First of all, Happy New Year! If you are a regular reader of this blog, I hope you’ll enjoy where it goes in 2017 and if you’re new, then welcome aboard. A year ago I was getting ready to have surgery and the first few months of 2016 were mostly about recovery. This year promises to be a lot more fun for me. Not only is my health good, but on February 28, my new novel, The Lost Book of the Grail, will be published in hardcover by Viking. I’ve been really pleased about the early buzz, including a starred review in Publishers’ Weekly this week that called the book “thoroughly enjoyable.”
With a new novel coming out, it makes sense to focus this blog on some of the topics and settings essential to The Lost Book of the Grail. The book takes place in an English cathedral, and in particular in the ancient cathedral library, so in the weeks to come I’ll be writing about some of my favorite cathedrals, some of the libraries I visited during my research, and some of the specific books that are mentioned in my text.
The main characters in the novel are the rather old-fashioned Arthur Prescott, who loves to spend time amid the volumes of the Barchester Cathedral Library, and digital native Bethany Davis, who has been hired to digitize the library’s manuscripts. So, I’ll be blogging about both the joys of good old fashioned physical books and some of the advances in digital information technology that come into play in both the novel and my research for it. I’m a believer in both of these technologies, if we use them correctly.
Finally, that word “Grail” in the title refers of course to the Holy Grail, and, like many a literary character before him, Arthur is involved in his own search for the grail—a search that takes him in surprising directions. So you can count on a blog or two about the Holy Grail and how I incorporated Grail Literature (from medieval manuscripts, to Tennyson, to Monty Python) into my narrative.
I hope you’ll enjoy the next few months as much as I do, and I especially hope that you will have as much fun reading The Lost Book of the Grail as I had researching and writing it. For more about the book, including how to pre-order signed copies, you can read the description and some early reviews by clicking here.