Roundtable: Inviting the Reader Into Your Story

In our roundtable today, we’re focusing on the question: How does your book invite a reader’s interest, both intellectually and emotionally? What might that look like? What methods might an author use? And we’ve got four incredible writers joining us for the discussion: Nancy Crochiere, Janet Rich Edwards, Christine Murphy, and Hesse Phillips.

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Nancy Crochiere’s comic-roadtrip novel, Graceland, about a single mom forced to chase her Elvis-obsessed mother and pink-haired teenage daughter to Memphis, was an Amazon Kindle bestseller and named a top summer read by Parade, Woman’s World, and Deep South Magazines.

Janet Rich Edwards' debut novel, Canticle, features a mystic who joins a defiant community of women to fight the medieval Church for their faith and independence, will launch on December 2 from Spiegel & Grau.

Christine Murphy is the author of Notes on Surviving The Fire, considered one of the best crime novels of the year so far by NYT, “brilliant” by the Financial Times, and praised by the New Yorker for its layered narrative and spirit of anarchy.

Hesse Phillips's debut Novel Lightborne was a finalist in the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair and was chosen as both a Book of the Month and a Best Historical Fiction Novel for 2024 by The Times (UK), who said "there has never been a fictional retelling [of Christopher Marlowe's mysterious death] as vivid and original as this one."

Photo by Kir Simakov on Unsplash

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