“When she woke, she was red. Not flushed, not sunburned, but the solid, declarative red of a stop sign.

She saw her hands first. She held them in front of her eyes, squinting up at them. For a few seconds, shadowed by her eyelashes and backlit by the hard white light emanating from the ceiling, they appeared black. Then her eyes adjusted, and the illusion faded. She examined the backs, the palms. They floated above her, as starkly alien as starfish . . .”

—from When She Woke

So begins Hillary Jordan’s riveting new novel, When She Woke, publishing today. In the haunting first scene, Hannah Payne wakes up on a table in a bare room, covered by nothing but a flimsy paper gown. Her skin is now red and her every movement is broadcasted live on national television. In this grim vision of America’s not-too-distant future, watching “Chromes”–criminals whose skin color has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime–has become a sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. The victim, according to the state of Texas, was her unborn child. Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she shared a fierce and forbidden love.

In her Bellwether Prize-winning debut, Mudbound, Jordan gave us a stunning recreation of America’s past. Now she returns with a haunting and all-too-familiar vision of America’s future in which faith, love, and sexuality have fallen prey to politics. When She Woke is a powerful re-imagining of The Scarlet Letter, set in an America where the line between church and state no longer exists and criminals are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated, but “chromed” and released back into society to survive as best they can. In Hannah’s attempts to find solace in a hostile world, she unknowingly embarks on a journey of self-discovery that will force her to question her country’s values–and her own. When She Woke is both a timely fable of a society that politicizes the personal and a powerful story of one woman’s struggle to reclaim herself.

We’ve set aside three copies for our devoted fans. For a chance to win one, just leave a comment here or on our Facebook page and you’ll be automatically entered!

When She Woke has already garnered rave reviews from critics and booksellers alike.  So far, it’s been:

• The #1 Indie Next pick for October
• One of Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Fiction picks for the fall
• One of O Magazine‘s Fall Reading picks

Check out some of Hillary Jordan’s fantastic reviews below and don’t miss the excerpt at the bottom of this page.

“[A] chilling futuristic novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“[A] provocative, politically charged novel… [Hannah’s] journey to reclaim herself is equally chilling and riveting.”—Family Circle

“Jordan’s elegant prose and thrilling plot make for an engrossing read, while her well-structured examination of our Schadenfreude-hungry culture and the precarious position of women’s rights within it make for a thought-provoking one.” —Shelf Awareness

“When She Woke is one of those books I did not want to put down. I read it in one sitting because the story was so desperate and dark and engrossing … It’s a well-paced literary thriller, very engaging.”–Bookslut

“Christian fundamentalists may shun this novel, but book clubs will devour it, and savvy educators will pair it with Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Essential.”—Library Journal

“Jordan blends hot-button issues such as separation of church and state, abortion, and criminal justice with an utterly engrossing story, driven by a heroine as layered and magnetic as Hester Prynne herself, and reminiscent, too, of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Absolutely a must-read.”—Booklist, starred review

Hillary Jordan is the author of two novels: Mudbound, which won the 2006 Bellwether Prize and a 2009 Alex Award from the American Library Association, and When She Woke, publishing October 4, 2011.

Michael Dahlie is the recipient of a 2010 Whiting Writers Award. He is the author of the novel A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, which won the PEN/Hemingway award in 2009, and has a second novel due out in late 2012.

HJ:

You’ve just finished (as I have) your second novel. For me they were two very different kinds of ecstasy and agony: With Mudbound I experienced the joy of discovering my voice and learning that I was in fact capable of writing a novel and getting it published (what a feeling, holding the book in my hands for the first time!); and the torment of spending five years wondering whether it was any good and would ever be finished and read and liked by anyone not related to me by blood. With When She Woke I had the thrill and terror of being under contract (“Wow, I’m actually being paid to write!” and “Uh oh, this means I owe them a book”) and the sporadic reassurance that came from having written a pretty successful first novel, which of course gave rise to anxiety over whether WSW would rise to the standards of MB or fall prey to the dreaded “sophomore slump.” What was the experience like for you?

MD:

I always feel like writing is something close to dreaming – I’m inhabiting a world that’s both imaginary and also entirely my own. So taking something that seems to belong to my imagination and turning it over to the so-called world feels strange. So far this has been my experience with both books, even though the second one will not be out for a bit. Anyway, I think that’s something like what you’re talking about with WSW. There are the publication pressures you describe, but there’s also the sense of unreality when other people read the story and talk about it. It’s what it would be like meeting Robinson Crusoe or Maggie Tulliver at a cocktail party. Two different and unresolvable realities have somehow collided.

HJ:

Writing is like dreaming, isn’t it? And publication is the wake-up call. And as much as you want the book to be out there in the world, part of you just wants to pull the covers over your head and drift back into the safe cocoon of sleep… But to return to my original question: were Gentleman’s Guide and your forthcoming novel different kinds of dreaming for you?

MD:

Strange to think about now that I’m asked, but the truth is that I remember so little about writing them. I suppose there are a few distinct moments I can recall – researching the correct spelling of Lobster Newburg for instance (there’s quite a literature on this topic). But writing for me is really like reading (or dreaming, once again). Even with the books/dreams I love the most, the details always escape me later on.

Okay, here’s a question for you – one I’d be quite annoyed by – what’s up with book three? Are you going to be writing the next novel on tour? I ask this now because I find embarking on fictional projects to be quite calming. Perhaps this is the way you deal with delayed plane connections and unsettling hotels?

HJ:

I didn’t write much when I was touring for MB, unless you count all those breakfast menu door hangers I filled out (“NO home fries please”). I need intense focus to write, and I find that elusive when I’m constantly packing and unpacking and returning my seat and tray table to their fully upright position and praying that the guy coughing his lungs out next to me has allergies and not avian bird flu and that the hotel I’ll be staying in doesn’t wrap the glasses in plastic. The tour for WSW is going to be even more epic than the last one—I’ll be doing 38 events between mid-September and the end of the year—so realistically I don’t think I’ll be able to start the third novel until early 2012. And yes, I know what it is, but I’m not telling!

And because I just finished reading the manuscript of your most excellent second novel last night (I devoured it in one sitting), I’m going to abruptly change the subject and ask: as unique as the two books are, both of them center on hapless but lovable rich guys. What draws you to this type of character? And will you return to the same territory in book three—or do you even know yet?

MD:

I think what I most like writing about is money. From an artistic standpoint, I can’t get enough of rich people, especially the ones getting the bad end of things, although I tend to be very sympathetic towards my characters. But it now all seems even more interesting to me given what’s going on these days with the economy. Maybe my protagonists are some kind of stand-in for the reported decline of American economic dominance. On a more personal level, though, I think my artistic fascination with cash also comes from living in New York for so long, especially since I was always on the ragged edge of financial disaster. The credit card debt I amassed over that decade was absolutely colossal and a lot of that was via cash advances for rent. At any rate, I suppose I spent significant time thinking about what it would be like to have a lot of money. (Back to my dream life again.) Anyway, this leads to two questions for you. First, what was it like for you to write two novels that are both equally excellent but also so different – kind of an impressive feat. Second, you just moved back to the city. How is it influencing your writing?

HJ:

You know, I don’t think I’ve never really sat down and defined what I most like writing about. People in really effed-up situations, I suppose, and also people battling other people’s notions of what’s right and wrong. And love; I think I’ll always write about love. Both my novels are about those things, so in that sense they’re not entirely different. But it was really exciting to me, after spending 7 years in 1940s Mississippi, in the past tense and in the first person (all of which I was heartily sick of), to jump 35 years into the future, into the thirrd person limited POV of a young woman nothing like my MB characters.

As for being in NYC—who’s going to be in NYC? Certainly not me, at least not till the book tour’s over. How is that for you, meaning the author part of the job vs. the writer part? For me it’s surreal (and lovely) that people would actually care about meeting me. I’ve been an avid reader my whole life, and until I became an author I never once went to a reading or cared about getting a book signed. Though I probably would have, if Jane Austen or Flannery had been doing the reading and signing.

MD:

Yeah, touring for a book can be quite baffling, but aside from the opportunities for people to meet and socialize, I do think there can be something artistically important about them, with readings specifically. Authors can add a certain kind of inflection and emotion to their words when they read aloud that can’t always be captured in print. For instance, when you and I first met we were reading together and your selection from Mudbound was truly exceptional. You read at a slower pace than I would have read it and I really think it added something, and certainly colored how I read the book later on. Anyway, as you know, we’re going to track you down in Chicago, so it will be interesting to see what you do with WSW – the book is so memorable and arresting already that I wonder how you’ll handle it out loud. (I’ll give you my full review at the bar afterwards.)

HJ:

Aw shucks, Michael. The admiration is mutual.

My favorite book from this summer is Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt, narrated by a man in his fifties who, at his mother’s funeral, runs into his aunt, who tells him that his mother was not his mother, and who drags him into a series of illegal adventures across Europe and into Turkey and South America. This is one of Greene’s so-called entertainments, but I often like his entertainments more than his supposedly serious novels, and I love this novel most of all, for the reasons I love Muriel Spark novels: an unlikely, wry, sneakily sad novel about what it means to start a new life.

– Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England

Maybe because I’ve been caretaking two elderly parents (95 and 85), both stricken with Alzheimer’s, I’ve been attracted to books by older authors who address the experience of being old, of approaching death. Googling “old age memoirs and women,” I hit on a memoir by Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End. A former British editor with a long, renowned career publishing the likes of Jean Rhys and V. S. Naipaul, Athill discovered late in her own life that she herself could write. The memoir is a gem, clear-eyed and unsentimental, remorseless and cranky, and tender and true. Athill focuses her sharp eye on everything from sex in old age (Ninety-one when the book was published, Athill ceased to be a sexual being in her seventies; the plus side: “other things became more interesting”) to her preference for nonfiction in her old age (“I do still want to be fed facts, to be given material which extends the region in which my mind can wander”). I found myself underlining passages and starring every other page, wondering if my markings would some day elucidate what I had dreaded or looked forward to in old age for a loved one.

– Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Every year, as the summer solstice approaches, I get a hankering to reread The Sun Also Rises. I’ve now given into that hankering so often that it doesn’t really feel like summer to me anymore unless I’ve spent a few days with Hemingway’s masterpiece. And, as much as I love its bittersweet depiction of expatriate life in Paris in the nineteen-twenties and its rendering of the reckless bacchanal of the Pamplona fiesta, nothing is dearer to me than the quiet center of the book: the fishing trip Jake takes to Roncesvalles with his friend Bill. I don’t fish, but those passages, which so evocatively capture the blissful escape from workday life and the satisfactions of leisure, are redolent of every great vacation I’ve ever taken. All the more so, since in the novel–as in life–the happiness is so fragile and fleeting.

– Jon Michaud, author of When Tito Loved Clara

Lord of the Rings. I think I was thirteen that summer. I devoured the whole trilogy in about a week and was utterly bereft when I turned the last page. Oh, to be in Middle Earth!

– Hillary Jordan, author of Mudbound

I first read Larry McMurtry’s Moving On, the summer when my first husband was busy leaving me. It was a rough summer but I lost myself in this big huge book peopled with characters so alive, I felt they were at my side. Every summer after that, I dipped back down into this story of desperate rodeo people, Texas grad students and the very unhappy Patsy Carpenter, who are all doing just what the title says–moving on. It’s funny, moving and brilliant–and it saved my life.

– Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is my new favorite summer book! It’s an illustrated novel centered on 6-year-old Sophia and her aging grandmother and set on a small Finnish island that the two adventurers explore each day. It’s a heart-warming story that holds some important life lessons. Think The Little Prince with a little bite to it. I fall in love with Sophia every time I read this book. I think you will too. How can you resist the little girl who is writing a treatise on angleworms that become split in half and concludes: “Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.”

– Heidi Durrow, author of The Girl Who Fell From The Sky

As a kid, I think these books made their indelible mark in summer: Lad: A Dog by Albert Payson Terhune and of course Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. I remember the exact feel of the days I spent with these books, reading them in the afternoons when the Missouri heat drove me out of the woods and fields and off the melting asphalt street, and indoors. After my father and mother bought an air conditioner, when I was a preteen and teenager, on some of those hot summer afternoons — particularly if my parents were gone — I would make hot tea, crank the air conditioner to the coldest setting, and burrow into the good living room couch I wasn’t supposed to use, and read novels by Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. I did this while other kids tried smoking. No, wait. I did that, too. With the air conditioner cranked up. In college, Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion got me through the long, last summer. After that, memory blurs.

– Richard Louv, author of The Nature Principle


“Summer read” implies guilty pleasure, the easy beach or airplane read, something we eat for flavor, not nutrition, purely as entertainment. I can’t name a single title but I can name an author, Tony Hillerman, and his series of mysteries featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. The characters are both men I’d like to know. The mysteries work on two levels, giving the reader both a question he can’t answer and a world he doesn’t understand, and it’s the latter I find most inviting, books set on the Navajo reservation of the “four corners” area where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet, with its buttes and mesas, arroyos and dry river beds, lit in what seems like perpetual sunset. Maybe it’s because as a young man, headed away from home for the first time to attend a graduate writing program in Tucson and scared out of my mind, I pulled off the highway to get gas, somewhere west of Tucumcari, and I leaned against the fender of my car to rest, smoke a cigarette, drink a Coke and watch the hills all around me turn from gold to red, and I thought, “Something huge is happening here, something I’ll never know in full.” Hillerman’s books, where the landscape and the mystery fuse, take me back to that moment and give me a second chance, and feel 24 again, the age when everything seems like a mystery. That’s a pleasure, usually one I’ve savored summers, and I don’t feel guilty about it.

– Pete Nelson, author of I Thought You Were Dead

Barbara Kingsolver

Five years ago, I stood on the periphery of the Duke University Chapel during the North Carolina Literary Festival, straining to hear the speaker. I was on the periphery because the chapel was packed full, so that many of us had spilled outside the large cathedral doors. On the stage, about the size of my little finger (at least from my vantage point) was the bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver, talking about the literary prize she’d endowed. Ten years ago, feeling the paucity of American literature that was “socially responsible,” or that compelled readers to examine their own prejudices or the larger world around them, she’d established a $25,000 award for a novel manuscript that took on such issues. At the festival Barbara Kingsolver was describing the latest selection for the prize, a manuscript called Mudbound by Hillary Jordan. I had been able to make out that much of what she said, and strained to hear more, as I’d read about this prize before and had envied the houses that went on to publish the winners.

I had no idea that I was experiencing a serendipitous moment—that in a happy twist of fate I would end up being the editor of Mudbound, and that Algonquin would go on to publish subsequent Bellwether winners (last year was Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, and next year, we’ll publish the latest winner, Naomi Benaron’s Running the Rift—and then two years from now, whomever wins the latest competition that begins this fall).

But you would think after four years, many phone conversations, detailed emails, and intense editorial discussions, that Barbara Kingsolver and I would spot each other in a crowd. After all, we knew each other in a way — via email and lengthy phone calls and letters. I knew that she was incredibly smart, the most sensitive and careful reader I’d ever encountered, and she had a memory for specifics that I envied. But still, in my mind’s eye, there existed only a miniature version of her, hazy and tiny, smiling yet frozen in time, because until two weeks ago, we’d never met face to face. So as I stood waiting to greet her in a restaurant in Durham, it was a slightly surreal moment. As I walked toward her and saw her in real size—not a postage-sized photo on the web, not a miniature figure in the far reaches of a chapel—I could see that she had her doubts about who was looking at her in the eye. “Not until I hear your voice will I know that it’s really you!” she said.

We all know that there are huge advantages to our virtual world—speed, more speed, and well, still more speed. Events are related at a lightning pace; we can learn news almost before it happens (how many seconds elapsed this week before the world knew who’d won the Pulitzer?); we can be in remote locations and still answer emails and read tweets. But here is what I learned about Barbara Kingsolver when I met her in the flesh: she is tall (especially compared to me), she is funny, she is warm, she is gracious (never once commenting on how at the lunch we were asked to change tables after we were all seated), she loves good shoes, good food, and a nice slow-paced meal. Three hours later, after the restaurant had emptied out, the five of us were still lingering, talking about elections, height and power, the Orange Prize, shrimp and grits. Call me a Luddite, but I’ll trade a life-size moment like that for all the speed in the world.

–Kathy Pories, Senior Editor

We were absolutely thrilled that Flyleaf recently hosted an Algonquin Book Club evening with special guest Heidi Durrow, author of the critically acclaimed national bestseller The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, her debut novel now out in paperback.

Heidi Durrow

The room was packed to the gills, with audience members noshing on cheese and sipping on winter beer. Algonquin’s Marketing Director Craig Popelars started off the night as only he could, with an inspiring ode to book clubs written to the tune of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby.”

Craig Popelars

Heidi Durrow, winner of Barbara Kingsolver’s prestigious Bellwether Prize, dazzled the audience with her dramatic reading and then had a lively Q&A with the audience.

The audience at Flyleaf

Afterward, Algonkians Chuck Adams, Kathy Pories, Ina Stern, and Michael Taeckens took to the stage and discussed various titles that are perfect for book clubs, including Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family, Robert Goolrick’s A Reliable Wife, Jonathan Evison’s West of Here, Caroline Leavitt’s Pictures of You, Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon, Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle, and Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants. They also discussed the particulars of the Algonquin Book Club, a new program that will be launching later this month with beautifully designed catalogs and a brand new website (more details to come, so stay posted!).

Kathy Pories, Chuck Adams, Ina Stern, and Michael Taeckens

The evening concluded with more partaking of wine and cheese, tons of audience members lining up to have Heidi sign their books (Flyleaf sold out of every copy!), and people loading up on Algonquin titles and other offerings, thinking about their future book club reads.

Heidi Durrow autographing her book

People waiting to get their books signed by Heidi

Thank you for a great evening, Heidi and Flyleaf!

–Megan Fishmann, Publicist

What does Hillary Jordan’s debut novel, Mudbound, have in common with the likes of Nickel & Dimed, Freakonomics, The Glass Castle, and Three Cups of Tea? The answer: it’s the 2010 selection for Appalachian State University’s Summer Reading Program. Like the aforementioned titles, Mudbound was assigned as summer reading for Appalachian’s 3,500 incoming freshman.

Hillary Jordan at the podium on September 16th

The highlight of the program was Jordan’s recent visit to the University, where, adorned in full regalia, she delivered an inspiring speech to the freshman class and the entire school faculty. With a full-brass ensemble, a jumbotron, and an audience of 4,000+ people staring back at her, Hillary was in full-command. Heck, it was like watching Bono, Springsteen, or Lady Gaga, and the response she received was an enthusiastic standing ovation.

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For a day and a half, Hillary went from one campus event to another: readings, interviews, dinners, question and answer sessions, and classroom visits. It was absolutely inspiring to watch an entire college community embrace a novel and an author with such enthusiasm.

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Appalachian was nice enough to provide us with some wickedly cool Mudbound T-shirts. The pick-up truck graphic coupled with the quote, “Everything’s fine. I just gave Ronsel here a lift from town,” makes it a must-have. Want one?

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—Craig Popelars, Marketing Director

.GET ONE! COMMENT HERE OR ON OUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT TO ENTER THE DRAWING FOR A MUDBOUND T-SHIRT! Many will comment, four will win.

If you haven’t checked ‘em out, what are you waiting for?

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

Hard Work by Roy Williams and Tim Crothers

The debut novel A Reliable Wife is just out in paperback–which makes for a fantastic start in 2010. Click here to see a video interview with the author, Robert Goolrick.

Happy New Year from all of us at Algonquin!

-christina