Delivery & Acceptance

So I finished the new book (February 12) and sent it off and both my agent and my editor thought it was pretty good, a vast relief. I finished the edit on April 13, and just the other day I got paid. It was very long time between checks. The book is called (as least for now and subject to the approval of Holt marketing) THE FAMILY DEAD. It's a little bit like THE GOOD SON, except Mexico rather than Pakistan, and a father-daughter thing instead of a mother-son thing. Besides that the usual: musings on the underlying nature of reality, guns, car chases, explosions, religion, sex. If all goes well at Holt, it should come out in the spring of 2013.

The next book is going to be an enormous, barely readable, historical novel about a man who lives through the European cataclysm between 1786 and 1848, a period that established the political categories under which we still live: liberal and conservative, left and right, secular and religious. It starts with an assassination conspiracy at the premiere of Don Giovanni in Prague in 1786 and goes on through the wars of Napoleon and the revolutions of 1848. Characters include Mozart, Casanova, and Marx. Just now, I'm doing research, ploughing through Casanova's memoirs, all 12 volumes, and there's a lot more besides. I'm off contract, so I plan on taking my time, but if all goes well, I should have a book by the fall of 2014.