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Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel, The Age of Miracles, is, as Aimee Bender states, "glowing magic....at once a love letter to the world as we know it and an elegy."

Julia is 11 years old when the earth, suddenly and inexplicably, begins rotating more slowly on its axis, forcing days and nights to get longer and longer. People try to adapt at first, but a division arises once the government switches back to "clock time" and holdouts to "real time" are shunned and ostracized. Earth's magnetic field changes, birds fall from the sky, and whales start beaching themselves around the world. Meanwhile, ordinary life goes on; young Julia's friendships are changing, her family is fracturing, and she might be falling in love.

The Age of Miracles is both an inventive dystopian novel and a beautiful coming-of-age story unlike anything you've read before. Nathan Englander raves, "The Age of Miracles is pure magnificence. Deeply moving and beautifully executed." We are proud to have chosen it for Volume 34 of Indiespensable.

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Jill Owens: How did The Age of Miracles begin?

Karen Thompson Walker: ...

I started and finished A Sense of Direction in one evening; I couldn't really stop thinking about it, so I couldn't put it down. I found it incredibly honest, messily lovely, and so damn smart — a really deep, intelligent, generous, funny look at life and purpose, which never relied on easy answers. It made me want to go on a pilgrimage, and it made me think differently about forgiveness. I haven't been so impressed with a memoir or travel book since Geoff Dyer — and as much as I love his work, A Sense of Direction frequently felt more thoughtful and self-aware than Dyer's books sometimes can. Thank you so much for publishing it; it genuinely moved me.

—Jill Owens, in an email to the publicity director at Riverhead Books

A Sense of Direction is Lewis-Kraus's account of three pilgrimages: the Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage route across Spain which has become secular and fairly popular; a circular pilgrimage, the 88 Temples of Shikoku in Japan; and a trip to Ukraine for Rosh Hashanah with his brother and father. It's also a sharp-eyed and extremely funny meditation on desire, discipline, friendship, work, family, ...

Leni Zumas's writing crackles. Her books are sharp, bleak, funny, and possibly dangerous. When her collection of short stories, Farewell Navigator, came out, Karen Russell marveled, "Her language is a kind of sorcery," and Joy Williams added, "Leni Zumas's writing is fearless and swift, sassy and sensational." Her profoundly disquieting debut novel, The Listeners, portrays a world twisted on its axis by loss.

Quinn is a musician and a survivor of a fractured and eccentric childhood marred by the death of her younger sister. Now in her mid-30s, years after the disintegration of her band, Quinn is at loose ends. Her relationships with her family and her ex-bandmates have been shaped by tragedy and haunted by the past. Zumas's style is hypnotic, and Quinn is a hyper-alert, fascinating narrator. Kevin Sampsell calls The Listeners a "crushing, dazzling performance." We agree, and we're proud to have chosen it for Volume 33 of our Indiespensable series.

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Jill Owens: At the end of The Listeners, in the acknowledgements, you give special thanks to your dad for telling you his story. Did his story have an influence on ...

Esi Edugyan's debut novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was widely praised, if a little under the radar. Now with her new book, this bright young author is garnering more attention and lauds from the critics. Half-Blood Blues won the Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize and the Canada Council for the Arts Governor General's Literary Award, among others. The Independent UK raved, "[T]ruly extraordinary in its evocation of time and place, its shimmering jazz vernacular, its pitch-perfect male banter and its period slang. Edugyan never stumbles with her storytelling, not over one sentence."

Sid Griffiths was the bass player in the Hot Time Swingers, a multiracial jazz band in Berlin and Paris between the world wars. Their star trumpet player, Hieronymous Falk, a biracial German, is arrested in a Paris cafe and never seen again. Alternating between the past and the present, Half-Blood Blues tells their stories in an extraordinary voice that employs actual and invented slang of the time period. The novel is an exploration — of friendship, love, and war — that is utterly page-turning and heartbreakingly original.

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Jill Owens: ...

Stephen Dau's The Book of Jonas is a marvelous, lyrical debut that examines the effects of war on everyone involved. Dau weaves together the stories of Jonas, a teenage refugee from an unnamed Muslim country who comes to live in Pittsburgh after American soldiers destroy his village, Christopher, a missing American soldier who may have helped save Jonas's life, and Rose, Christopher's mother, who is searching for answers about her son. Jean Thompson, author of The Year We Left Home, raved, "The Book of Jonas is a vivid portrait of a distant war we might scarcely be able to imagine. It challenges our assumptions about the survivors of war, and about guilt, justice, and memory. This is first-rate, original, powerful storytelling." We were so moved by Dau's storytelling, we chose The Book of Jonas as Volume 32 for Indiespensable.

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Jill Owens: What inspired The Book of Jonas?

Stephen Dau: It draws its inspiration from a couple of different things. Part of it is that, for a little while, I worked with people who had lived through a war. So, I had an interest in what that does to people, ...

Ben Marcus's books The Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women were considered "experimental" fiction because of his unconventional use of narrative, character, and language. His newest novel, The Flame Alphabet, begins with an unconventional idea: Language becomes toxic to adults — first children's language, in the Jewish community, and later all language, spoken or written. But the book itself, though written in fantastic, sharp-edged prose, is at heart a story of family, religion, and loss.

Samuel and Claire are members of a Jewish sect that secretly practices forest worship — they have their own synagogue out in the woods and, through a device called a "listener," receive Rabbinical messages from an underground radio. When the couple become sick from their daughter Esther's speech and as their community fractures around them, Samuel takes it upon himself, through "smallwork" — maybe best defined as intricate, obsessively thorough testing and experimentation — to find a cure.

Library Journal raves, "Fierce, scary, hurtful, unsettling, and brilliant, this new work by award-winning novelist Marcus...reminds us that language is dangerous and that we'll do anything to protect our children, even when they are (literally) killing ...

Running the Rift is the most recent winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, as awarded by Barbara Kingsolver. It's also an extraordinarily beautiful and heartfelt book. Naomi Benaron tells the story of Jean Patrick Nkuba, a gifted Tutsi boy growing up in Rwanda in the midst of profound political tensions leading up to mass genocide. But as the country fractures around him, Jean Patrick is on track to become an Olympic runner, which he believes might save him and his people from the violence.

Kirkus gave Running the Rift a starred review: "[W]here Benaron shines is in her tender descriptions of Rwanda's natural beauty and in her creation of Jean Patrick, a hero whose noble innocence and genuine human warmth are impossible not to love." Publishers Weekly also gave it a starred review: "Benaron accomplishes the improbable feat of wringing genuine loveliness from unspeakable horror....It is a testament to Benaron's skill that a novel about genocide...conveys so profoundly the joys of family, friendship, and community." Graceful, subtle, and overwhelmingly moving, Running the Rift is a powerful and important debut novel and an obvious choice for our subscription club, Indiespensable.

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