Dear Librarians, You’re the heroes of Mother Daughter Traitor Spy, my first stand-alone novel. Without you, it simply wouldn’t exist. Let me explain. First, I wouldn’t and couldn’t have written a single book without librarians and without libraries. My hometown library—and one librarian in particular—nurtured my love of books and reading. I remember her putting a copy […]
Dear Librarians, Thank you. Sincerely, wholeheartedly, enormously, thank you. I’ve always been a librarian devotee, but about twenty-five years ago, I was invited to be on the Board of Trustees of Nantucket’s library, the Nantucket Atheneum. I was charged with starting a Friends of the Library group, because our new library director, Charlotte Maison, wanted […]
Dear Librarians, As the tenth Maggie Hope novel, The Hollywood Spy, goes out into the world, I think it’s more than fitting that a pivotal scene is set in a library. This particular scene takes place in Los Angeles’s magnificent downtown Central Library, and for guidance on how that library worked I must thank Jen […]
Continue reading "Susan Elia MacNeal’s Letter to Librarians"
The Girls in the Picture is a fascinating novel of the friendship and creative partnership between two of Hollywood’s earliest female legends—screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Swans of Fifth Avenue and The Aviator’s Wife. Below, read Melanie Benjamin’s letter to librarians about writing and researching her new novel. It is 1914, and […]
Bewitching and playful, with its feet only slightly tethered to the world we know, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover explores hope, love, and loss across a series of surreal landscapes and wild metamorphoses. Here, Michael Andreasen, a UC Irvine MFA graduate and recent contributor to The New Yorker, writes a letter to librarians about the summer he lost […]
Julie Garwood, #1 New York Times bestselling author, shares how libraries and librarians are dear to her heart. In Garwood’s new novel Wired, a beautiful computer hacker and a bad-boy FBI agent must collaborate—in more ways than one. Allison Trent doesn’t look like a hacker. In fact, when she’s not in college working on her degree, she […]
In Secrets in Summer, the “queen of beach books” (The Star-Ledger) returns to the shores of Nantucket in a novel about one memorable summer when flirtations flourish, family dramas play out, and scandalous secrets surface. Here, Nancy Thayer shares her library memories, and discusses how she wrote the main character in her new book who just […]
Intricate, heartrending, and morally urgent, Ranger Games is a crime story like no other about a U.S. Army Ranger who robbed a bank the day before his deployment to Iraq. Here, author Ben Blum writes a letter to librarians about how libraries and book influenced him and his cousin, Alex Blum, the Army Ranger who committed armed […]
Continue reading "A Letter from Ben Blum, Author of Ranger Games"
