Jessica Brockmole

Jessica Brockmole is the author of At the Edge of Summer, the internationally bestselling Letters from Skye, which was named one of the best books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly, and Something Worth Landing For, a novella featured in Fall of Poppies: Stories of Love and the Great War.

Brockmole's latest novel is Woman Enters Left.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

This fall there’s been a lot of nonfiction on my reading stack, some for research, some for pleasure. One that fascinated me was Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption, about the changing role of the American consumer from the Great Depression to the postwar era, and Virginia Scharff’s Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age, which traces the relationship between women and automobiles in the early twentieth century. Although I didn’t read the latter until after my own Woman Enters Left was out there in the world, I recommend it if you want to learn more about intrepid women traveling across the largely unpaved United States, like my Ethel and Florrie in their unsprung Model T.

In fiction, I’ve recently read two by authors I know, Kristina Riggle’s Vivian in Red, about a feisty octogenarian who, after he thinks he sees a ghost, takes us back to his days as a young songwriter when he wrote his one hit Broadway song, and Clarissa Harwood’s Impossible Saints, set amid the fierceness of the suffragist movement in early twentieth-century England. I had the pleasure of doing an event with Kristina this past fall and have one coming up in January with Clarissa. One of the absolute best parts of writing books is getting to meet so many other amazing authors!

Up next: I have Ken Follett’s Column of Fire waiting to dig into on the first snowy day.

Visit Jessica Brockmole's website, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

The Page 69 Test: Letters from Skye.

My Book, The Movie: Letters from Skye.

My Book, The Movie: Woman Enters Left.

The Page 69 Test: Woman Enters Left.

--Marshal Zeringue