” to eat the donuts and that she must complete this job because you “never take money for a job you can’t finish.” Then her brother, Beckett, and love-interest, River, pull up. Caprice reflects on how in the last week she’d only seen River at school and as she equates him with “firefly glimpses,” the page ends.

Because of the chapter header this is a short page, but it still gets to the heart of a few things that are deeply important to this book. Caprice is shown with her loving Gramps. She adores him and he supports her. He is someone that helps set her morals about money and work, and toward the end of the book this conversation will be something Caprice reflects on as she figures out her path forward.

Gramps is mentor character who is there even when she isn’t confident in her new role as someone who has to run a meeting. Her ability to focus is challenged by being seventeen and having her love interest there. The good and bad of a new love during times of change is also an important theme in the book.

Hole In The Dam donuts is an important setting because its name is an example of one of the many “Dam puns” embraced by Sierra residents, a town that celebrates the history of their local dam with an annual “Dam Days” Parade. Caprice’s family is very involved with this parade, and it is the setting of the book’s final chapter.

Two and a half-weeks before is the countdown to the catastrophic wildfire that will decimate Sierra. The fire will force Caprice to confront all of her feelings of inadequacy head-on, and realign her understanding of home, her vision for the future, and her relationships with her friends and family. It’s ultimately all there, but you might want to read more than just page 69 to really feel it!

Visit Shana Youngdahl's website.

Q&A with Shana Youngdahl.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Women Like Us"

Katia Lief’s new novel, Women Like Us, is the follow-up to Invisible Woman. Lief is also the author of A Map of the Dark and Last Night under the pseudonym Karen Ellis. Earlier work includes USA Today and international bestselling novels Five Days in Summer, One Cold Night, and The Money Kill, the fourth installment of her Karin Schaeffer series which was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. She teaches fiction writing at The New School in Manhattan and lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Lief applied the Page 69 Test to Women Like Us with the following results:

When Women Like Us takes the Page 69 Test, we arrive at a relaxed moment with Joni Ackerman letting her guard down and allowing herself to enjoy a simple kindness.

Frank, who she’s just met, owns a film and television post-production company in New York where Joni and her daughter Chris might return to finish the pilot for a TV show they’re making. After visiting several uninspiring facilities in Manhattan, they’re caught off guard by a small Brooklyn-based company’s creative and technical capacity in combination with an unusual coziness and the convenience of its location near their apartment.

Joni surprises herself by feeling attracted to Frank, who is divorced and about her age, at a time when she’s written off the idea of dating. Her instinct is to bolt—but then, on this page, Frank offers his homemade scones and a cup of coffee before they leave.

Everything about the visit feels right, and it terrifies her. She doesn’t really want to return to New York after several years back home in California, and she doesn’t trust the strength of the good impression this man is making on her.

In Invisible Woman, the first in this two-book series, Joni went down the rabbit hole of her anger as her marriage dissolved. By the end, she made a life-changing choice in committing a crime and getting away with it. She left New York and returned to her Los Angeles home where she recovered her balance and a sense of inherent goodness, while weathering the pandemic with her daughter Chris. Now Chris and others at their production company are pressuring them to return to New York where the company has its headquarters

Joni is reluctant and almost wants the visits to post-production facilities to fail so she can head back west. Then she meets Frank and tastes his homemade scone.

As the novel goes on, Joni discovers that she isn’t afraid of Frank as much as she’s afraid of herself. Can she trust herself not to hurt him?

Visit Katia Lief's website.

The Page 69 Test: Next Time You See Me.

My Book, The Movie: Next Time You See Me.

The Page 69 Test: Vanishing Girls.

My Book, The Movie: The Money Kill.

The Page 69 Test: Last Night.

Q&A with Katia Lief.

The Page 69 Test: Invisible Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Murder Takes a Vacation"

Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Lippman applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Murder Takes a Vacation, and shared the following:

Page 69 in Murder Takes a Vacation opens to a seminal memory for the main character, Mrs. Blossom. It's about the first time she saw the work of Joan Mitchell, an abstract expressionist, and how emotional it made her. This, she thinks to herself, "was a woman who clearly was not afraid to take up space." Mrs. Blossom is a woman who's trying not to be afraid to take up space, but it doesn't come naturally to her. Newly rich through a stroke of luck, she has flown to Paris to see a Mitchell exhibit, resolved to see Mitchell's home in Vetheuil.

In her memory of her first time: “The paintings were bold, enormous . . . And so much color, so many evocations of flowers! Mrs. Blossom had wandered through the rooms transfixed, feeling as if this work had been created explicitly for her.”

The fact is, I discovered Mitchell as Mrs. Blossom did, at a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I am embarrassed I didn't know of her work until a few years ago, but so it goes. And, although I'm not as shy as Mrs. Blossom, I'm also a little conflicted about taking up space.

Because I became a mother quite late in life, I'm not yet at the point of the existential dilemma she finds herself in, with no one to care for. (A widow for a decade, she's been helping with her grandchildren, but now her daughter's family is relocating to Tokyo and she is pointedly not invited to join them.) But I've lately taken to bragging that I'm living my best old lady life -- still working, but enjoying travel and museums more and more. I'm even a docent at the American Visionary Art Museum.

A browser glancing at page 69 would certainly get a glimpse of the larger themes of the work — a woman alone, traveling, interested in art, feeling a little bit adrift, but trying to take positive steps.

Visit Laura Lippman's website.

The Page 69 Test: Another Thing to Fall.

The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.

The Page 69 Test/Page 99 Test: Life Sentences.

The Page 69 Test: I'd Know You Anywhere.

The Page 69 Test: The Most Dangerous Thing.

The Page 69 Test: Hush Hush.

The Page 69 Test: Wilde Lake.

My Book, the Movie: Wilde Lake.

The Page 69 Test: Sunburn.

The Page 69 Test: Lady in the Lake.

The Page 69 Test: Dream Girl.

The Page 69 Test: Prom Mom.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sister, Butcher, Sister"

KD Aldyn lives everywhere and nowhere (home is where the Wi-Fi is). She most often wears black (and sometimes red) and sometimes dances like Elaine from Seinfeld.

Aldyn applied the Page 69 Test to Sister, Butcher, Sister, her debut, with the following results:

On page 69 of Sister, Butcher, Sister, you’ll be in the company of Kate, the eldest of three sisters, as she shows her little sister and nephew around the garden of the house she has recently purchased. What memories bubble beneath the surface?

From page 69:

Bo inspected the furry tan buds on the Michelia.

“Just wait until you see them in bloom, Bo. They are glorious.” Kate turned and placed her arm around Peggy’s shoulders. Do you remember little Peg?”

Yes, she remembered. The sweet perfume of those precious white flowers was not something easily forgotten. The two sisters stood back and watched Bo seeing this garden for the first time. Peggy stared at the deep green of the rhododendron leaves and the bright pink splashes of color painted by a few early blooms, …

The Page 69 Test might lead the reader into a false sense of security! I mean, we are talking about a female serial killer, guilty of the most heinous crimes.

Yet, it does show something of the dynamic between two of the sisters. It also shows the importance of the house which, in the writing, became almost a character itself, holding as it does the divergent memories of all three sisters.

* * *

I’d like to share with you something unusual that came to light after I wrote the manuscript. In real life, I spent much of my youth living with my grandparents and I loved their house.

The house that Kate purchases for her thirtieth birthday is modelled on my grandparents’ home. It was number 30.

After completing the manuscript, which turned out to be even more gruesome than I initially imagined, it occurred to me that people who knew me might think that something terrible had happened there (it had not), so I set about changing the house number in the book from 30 to 36.

Not quite so simple as it sounds but I got the job done.

Fast forward a year or so and I decided to take a trip down memory lane, only to discover that the land around my grandparents’ home had been subdivided and the house numbers reassigned.

You’ve probably guessed it …

The house that was number 30 is now number 36.

So, all my hard work in rewriting was to no avail. The house won.

I never did change it back.

Visit KD Adlyn's website.

Q&A with KD Aldyn.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In the Family Way"

Laney Katz Becker is an award-winning author, writer, and a former literary agent. Her books include the novels, In the Family Way and Dear Stranger, Dearest Friend, and the nonfiction anthology, Three Times Chai, a collection of rabbis’ favorite stories. When she’s not writing, Becker enjoys drawing, sewing, reading, long walks, playing tennis, and canasta. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, raised her two children in Westchester County, New York, and currently lives on the east coast of Florida with her husband and their Havanese.

Becker applied the Page 69 Test to In the Family Way and shared the following:

It's sort of scary how indicative page 69 is when it comes to the themes in my novel. On that page, Lily’s best friend and neighbor, Becca, has dropped by for a visit. She’s nervous because she’s about to share a secret with Lily—something even Becca’s own mother doesn’t know: that Becca was “in the family way” when she married her husband, Bradley, more than a decade earlier. Now, Becca and Bradley have three sons but Becca’s recently discovered she’s pregnant again—with a baby she doesn’t want and cannot afford. But this is before Roe, so Becca has no options. Or does she?

On this page we also learn that when Becca and Bradley were dating and first started “doing it” in high school, Becca thought she was protected because she douched afterwards. The lack of knowledge so many women had about their bodies in the 1960s, coupled with living in a repressed society (Lily is mortified as Becca shares her story)—where sex education wasn’t taught in schools and nice women didn’t talk about such things—is only one reason Raven House, the local Maternity Home for Unwed Mothers, is overflowing with girls who are “in trouble.” On page 69, Becca confesses that “there but by the grace of God,” she didn’t wind up in a place like Raven House.

Because my novel is set before the women’s movement, the women in my novel have to rely on each other to navigate through life’s challenges, marital issues and their pregnancies—both wanted and unwanted—and page 69 touches on all of those things.

Visit Laney Katz Becker's website.

Q&A with Laney Katz Becker.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Terra Incognita"

Steph Post is the author of the novels Terra Incognita, Miraculum, Lightwood, Walk in the Fire, Holding Smoke, and A Tree Born Crooked. She graduated from Davidson College as a recipient of the Patricia Cornwell Scholarship and holds a Master’s degree in Graduate Liberal Studies from UNCW. Her work has most recently appeared in Garden & Gun, Saw Palm, and Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a Rhysling Award and was a semi-finalist for The Big Moose Prize. Terra Incognita received the 2024 Gold Medal in the Florida Book Awards.

Post applied the Page 69 Test to Terra Incognita and reported the following:

Terra Incognita is a classic adventure tale told through a kaleidoscope of medium, forms and voices. I was especially excited, then, that page 69 lands within the bounds of the first “Crossing” piece: Whenever the six main characters are traveling across large distances—the ocean, seas, wilderness—the story is told through a collection of epistolary ephemera. On page 69, we have the first of many journal entries written by Sebastian Dahl, mineralogist and conflicted protégé of the expedition’s leader, Sir Ashmore Bedivere.

Among his scientific observations and sketches of ship-life aboard the Undine, Sebastian expresses his anger, frustration and bewilderment at being left out of Ashmore’s secret plan to discover the last lost city, Alatyra.

I only wish Ashmore had confided in me from the beginning.

As he used to.

I wonder how much more Cristabel knew than me. She appears to be in his confidence again, which would explain why I’ve been shut out. I knew I shouldn’t have traveled home to Copenhagen last fall! I could feel the difference when I returned, not only with Ashmore, but with Cristabel as well. It was as if the two of them had grown closer somehow. Closing doors in Lunete House. Heads together, whispering at the top of the stairs.

Does Sebastian’s first journal entry give the reader an idea of the book as a whole? Absolutely not. But then neither would an excerpt from one of Cristabel’s—Sir Ashmore’s wife—furtive letters or Theo’s telegrams as he impersonates a Zulu prince. The same would go for Ashmore’s internal monologues to his dead partner, Lily’s immediate musings as she grapples with an entirely different life than the one she knew as a thief on the streets of New York City or Felix’s reminiscences of the story itself, framed a year later by his narration.

But that doesn’t make this page any less vital than any other page in the novel. Terra Incognita is rooted in Sir Ashmore’s expedition, but at its heart, too, is the beat of every character Ashmore drags along—and down—with him. As each character becomes entangled with the rest, a web is created that can either snare them or catch them safely from falling. As Felix informs us from the very beginning, “Terra Incognita is not the dark space on the map to be illuminated, but the darkness in our hearts, to be tamed or unleashed.” Each character is on a journey to find that darkness and choose to give in to it or cleave to their new, found family. Therefore, each voice is just as important as the story as a whole.

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My Book, The Movie: Walk in the Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue