Dear Reader,

The Astral was inspired by a building and a book.

The beautiful, enormous, and compelling Astral Apartments is a red edifice in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the neighborhood I lived in for many years. Walking by it often, I wondered about its inhabitants, history, stories. Finally, I realized that I needed to write a novel about it. I still have not been inside; I transformed it into an imagined version of its real self.

The classic 1944 English novel, The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary,

Photo credit: Ronnie Farl

set in the London neighborhood of Green Bank, on the Thames, is narrated by down-on-his-luck painter Gulley Jimson, a philosophical old rogue still up to all his old tricks. I discovered it in my twenties and have reread (and loved) it many times.  

The Astral is my homage to the building and the novel that inspired it. I hope you enjoy it.

Yours,

Kate Christensen

a scintillating novel set in the heart of Brooklyn about love, loss, and making a new life on the wreckage of the old.

The Astral is a huge, rose-colored apartment building in the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. For decades, it has been the happy home (or so he thought) of the poet Harry Quirk and his wife, Luz, who raised two children in their rambling top-floor apartment.  However, the aging Astral's glory is beginning to fade and as the building crumbles around him, a series of events forces Harry to face the reality of his own fractured family.

"Like the rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn of its setting, Christensen's unremittingly wonderful latest (after Trouble) is populated by an odd but captivating mix of characters.  Christensen takes a singular, genuine story and blows it up into a smart inquiry into the nature of love and the commitments we make, the promises we do and do not honor, and the people we become as we negotiate the treacherous parameters of marriage and friendship and parenthood."

-Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

"With acute perception and witty humor, this bittersweet novel moves along at a tremendous pace, entertaining until its climactic final scene."
-Bookpage

Visit Kate's Facebook page, Scribd,  and her website.    

Kate Christensen is available to speak with your book club by phone.  Contact Kate through the publisher's website to arrange a discussion.

  Fiction / 400 pages / Paperback
  Wiliam Morrow / May, 2011

Dear Reader,

In The Sweetness of Tears, I wanted to write a story that went beyond the conflict that dominates the front pages of newspapers around the world, to explore questions of faith and doubt, war and its consequences, friend and foe, through the voices of two families, Christian and Muslim, who find themselves connected in ways they never imagined.  Approaching my own religious history, cultural heritage, and spiritual experiences through the eyes of an outsider, I dived into the story of a young Evangelical woman named Jo March, journeying with her around the world as she uncovers the secrets of strangers, learning who she is along the way. 

Writing The Sweetness of Tears was an exercise in empathy.  Exploring the world through strangers' eyes, seeing it from a new perspective, and folding that perspective into my own experience has always been what I most enjoy about reading fiction.  I hope that getting to know Jo and the people she meets is as much of a gift to readers as writing her story was for me.

If once you read my novel, you wish to further discuss the issues and characters, please be my friend on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, or invite me to call in to your book club.

With warmest regards,

Nafisa Haji

NAFISA HAJI IS GIVING AWAY 5 COPIES OF THE SWEETNESS OF TEARS.  ENTER TO WIN A COPY.

When faith and facts collide, Jo March, a young woman born into an Evangelical Christian dynasty wrestles with questions about who she is and how she fits into her faithful family. Chasing loose threads that she hopes will lead to the truth, Jo sets off on an unlikely quest across boundaries of language and religion. Traveling from California to Chicago, Pakistan to Iraq she delves deeply into the past, encountering relatives whose histories are intricately intertwined with her own -- only to learn that true spiritual devotion is a broken field riddled with doubt and that nothing is ever as it seems.

 
Reviews of The Sweetness of Tears

"A family story, and the many threads eventually cleave to illustrate how a complicated blend of race, religion, culture, and tradition can create peace rather than conflict."

-Publishers Weekly

"The type of storytelling that opens the reader's eyes to other lives..."
-The Columbus Dispatch

TRY NAFISA HAJI'S RECIPE FOR PAKISTANI KULFI.  

Visit Nafisa Haji's website, her publisher's book page or follow her on Twitter.

Nafisa Haji is available to speak with your book club by phone.  Contact Nafisa to arrange a discussion.

Fiction / 336 pages / Hardcover
HarperCollins / May, 2011

Dear Reader,

When I moved to Boston in 2002, the city was reeling from revelations that local Catholic priests had molested children, and that the Boston Archdiocese had covered up the abuse. The news hit me like a sucker punch. I was raised in a devout Catholic family; I spent twelve years in parochial schools and had  

extremely fond memories of Catholic clergy.
It's no exaggeration to say that nuns and priests were the heroes of my childhood, and I found it impossible to square those tender memories with the shocking scandal unfolding in Boston. Like a lot of writers, I write to make sense of the world, and Faith was my attempt to explain the inexplicable, to understand what I couldn't make sense of in any other way. It is an anguished and deeply personal book.  

Jennifer Haigh 

JENNIFER HAIGH IS GIVING AWAY 5 COPIES OF FAITH.  ENTER TO WIN A COPY.

Art, Sheila, and Mike are siblings in a large extended Irish-American family from the Boston suburbs. Their mother is Lace Curtain Irish-Catholic, having raised her children to keep family secrets just that, secrets, in a home where most subjects are taboo.

Sheila is concerned when Art, a beloved priest leading a major Catholic parish outside Boston, seems to fall off the grid. Then the news breaks that he has been accused of sexual misconduct. The media coverage shatters the community and pits Art's family members against one another, leaving Sheila determined to uncover the truth and -- she hopes -- clear his name.  

Reviews of Faith    

"Haigh explores the intersections of public scandal and personal tragedy in her superb fourth novel. . . . At its broadest, this is a frank and timely story of familial and institutional heredity; at its most personal, the novel is a devastating portrait of a priest who discovers that he's also a man."

-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Please visit the publisher's website for more information, and view her book trailer. 

Jennifer Haigh is available to speak with your book club by phone.  Contact Jennifer through her publisher to arrange a discussion.