The paperback edition of A Reunion of Ghosts, with its new haunting cover, comes out today from Harper Perennial. If you’d like a copy, you can buy it using the links here. Or you could try to win a free copy in the Goodreads giveaway here.

Learning fancy new publishing terms from my paperback editor, Hannah Wood. This is the “deliverable” that includes an image of the paperback with the National Jewish Book Association “burst” on the cover. It will be emailed to booksellers across the Midwest on January 26, the day the paperback is released in North America by Harper Perennial.

And how proud am I to have endorsements from Anthony Doerr and Lauren Groff?

This morning Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life rebroadcast “Sunday Morning,” a short radio essay I recorded for them back in 2012.  It’s about a warm night (or rather, a very, very early morning) when our terrier Josie woke me up, asked me to let her outside, and then refused to come back in. Instead, she darted around her pen, evading my grasp, ignoring my pleas, patrolling the “grounds” as her not so fine breeding compels her. I finally gave up and sat on the deck, watching her. (She’s only 12 pounds and there are stories here in the Arboretum neighborhood about owls or coyotes carrying small dogs away.) WPR had asked me to write something about Wisconsin for them and I’d been having a hard time coming up with anything suitable. Then I heard a not-so-distant roar, and the next day I came up with this little piece.

Natural Instincts Collide With Modern Life For A Woman And Her Dog

by JUDITH CLAIRE MITCHELL

It’s two a.m., and the terrier can’t sleep. Raccoons and possums are prowling. The terrier wants to go outside, guard our farm, protect our crops.

I’d welcome her vigilance were we actually farmers, if we truly had any crops, but we aren’t and we don’t. I’ve explained this to her, but she just tilts her head, and continues to wheedle and whine. What part of raccoon do I not understand? She must save the (nonexistent) wheat, the acres of (invisible) corn. She must save them tonight. Now.

In fairness to the terrier, our neighborhood does seem rural. We live adjacent to the UW Arboretum in Madison. While we’re in walking distance of the state capitol, our home is in the woods.

We love it here. We never tire of saying: We live in a small forest inside a big city.

We thought the terrier would love it here too, would spend her time frolicking and perfecting her Frisbee skills. Instead she’s always on duty, always on edge. All these insolent trespassers: the rodents, the deer, the gangs of wild turkeys, blue and pre-historic. She paces, yelps. When I coo at the chipmunks or am charmed by the bunnies, I can tell what she’s thinking: I live with the worst farmer ever.

Tonight, two a.m., sleepless myself, I indulge her. Outside now, she peers into the woods, rigid with watchfulness. I’m watchful too, looking for owls and hawks, for coyotes.

The coyotes are hungry and angry this year. I’ve seen them at the forest’s edge at dusk, hunting for housecats and small dogs like this one. The terrier guards the land; I guard the terrier.

~~

Sometimes I wish I could disconnect the hard wires that make the dog think the world is one giant cornfield. I wish she could stop her endless patrolling, her worrying.

Then again, I wish I could stop worrying too. We’re blessed, my husband and I say, but lately the depression I thought I’d vanquished through meditation, medication, and willpower, has returned. At night the reflection in my kitchen window is of a gray-haired woman who appears less wise and serene than she’d hoped. I don’t like how old looks on me.

Or is it just my own hard-wiring, that just as this terrier comes from a long line of possum-chasers, I come from a long line of hand-wringers? That just as the dog doesn’t need a farm to protect a farm, I don’t need a problem to fret about life?

~~

Tonight’s vigil ends with a lion’s roar. This is no metaphor. A lion at Vilas Zoo, is also up late, unable to sleep.

The terrible roar actually calms us. The terrier thinks a bigger dog has come to spell her. As for me, the roar takes my mind off myself.

Upstairs now, in bed, the dog by my side. Then comes another enemy: the clash and clatter of thunder, the report of rain on leaves. The dog again grows agitated. She looks at me. I whisper to her: Enough.

For once she agrees. Outside, raccoons may be dancing in the rain, but finally, three a.m., a terrible farmer and her stalwart dog close their eyes. Tomorrow, we’ll be back guarding against the unseen and unnamed. Tonight, though, we’ll let ourselves sleep.

Thank you to Lorri Levine and the other members of the Orlando JCC Book Club for sending this photo of their January 13, 2016 meeting. Lorri tells me that this book club is all about the cheese and the wine and the sushi and the cameraderie and the book, but mostly…the cheese. As a Wisconsinite, I can get behind that. Thanks, again, ladies.

Today my friend, the fiction writer Emily Franklin, left a note on my Facebook timeline that simply said, “Congrats!” When I replied, first, to thank her and, then, to ask what in the world she was congratulating me for (I’d finally unpacked the suitcase that’s been lying by the front door for two days now, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it), she was the first to tell me that A Reunion of Ghosts was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction. (Full list of winners and finalists here.)

As my people say, Who knew?

I have to confess I’m on Cloud 9 over this. The winner of the fiction award was Daniel Torday, author of The Last Flight of Poxl West, and the other finalists included one of my idols, Jim Shepard, as well as Kristin Hannah and Yehuda Avner & Matt Rees. To be in such company: such a joy. As my people also say, Mazel Tov to one and all.

When I was 15, my English class was assigned to write an essay about a work of literature that I found horribly boring. I can’t remember the book or its author, but I know it was a classic, and even as I loathed it, I knew it was important. I just couldn’t figure out why. Accordingly, with the arrogance of youth, I penned (literally, as we had no computers back then) a scathing indictment of the enduring art before me. My callow refutation ended with a declaration that the book was “eminently putdownable,” which I thought was witty and writerly.

As you can imagine, the first ten minutes of the next day’s class consisted of our teacher Mr. Gratton lacing into me for having the temerity to criticize the canonical author (Henry James? Was it Henry James?). Mr. Gratton didn’t like me in the first place. He never called on me when I raised my hand and he called me Debbie, this despite the fact that my classmates constantly pointed out that Debbie was not my name. He didn’t care. He seemed to see no good reason for learning my actual name. The dislike was mutual, of course. I thought he was a cantankerous jerk. But on this day I realized I was being  justifiably excoriated and was humbled. He was right. Who did I think I was, anyway? I was also embarrassed as he railed against using nonexistent words such as “putdownable.”

This memory came to me today as I read Waterstones official announcement of its eight New Year Book Club Selections, which the British bookseller describes as thus:

Unputdownable reads chosen by our expert booksellers

Unputdownable! I may have been wrong about Henry James or Joseph Conrad or whoever it was that I was too young and solipsistic, at 15, to appreciate. But perhaps I was right–just a little bit right–about what readers value. Learning from literature, pondering life, empathizing with characters, eschewing sheer entertainment for exquisite prose or authorial wisdom–yes, all so important. But so is feeling compelled to turn the page and then the next, then the next.

I’m so pleased that the expert booksellers, broad and voracious readers all, have called A Reunion of Ghosts unputdownable. And pleased, too, that they go on to say:

We love our book club. No, really, we LOVE it. We are proud to hold up each of these books and say ‘you MUST read this!’ and, of course, you really ought to read them all – they’re brilliant. We’ve taken the greatest care picking them for you, so we hope you enjoy them as much as we have. This is our selection of the best books to read right now…Past Book Club titles have proved hugely popular with our customers, and we are certain our new choices will become future bestsellers and be the best-loved and most discussed books of 2016.

What I was trying to say in my essay all those years ago was that I didn’t feel this kind of passion, this kind of love, for the great work put before me. Later on, other teachers (some of whom even took the time to learn my name) plus some newly acquired maturity on my part taught me how to read the classics even when I found them “difficult” reads.

What I’m trying to say now is that I’m happy there’s a place where the word putdownable–or better yet, unputdownable–not only exists, but is shouted with joy. That the word is being applied to my own book–well, I love it. No, I really love it! Thank you, thank you, Waterstones.

As for you, Mr. Gratton, no longer with us–I hope your heaven is populated with angels who appreciate the books that you really love. You taught me to be humble and open and a more generous reader. For that I thank you. xoxo, your former student Debbie.

Into the world (well, at least into the UK and its former colonies except for the US), on this last day of 2015, comes the British paperback edition of A Reunion of Ghosts published by the wonderful booklovers at 4th Estate. Friends in England, look for it in Waterstones, where it is one of the New Year Book Club books.

Here is my fantastic editor at 4th Estate, Lettice Franklin, on the striking new cover:

‘The hardback of A Reunion of Ghosts was papered with yellow and purple clouds. Jo Walker, the designer of that jacket, meant ‘the three purple clouds [to] represent the sisters and the main yellow cloud is the past that has a hold over them’. The result was so lovely I wanted to paper my bedroom in it.

We wanted to do something different for the paperback – something photographic – but when I went through the novel again, I found myself repeatedly stopped in my tracks by Mitchell’s heart-rending descriptions of skies, open windows and gases.

A character enters ‘the Dead and Dying Room’, to find ‘something terribly wrong has occurred’ and the window is open. Lenz Alter, as a child, sees ‘an inky slash between earth and sky … a ribbon of indigo’. The sisters symbolise their desire to kill themselves with a ‘horizontal light … the light that sometimes replaces sunlight, the light we see for a brief moment virtually every day’. They see sunsets that are beautiful ‘in the way poisons sometimes are … dangerous and gorgeous colours’. And then – of course – there are the horrific, lethal ‘yellow-grey fumes’ of poison gas that infiltrate every day of the sisters’ lives and every page of this novel.

The cover’s designer, Becky Morrison, bottled all those ‘dangerous and gorgeous’ colours to create a cover that is simultaneously beautiful and disturbing – a cover that is perfect for a novel that is simultaneously heart-breaking, hilarious, tragic and uplifting.’

Heartfelt thanks to Lettice, Jo, and Becky.

Joining Singapore, the Philippines shows A Reunion of Ghosts some love.  In a list of “the most popular literary works in fiction for the year according to online rankings and critics,” the Philippines Online Chronicle ranks Reunion at lucky 7. In what I believe must be a translation from Tagalog, the Chronicle’s reviewer writes:

Who says creating a joint suicide note for three sisters about to commit suicide on New Year’s Eve can’t be a hilarious endeavor? The novel serves as a tell-all for the lives and previous generations of the Alter family, and before Lady, Vee, and Delph end their lives as least melodramatic as possible, they want to share their family history to us, the readers. What results is a dark comedy about the sins of the past and how everything is intertwined with our lives today.

I’m not sure what that means exactly, but I’ll take it anyway. Thank you, Philippines.

Earlier this month the Seattle Public Library system was kind enough to name A Reunion of Ghosts one of the top ten novels of 2015. Today they honored Reunion yet again by including it in another top ten list: The Top Ten Families More Dysfunctional Than Yours (Probably). As they explain:

The extended holiday season, from Thanksgiving through Hanukkah and Christmas to the end of Kwanzaa and into the New Year, is often a time full of family – and the unique frustrations that family can bring. For comfort and commiseration, try reading one of these 10 books featuring families that are (probably) more dysfunctional than yours.

Thanks, Seattle. Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter are honored to be included in this list. After all, nobody puts the fun in dysfunction like they do.