Megan DeMint is a writer and editor with a love for nonfiction: memoirs, collections of essays, books by journalists, and whatever else she can get her hands on. She writes articles about authors and their writing processes at Spine Magazine and works as a Communication Specialist at Cornell University. Even more of her work can be found at www.megandemint.com.
Meng Jin’s debut novel, Little Gods, utilizes a network of characters and their lives to tell the story of Su Lan, a physicist who is forever changed after giving birth to a daughter in Beijing on the night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Through the eyes of her daughter, husband, and a neighbor, the complexity of Su Lan and her experiences are revealed.
In The Stationery Shop, Marjan Kamali tells the story of a romance that reaches far beyond its origins and across the span of the characters’ lives. Amidst growing political turmoil in their home of Tehran, Roya and Bahman do not expect to fall in love amidst the books of their local stationery shop, let alone find their entire lives changed by it. Little do they know, this will also be the year that Prime Minister Mossadegh is removed from power with the assistance of the American government.
When Ayesha Harruna Attah learned of her enslaved great-great grandmother, only known as “slave,” she wanted to give her a voice that had previously been denied. The origin story of her book, The Hundred Wells of Salaga (Other Press), comes from this personal family history, as well as years of research and writing to get it right.
With her second work of historical fiction, Jane Healey knew that she wanted to highlight a story of lesser-known women. So when she came across the story of the Red Cross Clubmobile girls, American women who volunteered to bring a piece of home to soldiers in World War II, she was instantly drawn to them. The Red Cross Clubmobile girls became the subject of her new novel, The Beantown Girls, out last February from Lake Union.
