FICTION an actual event: a March 10, 1948, fire at Asheville’s Highland Hospital for the mentally ill, in which nine women perished, one of whom was Zelda Fitzgerald. With this tragic remnant of history in mind, the reader jumps back to the 1930s, in New Orleans’ French Quarter, where heroine Evalina Toussaint begins her story. After her mother’s death, the young girl’s refusal to eat finds her shipped off to Highland Hospital, where she will spend the rest of her childhood and her early adulthood. Moving seamlessly from New Orleans to Asheville, then on to Baltimore and Paris before looping back to Asheville and New Orleans once again, Guests on Earth gives readers a fascinating, albeit heartwrenching, glimpse of early 20thcentury psychiatric treatments, including the work of celebrated psychiatrist Robert S. Carroll. His unwavering belief in the importance of art, music and exercise therapy in treating mental illness was revolutionary in his day—even as he popularized shock therapy. Guests on Earth delivers on all counts, entrancing readers with a brilliant tapestry that falls inside the confines of historical fiction, yet defies genre with a hypnotic narrative. —KAREn Ann cullOTTA
BELLMAN & BLACK
tire life. As a young man, William is promising, bright and handsome. As he grows into adulthood, he builds a successful business and has a lovely wife and children he adores—but then it all begins to crumble, and a mysterious man in black appears. Desperate to save what little of his former life remains, William makes a deal with the oddly familiar stranger, and a grim new business venture is born that will consume him. Despite the story’s macabre premise, Setterfield never gives in to the temptations of garish sensationalism. This is a slow-burning, creepily realistic tale, woven together with practical but often magically transformative prose that moves the reader from the comforts of an idyllic domestic life to the depths of despairing determination. Even with all its strangeness, Bellman & Black never loses sight of its emotional core, and that makes it a deeply affecting journey. Quite simply, Setterfield has done it again. —mATTHEw JAcKSOn
SUSPENSE
would you describe the book Q: How in one sentence?
Q: What inspired you to write this novel?
Q: Why do you find ghost stories particularly appealing?
Q: What one thing in life is most precious to you?
By Eleanor Catton
Little, Brown $27, 848 pages ISBN 9780316074315 eBook available
HISTORICAL FICTION
Eleanor Catton’s historical suspense novel The Luminaries is built like a triple Decker—one of those 19th-century novels that were so substantial, they were published serially in three volumes. Clocking in at over 800 pages, this pitchperfect Victorian pastiche set in New Zealand has all the right elements: long-lost siblings, hidden caches of letters, a séance and a villainess so wicked she could have walked right out of a Wilkie Collins novel. When Walter Moody comes to Hokitika in 1866, it is to make his fortune in the gold fields. At his hotel, he happens upon a meeting of 12 men nervously discussing a rash of mysterious local occurrences. A prostitute has been arrested after overdosing on opium. A wealthy man has disappeared. A recluse was discovered dead in his isolated
Q: What do you fear the most?
Q: If you could choose someone to haunt, who would it be?
Q: Words to live by?
BELLMAN & BLACK A former professor of French literature who left academia to become a writer, Diane Setterfield found international success with her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale (2006), a Gothic mystery that reached the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Her second novel, Bellman & Black (Emily Bestler/ Atria, $26.99, 336 pages, ISBN 9781476711959), traces the lifelong consequences of one cruel childhood act. Setterfield lives in Yorkshire, England.
R E A D M O R E AT B O O K PA G E . C O M
Seven years after her mesmerizing first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield returns with Bellman & Black, a ghost story that’s both terrifyingly familiar and unlike any such tale you’ve ever read. As in her previous novel, Setterfield once again transports us into a world of irresistible Gothic suspense, this time weaving in unsettling ruminations on mortality, nature and how far a man will go to save what he loves. As a young boy, William Bellman kills a rook with his catapult. It’s an act of boyhood curiosity and playfulness, but it will alter his en-
Q: What’s the title of your new book?
THE LUMINARIES
By Diane Setterfield
Emily Bestler / Atria $26.99, 336 pages ISBN 9781476711959 Audio, eBook available
meet DIANE SETTERFIELD
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