Please welcome New York Times bestselling author Khaled Hosseini to On the Bookcase as he tells us a few secrets about traveling for his new book tour of And the Mountains Echoed.

What most excites you about meeting your readers across America?
Meeting the wide range and diversity of people who have responded to my books, people from all walks of life, all religions, races, cultures, from varsity wrestling team members to hipsters to CEOs to middle-aged accountants to octogenarians.  It is always a reminder to me, when I meet these kaleidoscopic demographics, of the ability of fiction to connect people through the expression of basic, common human experiences.

You’ll be on the road for five weeks—what are you planning to bring to read on your tour?
I have already bought a few books for just that purpose and they are now sitting on my desk!  Some are new, some are older books that I have always meant to read and never got around to. They are:
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis
Dear Life by Alice Munro
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Not sure I will get through all of them, but I will knock off a few.

What do you like to do with your downtime during your book tour?
I read.  I exercise, if I can find the time.  I watch parts of movies.  I call home.  I try to write but never can.  I end up reading a lot.

What do you pack in your suitcase that might surprise us?
I always pack—though I never end up wearing it—my SF 49ers cap, which I consider my good luck hat.  Also, I have started taking guitar lessons (as a show of solidarity, really, with my son), and sometimes I will pack a small travel guitar for practice on the road. (A bit of parental trickery is at work here, of course; i.e., if I can find time to practice on a national book tour, then my son can find twenty minutes in his day to do the same.  Sometimes you have make people feel so bad that they’ll do the right thing.)

What are your children reading right now?
My daughter, who is ten, is reading A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
My son, twelve, just finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

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With more than ten million copies sold in the United States of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, and more than thirty-eight million copies sold worldwide in more than seventy countries, Khaled Hosseini is one of most widely read and beloved novelists in the entire world. The Kite Runner spent 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted as a #1 New York Times bestseller, remaining in the #1 spot for fifteen weeks, and spending nearly an entire year on the bestseller list. Hosseini is a Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.

Please welcome Karen Lee Sobol, author and illustrator of Twelve Weeks: An Artist’s Story of Cancer, Healing, and Hope to On the Bookcase!

“Why am I still here?”

When this question entered my mind, the answer followed at once.

“Write a book.  Try to have my experience be useful to others.”

In 2005 I received shocking news.  Waldenstrom’s macroglubulinemia, a blood cancer, raged through me.  “Rare and incurable” defined it.  Paralyzed with terror, I had this advice from a friend:  “When you’re drowning in quicksand, reach for a different branch.”

Luckily, different branches began to appear in many forms.  A Chinese herbalist and a kind stranger urged me to explore treatment options and to trust myself.   A grandmother sent a tape about the mind-body connection. My husband found the physician who is the world’s expert on this lymphoma and who saw me as a person first, then as a patient.  I learned all I could about the disease, approved treatments, and experimental ones.  My background in architecture came into play, and I decided to manage the sickness like a project.

Hope banished fright.  Not sure which moment might be my last, I began to truly live in the present.

Medicine, like art, is in large part a creative process.  The physician might begin with a mysterious substance in a test tube; the artist might begin with a blank canvas and a set of paints.  At the outset, each has an idea about a desired result, but neither is quite sure how to achieve it, much less what might happen along the way.

My journey from sickness back to health was a creative process, too.  We—my family and I—faced hard choices. Were the potential benefits of enrolling in a clinical trial with an experimental, biology-based drug worth the formidable risks?  Was I willing to experiment with my life?  My decision:  I would place myself in the test tube.

There is no doubt that the drug, and a superb medical team, annihilated the cancer.  I also believe that holistic healing techniques supported my body and my mind, and contributed to my recovery.  Through every phase, meditation anchored me.  My mantra became “I am healthy and cancer-free.”  I stated this in the present, and I felt it as if it were already true.  Over time, I became cancer-free.  My cure marks a breakthrough in medical science.

With infinite gratitude, I posed a question to my physician.  “How can I help you, who have helped me so much?”

His answer was immediate.  “Clinical trials.  We need more people to be willing to enroll in them.  It’s the only way we can advance the science.”  His response may have been a subconscious motivator.  Writing this book became my next project, with its own creative process.

Twelve Weeks seemed the logical title to choose since that was the time frame of the clinical trial in which I participated. People ask if writing was therapeutic; was it part of the healing?  Because I’m so fortunate, I feel it was a moral mandate, the right thing to do.

As my health declined, then gradually returned, in my art studio I expressed unspeakable emotions, as well as humor and beauty.  Images of my drawings, paintings, collages, and sculptures complement the text.

For the general reader, Twelve Weeks is a compelling tale.  For book groups, it provides a platform for multi-tiered conversations about one of life’s toughest challenges.

Valuable as a medical, emotional, and spiritual guide for people experiencing cancer, treating it, or seeking to cure it, the book offers both information and inspiration.  I’m happy to tell you that Twelve Weeks is making a difference in people’s lives.

To learn more, and for book group discussion questions, please visit www.twelveweeks-thebook.com

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Karen Lee Sobol is a painter, printmaker and sculptor. An alumna of Radcliffe College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she has studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Karen Lee is a board member of the New England Aquarium and the Institute for Health and the Global Environment. As an advocate for the Bing Center for Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she supports education and research and speaks regularly to share her story of healing and hope.

Please welcome Liza Gyllenhaal to On the Bookcase in an interview about her novel, A Place For Us!

Where did you get the idea for this novel?

A few years ago I heard a news story on our local public radio station in Massachusetts about a married couple who were being arraigned under the Social Host Liability law. Two teenagers had been seriously injured in a car crash after drinking with the couple’s son at a party in the family’s basement.  Though the parents had been asleep upstairs and unaware of the underage drinking, one of the injured teenager’s family was bringing a law suit against the couple. Understandably, the rural community where the accident occurred was upset about the incident — but also divided about where the responsibility rested.  As someone who loves writing about families and small towns, the story couldn’t help but capture my imagination.

I began to think about how I might turn this basic premise into a convincing work of fiction.  I let the idea simmer while I finished my most recent novel So Near, but then started to outline a plot and flesh out the characters. 

Coincidentally, as I began writing the novel, a very similar incident took place in a town not far from us in the Berkshires.  In this case, tragically, one of the teenagers involved in it was killed. This senseless death brought home to me how serious and pertinent the problem of underage drinking remains.

The story is told from the different points of view of four main characters.  Did you find that difficult to pull off?

Both of my last novels Local Knowledge and So Near were written in the first person, though in So Near it was a husband and wife who, alternately, told their stories.  I thought it would be interesting to try more points of view with this novel, but I also realized that using four different first person voices would probably drive me — and readers  — crazy.  So I decided to write the novel in what is sometimes called the close third person which means that the story is being told by “he” or “she” rather than “I” but, hopefully, from pretty deep inside the head of the character in question.

In the first person, you can write “I did this” or “I felt that” which gives the story an automatic believability.  For me, the third person—which puts readers a little more at a distance—is more of a challenge. I think that to write convincing fiction you have to be able to empathize with your characters.  You need to know them deep down. You have to believe in them.  But you also need to step back and give them breathing room to be themselves and make their own choices. It’s very tempting when you’re writing in the third person to  manipulate your characters and force them to do what the story line dictates.  But I think readers can always tell when a character is acting and talking—well … out of character.  The most important thing I learned from writing this novel in the third person is that if something doesn’t seem to be working, it probably isn’t the fault of the character—instead, there’s something wrong with the plot.

Two of your main characters are teenagers.  How did you manage to empathize with them?

Though I don't have children myself, I am lucky to have a number of wonderful teenage nieces and nephews in my life. I listen hard to what they say—and, perhaps more importantly, wonder about what they keep to themselves.  But, as I started to write the first chapter from Phoebe’s point of view, I remembered a relationship I had when I was about her age.  It was with a boy who, like Liam, was going through a very hard time.  He also happened to be the most popular boy in our class and, when it became obvious to everyone that we were spending a lot of time together after school, it was assumed that I was his new girlfriend.  So I suddenly became very popular, too!  But, in truth, all we were doing together was talking.  Actually, he was talking and I was listening.  More than anything else, I think I drew from that memory to create the strong bond that Phoebe and Liam share.

Is there an underlying theme in A Place for Us?

Yes—and it’s right there in the title.  It’s the age-old yearning to fit in and be accepted. In my novel Local Knowledge, I wrote about a woman raised in a small town who is befriended—and ultimately betrayed—by a wealthy female weekender whom she longs to emulate.  My character Maddie wanted to be accepted by this glamorous new friend so much that, as a result, she ended up sacrificing everything truly important in her life.

The natural human desire for acceptance has always interested me as a writer.  We’ve all felt that longing at some point, and very often the power of it has made us act in ways that we later regret.  In A Place for Us I decided to turn the tables on the social situation I’d set up in Local Knowledge and have my character Brook be a very wealthy transplant from New York City who longs to fit into the small town where her husband was raised and to which her family relocates after 9/11.   Brook’s struggle to fit in as well as her son Liam’s yearning for acceptance propels the story along and acts as the novel’s thematic underpinning.

What sort of research did you do in writing the novel?

I spent a lot of time on the internet reading up on the Social Host Liability law  and the many cases in Massachusetts that have resulted from the law’s passage.  The more time I spent researching different stories and exploring various sites, the more the name of Richard P. Campbell kept cropping up.  Digging a little deeper, I discovered that Mr. Campbell is the founder of a prestigious law firm in Boston, President of the Massachusetts Bar Association, and a driving force behind Social Host Liability legislation. He created a multi-media program, Be A Parent, Not A Pal, to educate students, parents, teachers, and members of the community about the Social Host Liability law. It’s a first-rate tutorial on the subject.  For more information, please see: http://www.socialhostliability.org/programs/beaparent.php.

I was very lucky to have the opportunity to interview Mr. Campbell by phone one afternoon.  He had agreed to a one-hour session, but we ended up talking for much longer than that.  He was outspoken and full of great anecdotes. And he was tremendously helpful, clarifying many complicated legal issues for me. He was also a passionate spokesperson for a cause he obviously believes in very deeply. At the end of the conversation, he said, “Whatever else your novel does, please have it make a case for how deadly underage drinking can be.”  I hope I’ve done that!

What authors do you like — and would like to recommend?

I read a lot — poetry, fiction, history, memoir.  I spent last winter in 18th century Russia with Robert Massie’s fascinating biography of Catherine the Great. This spring, I relived the Kennedy assassination and Lyndon Johnson’s remarkable early achievements as President via Robert Caro’s latest installment of Johnson’s life.  I loved Ann Patchett’s most recent novel State of Wonder and Edith Pearlman’s collection of short stories Binocular Vision. I’m thinking about trying my hand at writing something that revolves around a mystery, so I recently reread all my favorite P.D. James novels and I’m currently working my way through Agatha Christie.  After Nora Ephron’s death, I read everything she wrote in book form—and laughed out loud for a couple of days.

Do you have a set writing routine?

I usually wake up early and reread whatever I’ve been working on.  I revise constantly on the computer.  (It continues to amaze me how Tolstoy could have written War and Peace in longhand!)  Then I let the demands of daily life intervene for several hours and pick up again in the afternoon. Most days, I don’t hit my stride until three o’clock or so, and then if I’m lucky get two or three good, productive hours in. I think a lot about what I’m working on when I’m not actually writing.  When I’m running, for instance, or driving in the car back and forth between the city and our weekend place in Massachusetts. I try to work out problems—a scene I can’t get off the ground, a character who refuses to behave—during that two-and-a-half hour stretch.

Where do you write?

In the city, I usually write in a beautiful old Eames chair that I commandeered from my husband. But 16 years ago, we brought a place in the beautiful Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. It included a small farmhouse and an old horse stable which became my “writing studio.” It still has the old iron stall feeders and leather harnesses on the walls. It remains permeated by a wonderful smell of animal and old hay.

When we’re in the country, I wake up early and reread and rewrite on my laptop in the house, but in the afternoon I go out to the studio, bolt the door, and start the hard work of writing the next new word, sentence, paragraph, chapter. In the winter I have a fire going in the Jotul stove, in the summer I have all the windows open and can hear the seasonal brook and birdsong. This summer, I watched a family of wild turkeys—seventeen in all—parading up and down in the old paddock. Other sightings: woodchuck, coyote, fox, and early last spring, when the trees were just greening out, a big black bear.

Are you working on anything new?

As I mentioned earlier, I’m interested in trying to write something with a mystery at its heart.  I don’t think it will be a traditional police procedural, though someone will be murdered and the story will explore the reasons why—and probably end with the discovery of who did it.  But I’m hoping the novel will be more about the characters and the small New England community where they live.  I’m an avid amateur gardener and I loved writing about gardening in So Near and talking about my garden on my blog, so I’m pretty sure I want my main character to be a landscape architect/professional gardener.  I also know who gets killed—and when.  But that’s all I really have figured out so far.  A lot of the joy of writing—just as it is in reading—is discovering what’s going to happen next.

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Please welcome Santa Montefiore, author of The Woman from Paris, to On the Bookcase in this interview!

What was your inspiration for The Woman from Paris? Did you begin with a specific character or plot idea?

I started with the house! I fell in love with a beautiful Jacobean house near where I live in the country and worked the plot around it.

In the “Biography” section on your website, www.santamontefiore.co.uk, you write: “We have all had moments that we would give anything to live again.” What is one moment you wish you could relive?

Without doubt I would return to 1989 and relive the year I spent in Argentina as a nineteen-year-old. Inspired by the beauty of the pampa and the colourful people I met there, I wrote Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree, my first novel. I still have loads of friends there and return when I can. In my heart I feel it is my second home!

Phaedra deceives the Frampton family in the hopes of protecting them from the truth. Do you think good intentions ever justify a lie?

I think lying is acceptable in certain circumstances, one of those being when the truth would cause terrible pain. The trouble is you always risk getting found out and being exposed! Perhaps if Phaedra had lied and disappeared afterwards, she might have got away with it. Her troubles began when she allowed herself to become part of the Frampton family and of course when she fell in love with David. There was no way it was all going to end well!

The novel stresses the necessity of forgiveness. Why did you want to emphasize this theme in The Woman from Paris? Do you find it easy to practice forgiveness in your own life?

I think forgiveness is the hardest thing to find in our hearts, and yet it is the only way to diffuse our suffering. By holding onto resentment we hold onto pain. When we truly forgive we allow love to burn away all negativity. Love frees us from suffering, but goodness, I’ve had times in my life where I knew the theory and yet my heart remained as hard as stone. Sometimes, time is the only thing that softens the heart, which is why I think old people often make peace as they near the end of their lives. They grow wise and see the bigger picture.

Where is your favorite place to ski?

My favourite place to ski will always be Klosters in Switzerland, where I base the ski scenes in my novel. My great-grandmother, who was Swiss, used to go there with her family, way back, and her descendants have called it home ever since!

Did you model the beautiful setting of Fairfield Park after a particular place?

Yes, I went to visit friends in Hampshire who have the most beautiful Jacobean house, set in spectacular grounds. I have always loved houses, especially old ones, and I adore those summer houses built on hills or beside lakes, they’re very romantic. I used the house but made it my own, as the real one is not positioned by a lake nor does it have a hill with an ornamental summer house (folly) on the top. The houses in my novels are characters, too!

Your husband, Simon Sebag Montefiore, is also a successful, internationally bestselling author. Do you ever edit or read each other’s early drafts? How do you influence each other as writers?

Absolutely, we help each other all the time. We consider ourselves a business and share everything. He helps me with plots. Usually, I come up with the idea and then we sit over a bottle of wine discussing it and working out all the possible scenarios. It’s fun! I read the first draft of his novels, but not his history books. I can’t help with those. The novels I do feel qualified to critique. His new one, which comes out next year, is gripping and I really didn’t have to do much!

The Woman from Paris is your eleventh novel. Was there any element of writing this novel that differed from your previous novels? How you do you think you have grown as a writer from your first novel, Meet Me Under the Ombu Tree?

I think the key to success is loving what you do, whatever field you are in. I adore writing. I can’t look out of a window without feeling the urge to describe what I’m seeing. I think that enthusiasm is infectious. I have learnt a lot in the twenty years since I started writing my first novel, not only technically but from experience. The older I get, the wiser I become and the better I understand human nature. Writing about characters is much more interesting if those characters are complex. I think plot is important and it’s fun to keep the reader guessing, but I think it’s well drawn characters that keep the reader coming back for more. Is this novel different from the others? I think everyone is different, like children, but I love them all equally!

What was the last book you read?

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes. I found it moving, touching and funny. A very heavy subject told lightly.

What are you working on now?

I’m editing the one for next year. It’s based in Ireland and is a mystery, love story with lots of twists and turns. I have loved writing about Connemara, it’s very wild and romantic! I shall start my fourteenth novel straight after.

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Santa Montefiore is the internationally bestselling author of several novels, including The French Gardener and The Last Voyage of the Valentina. She lives in London with her husband, historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore, and their two children.