One Thing Stolen ARCs arrive; Going Over is kindly reviewed

and in some ways, one photograph captures it all. With huge thanks to the Chronicle team, to my friend Ruta Sepetys (whose Going Over quote is here, on the back of One Thing Stolen), and to Patricia Hruby Powell, who so beautifully reviewed Going Over for The News-Gazette; her review can be found here.

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how do we make historical fiction feel like right now?

A few weeks ago, the beautiful (inside and out) Caroline Starr Rose asked me to reflect on the writing of historical fiction. What typically comes first, she wanted to know—character, era, or story idea? How do I do my research? Why do I love  research? And why is historical fiction important?

I answered that final question like this:

Why is historical fiction important?
I think it is so important to try to imagine ourselves into the lives of others during critical junctures in world history. It is a hugely empathetic act. And empathy is, finally, what storytelling is all about—empathy for others, and empathy for ourselves.

You can find our entire conversation on Caroline's blog, here.

Always a privilege to be in the company of this talented, award-winning writer.

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Introducing Wattpad, where stories get told (read GOING OVER excerpts free)

It's amazing, all the things I do not know.

How to get rid of the embarrassing yellow-flower weed in my front lawn. How to stop breaking my fingernails just when they've reached their prettiest. How to make my new-fangled pottery vases stand up straight. How to remain focused on what actually matters in life, even as I stare down petty worries and ricocheting fears of the unjust.

Etc.

I also didn't know a thing about Wattpad—a free community in which readers can chat with writers—until my friends Sally Kim and Ali Presley of Chronicle Books whispered the news in my ear. There are all kinds of authors here, all kinds of books, all kinds of reading opportunities. And, like I said, it's free.

I am now, officially, a Wattpad-er, and here is my I don't even have a single follower yet Wattpad page. I'll be posting chapters of GOING OVER here over the next several weeks and interacting with any reader who sends a note or asks a question.

Take a look.

But also, while I have your attention, here is something wild: While exploring Wattpad on my own yesterday, I discovered this—a Wattpad story called Unrequited Love whose second chapter begins with words that this writer named Beth Kephart wrote.

That's here.

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The Going Over Blog Tour Reprise: Still time to win a copy of the book

To those who followed the blog tour for Going Over, thank you. To those who lent their time and space to the journey, enormous thanks. To Lara Starr, who set this whole thing up before I even knew there would be a blog tour, you rock, girl.

For the questions that were asked, the reviews that were written, the photos that were shared, the generosity of Chronicle Books—for all of it, I will always be grateful

For any of you who missed the links—and the giveaways—they're all here, below. In many cases, there is still time to win both a signed book and an Audible copy.

Savvy Verse and Wit (Review)

Chronicle Books (The Rocking Soundtrack)

My Friend Amy (Review and The first First page)

The Flyleaf Review (Review and beginnings)

The Book Swarm (East Berlin Escapees)

There's A Book (Interview)

YA Romantics (Interview)

Teenreads Blog (Photo Album)

The 3 R's Blog (Interview)

Forever Young Adult (Interview)

Kid Lit Frenzy (Interview)

Tales of the Ravenous Reader (Truth at the core of the novel)

Addicted 2 Novels

All books, finally, must stand on their own. That time has come for Going Over.

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lots of thanks, and My Friend Amy (warrior with wings)

The Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, in Berlin

First, I need to say thank you to everyone who made my birthday such a bright yesterday. My birthday-birthday, and my book birthday. The weather was surreal-ly sweet. The daffodils bloomed. I got the client project done in the nick of time. My students were their perfect student selves. My husband brought roses. A friend drove a long way to leave me with a glamorous basket of pansies. My brother played the birthday song, my brother-in-law was all sweetness, my mother-in-law sang. There were hummingbirds and William Kotzwinkle and Kelly Simmons just about did me in with words I swear I'm gonna frame.

I had crab cake.

I had dessert.

My son called—his voice the color of the day, his stories the kind that kept me smiling, late, in the dark of the night.

I know what, and for whom, to be grateful. And I am.

Today, I am, again, grateful for Tamra Tuller and Chronicle Books and the release of Going Over, and for all of you who sent notes or Twittered or Facebooked or just plain kept me company during the release. Thank you for letting me know about the starred review in Shelf Awareness. Thank you for sending along the extremely kind BookPage review. 

Last evening, Chronicle Books kicked off the blog tour (following Serena Agusto-Cox's earlier blog kindness) with some words I wrote about music, writing, and Berlin, in a post that begins like this, below, and carries forward here:
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At the age of nine, on a Boston pond, I launched my (oh so very minor) ice-skating career. Twirls. Edges. Leaps. Falls.

Shortly thereafter (the precise day and hour escape me now), I began to write. Lyric flourishes. Running lines. Suspended disbelief. Revisions.

Music and story. They’re the same thing, right? Sentences are melodies. Plots are choreography.  The silence in between the lines is wish and wisk.

Today My Friend Amy, who has, for almost forever, truly been My Friend Amy, is continuing that blog tour. A book warrior with wings, I'll call her, who has accompanied me through so much of my writing journey, who has always mattered deeply, who spent some time reading Going Over, writes the sweetest words, and is offering a copy of the book to one of her readers, all of which is happening here.

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celebrating the pottery ladies (and the honorary pottery ladies) (and the Wayne Art Center) in this weekend's Inquirer

What glorious work Inquirer page designer Amy Junod does. I'm always so lucky when my stories arrive on her desk. Grateful today to be able to sing about the Wayne Art Center and the friendships I have made among people who actually know what they are doing with clay (and apparently do not mind that I don't).

This is also my first piece with a Going Over byline. The time is soon for my Berlin.

As always, a huge thanks to editor Kevin Ferris, with whom I have such fun working.

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Two dear people read Going Over, and make this gray day bright and —

we are very happy. We are more than happy.

First, from my long-time friend Lorie Ann Grover, whose own forthcoming YA book, a fantasy novel called Firstborn, just received a Kirkus star. Lorie Ann and I bonded through our love for young people and young people books by way of Readergirlz, where I was the inaugural writer in residence (and we had so much fun, we really did). We have remained friends ever since. Lorie Ann came to my city for ALA Midwinter and somehow—somehow—I missed her. It was astonishing today to read her words about this Berlin novel. Astonishing, and danceworthy, and no excuses next time: We must meet!

And then there is amazing Pam of Bookalicious, whom I have also never met, though we believe that we once brushed shoulders at a BEA event and managed not to realize whose shoulders we'd just brushed. Pam has been such an incredible advocate for my work. Her words—so potent—sit, among other places, on the jacket of the Small Damages paperback. Pam was one of the very first people (outside the Chronicle team) to read Going Over. She shared her copy with a gentleman on an airplane and told me the story while I was sitting in a very cold hotel room in a far-away town, while on assignment. Here are her words about the book. They are, well, Pam-alicious. And there is a giveaway.

Thank you, Lorie Ann. Thank you, Pam. Very much.

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The starred Booklist review of GOING OVER

Yesterday Tamra Tuller called with the first official words on GOING OVER, a starred review from Booklist. I had not had time to get nervous yet—hadn't imagined that there would be a review so early on for an April 1 release. My focus has been placed, entirely, on finishing the Florence novel, a book that has taught me many things about starting over, again and again.

And so the gift was a call from dear Tamra, an utterly unexpected review, and a reviewer who wholly understood what I sought to do with this Berlin book. The gift was that sense of being heard.

I am grateful and relieved.

“A stark reminder of the power of hope, courage, and love.”—Booklist, starred review

In the divided Berlin of the early 1980s, 16-year-old Ada waits for her lover, Stefan, to escape across the wall from East to West. But the odds are against Stefan making it over alive, and against graffiti-rebel Ada evading the notice of the authorities and the brutal punkers hiding in the alleyways. National Book Award Finalist Kephart has recreated the inexorable fear and tension, as well as the difficult living conditions, of Berliners on both sides of the wall, especially those suffering under the ruthless oppression of the dreaded East German Secret police, the Stassi. Ada and Stefan are representative of the families, friends, and lovers separated and destroyed by the wall; their grandmothers serve as poignant reminders of the toll World War II took on the European population. Subplots about the Turks recruited to help rebuild Berlin and the ignored danger to women in all parts of the city add complexity to an already difficult, seldom written about time in the world’s history. Going Over is a stark reminder of the power of hope, courage, and love to overcome the most taxing of human struggles: war, its aftermath, and captivity. 

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Finishing Berlin, with gratitude to three women

Tamra Tuller isn't just an incredibly kind and interesting and intelligent (and very pretty) person.  She's a sympathetic reader and an outstanding editor.  A few days ago Tamra shared with me her final comments on the Berlin book.  I've just now finished picking those edits up.  In every single instance Tamra was right.  Any objective third party would have seen it.  I trust Tamra to see what I don't. 

Among Tamra's suggestions was the request that I consider (Tamra never insists) removing the book's opening lines.  I would not have seen the power of doing that on my own, but the second Tamra said it, I knew she was right.  Whoosh. A quick delete.  A better book.

I want also today to thank my dear friends Annika Duesberg and Heather Mussari for reading this manuscript in its early iteration.  Annika is German, born and bred.  She brought her big heart and impeccable English to our country more than eleven years ago.  Annika and I know each other through dance and gardens; she agreed to read this book before she headed back across the sea to live.  Sometimes Annika called her mother to check on details.  Always she was honest with me.  I feel incredibly lucky to have such an authoritative German reader—and extremely dear and jewel-eyed person—behind me.

Just as I feel lucky to have had the support and inspiration of one Heather Mussari, a knock-out through and through.  Heather is an artist and a muse.  She taught me things about pink hair, graffiti, and night prowling—things that became part of the story I told.  She was interested in this novel.  She cared that it came to be.  She's a very big part of the tale; she is, in some ways, my Ada.  And when I was looking lousy, Heather fixed up my hair and sent me out into the world with her brand of beauty.  I stood taller on those days.  I felt her loveliness touched down on me.

So. Three women.  Gratitude.  And some lines (below) that will never appear in this book.  They served their purpose, months ago, by getting this story moving.  Sometimes that's all some lines are meant to do.

My mother knows, she’s watching—her breath icing the window and a smudge of old blue beneath her eyes.   In the morning, the single whitened pane of glass will suffer like a cloud.

            “I’m back, Mutti.”

            “Danke, Ada.”

She will sleep, then, until the day comes for her, while Omi stirs her coffee with the smallest brick of bread.

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Chanticleer, Berlin, and a Special Friend

The fog is lifting here, the rain subsiding, and in two hours I'll meet my friend Annika at Chanticleer, where we will walk a path familiar to us both.  We have both taken solace and shelter in this pleasure garden.  We are both lovers of dance.  And I have a written a book about Annika's home, Germany, which she has generously agreed to read.

And so Berlin, gardens, dance, stories.  All of it here, in two hours. 

From the novel (first draft) that I will be sharing:

Some time, late, I wake to the sound of Omi snoring behind the door to her room.  She takes a long, rasping time filling her lungs, then snorts the air out quick, and then it’s silence, then rumbling again.  Who knows how she sleeps.  People who hide don’t want to be found, she said, and now when I close my eyes it’s her world, the stories she’s told me.  The Red Army has made its way in, is crossing the river.  There are German traitors—deserters—strung up by their flimsy necks from the lampposts at train stations, and women and children are almost all that is left of Berlin.  There will be no virgins standing after everything is done, and the newspapers have stopped, and the phones ring empty, and the trains run two-to-three to a car while everybody else walks, because no one else, including Omi, can afford the fare; they have all been issued the wrong ration cards.  She will wait in many lines.  She will fight for rancid butter.  She will loot the abandoned bakery for whatever there still is, and at night she will warm her feet by that brick, her legs cold and white beside her mother’s.  When the bombs go off she will scramble, her heart high and sick in her throat.  She will run, buckets of stolen things in either hand, the buckets clanging.  She will run beneath the streets into the shelter.

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thoughts on leaving Beach Haven, and on the making of a book

The ocean is behind me as I type; the day has come in.  I have been up since an early hour, at work again on Berlin.  I arrived here anxious, late Tuesday night:  Could I find my way to the end of this complex novel?  Could I honor Tamra Tuller, who invited me to write this book for her—her faith a gift like none other?  Many themes would have to find their way home.  Two storytelling voices would have to hold their own.  Tensions couldn't lag.  Research (oh, so much uncountable research) could never be confused with plot.  And don't forget love, which lies at this story's heart.  Don't forget what it is to love, and to wait.  Don't crowd that small big thing out with all that is Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, Little Istanbul and Stasi paranoia, bratwurst vendors and David Bowie.

Writing here has meant rewriting here, taking things apart.  It has required long walks and a settling in above the old laptop at 3 AM or 4 each day; I was here, after all, to write.  I had better make use of the days.  Clients await me.  The final projects of my beloved Penn students.  Reviews.  A contest or two to judge.  A son's graduation.  Interviews.  Small Damages.  If I couldn't do it here, I wouldn't do it at all.  I felt the pressure immensely.

This morning, at this hour, the book isn't done.  It is, however, intimately understood and my anxiety is gone.  There will be a storm here later today; in the gray dawn outside the waves are churning.  I will always be grateful to Beach Haven for letting me breathe, for restoring my own faith in me.  And I will always be grateful to my husband, too, who gave me room to work, who heard me, weeks and weeks ago, when I said, "I'd give anything for just a few, spare writing days."

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Bach and Berlin, a sliver from a work in progress

I hurry us deep into the belly of the church, away from the wind that tumbles in behind, toward Herr Palinski, who is still playing Bach like a four-armed man, like Berlin—both sides—is listening.  Slowly Meryem eases in, lets me sit with her in a lonesome pew.  She tilts her head and looks up, as if the music is coming from high in the church’s hollows, or from the tenacious stain of windows.  Her ducky yellow boots flop sideways.  Her back scoops my ribs.  

— from the Berlin novel, for Tamra Tuller/Philomel

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Seville, Berlin, Philomel: At long last, I am meeting Tamra Tuller

In the summer of 2010, I was at the American Library Association meeting in Washington, DC, when the ever-fashionable Jill Santopolo (who had worked with me on several Laura Geringer/Harper Collins books and had herself edited The Heart Is Not a Size) slipped a copy of Ruta Sepetys's novel to me and said, "I read this on the train and cried.  I think it's the kind of book you'd love."

I did.  So did the world.

Reading Between Shades of Gray made me wonder about the editor of that book, Jill's Philomel colleague Tamra Tuller, who had taken on Ruta's literary exploration of another time, another place.  I had been working on a Seville novel for years at that point.  I had come close—very close—to selling it more than one time.  My heart had been broken, but I hadn't given up; if I believed in anything I believed in that cortijo, that cook, those gypsies, those Spanish songs.  I wrote a note to Tamra—brazen slush pile person that I have often been—and asked if she might take a look.

She did.  The rest is history.  Two years to the month after my first reaching out to Tamra, Small Damages—far the better book for the conversations Tamra and I had—will be released, on my son's birthday, to be exact.  A year or so from now (the timing isn't fixed) my Berlin novel, a book born out of a phone conversation Tamra and I had one afternoon, a book that reflects both our love for that city (Tamra having gone there first, Tamra having sent me thoughts about where I might go, what I might see), will find its way into the world.

And today, for the first time, I meet Tamra, a young woman who has changed my writing life immeasurably in ways both big and small.  Two trains, a long walk, a conversation—in person.  If I'm lucky, Jill herself will be in sight (and the very dear Jessica).

It feels like going home.

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now (an instant)

After a day of thick, gray rain, I imagine spring being near.  I imagine myself at Chanticleer garden, in the opening hours.  Maybe my friend Annika will be there.

In the meantime, I will be grateful for the day that was.  For the enormous kindness of a certain editor who (even in the midst of her great personal busy-ness) stops to write and to give me hope for my Berlin book.  For the time I had to return to a memoir-long-in-the-making.  For a client who stops to thank me for project work completed thus far.  For studently goodness.  For a text from my son.  "Wrote 11 stories for the TV station today," he said.  "You're really good at that," I told him.

I'm taking the earliest train to Philadelphia tomorrow, so that I can take a still-early train to New York.  I'll spend much of the day on Wall Street then, but I'll be back in time for dance.

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you should write The Godfather

Yesterday, after sending the first 175 pages of my Berlin novel off to Tamra Tuller, whose dearness cannot be quantified, I sat and read those 35,000 words through again. I'd spent the day reading and editing and trimming, of course, and the day before that day doing the same, but there's something about sending your work to another that enables you to read the work newly—to read as a reader and not as a writer.  There is, of course, a difference.

My Berlin novel is a complex book.  The history it contains and reflects is complicated and important.  Kreuzberg is a crazy mix of punkers, immigrants, rebels.  Friedrichshain is riddled with spies and deprivation.  The characters have to be (for me) a new breed of people.  There have to be sub-plots and entanglements.  Still, as I read I asked myself questions:  Too complex?  Too entangled?  Should I bring the language down a notch?

At one point, my husband near, I pondered out loud.

He listened, briefly, then decided.  "People like simple stories," he said.  "You should write The Godfather."

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writing on and through; a scene from Berlin

The only cure, for writers, is writing on.  You will hear what you don't want to hear.  You will ponder it in your heart.  You will call a friend (no, be honest, the friend called you), and she will listen, and then you will carry on.  You know what you can do, and  you will do it.

Yesterday, while contemplating the fate of a book I have been writing for a very long time, I returned to Berlin, a story that challenges me deeply and, at the same time, brings me great joy.  It's the story I'm supposed to be writing right now, for many, many reasons.  It's a book I daily thank Tamra Tuller for.  Yesterday I reached the halfway mark. It is with this scene that the story turns:

            “What are you going to do?” Mutti asks.

            “About what?”
            “I know you, Ada.  You’re scheming.”

            There are hard lines beneath my mother’s eyes and shadows caught between them.  Her hair is thistles.  The light from the window glows through it, then storms her face with a sea-colored green.  Sometimes when I look at my mother’s face I see every man she ever loved and how much loving bruised her.

            “I think it’s pretty obvious.”

            “What is?”

            “That there’s nothing I can do.”

            “Nothing?” 

            “It’s impossible, Mutti.  You know how it is.  The Turks are their own country.  I can’t save Savas.”

            She straightens suddenly then shivers with the cold, unsatisfied.  She pulls her thin sweater across her chest and buttons it up to her chin, knows that I’m lying, because if I knew how to rescue Savas I would.  If I knew where to find him, that’s where I’d be. The truth doesn’t sit well with Mutti.

            She stares at me for a long time.  Draws her index finger across the bridge of my nose.  “Impossible has never stopped you,” she says, and I wonder how much she knows about everything I will always want, everything I'm planning.  I wonder whether, in my dreams, I called out for Stefan.

            “You can’t save the world, Ada.  You know that, don’t you?”

            “Somebody has to try,” I say, and I see the hurt go through her.

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street artist: approaching the blank page

I found him in Berlin.  I watched him work—fearless before every single blank page.  A quick idea, a suggestion—a tightrope walker, say—and the color was rolled and sliced, the painting set to dry.  It was that easy.

Today the fog lifts slowly.  I'll grab the train, walk 30th to 40th, meet with a student, then set off for my class. Three new young writers will be joining us this week.  We'll talk diaries, Joan Didion, Chad the Minx, Dawn Powell, Judith Malina, Joyce Carol Oates.  We'll wade through definitions.  We'll preface Geoffrey Wolff. 

And then we'll take our cameras, and we'll walk.

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A little of Berlin. A lot of YAMO thanks. And the beauty of writing slow.

When I went to Berlin this past summer I had no idea that I would someday soon be writing about this storied, divided, chaotic, rich, surprising city.  I had gone for no other purpose but this:  I had not been gone, in a real way, from my office/home for three years.  I took photographs of what appealed to me, what intrigued me.  I read a little, but not a lot, wandered, consulted maps, got lost, and managed to hike all the way to Little Istanbul on the wrong day, when the outdoor marketplace was closed, a not-so-pleased husband beside me.

These days, between client calls, I reconstruct that journey, ask myself what I really saw, look for spires in the background of photographs.  There, I think.  That is the church.  Here, I think:  The canal that leads to the bridge that overlooks a view that once was barbed and different. 

It all comes back, new and different.  It comes back, not just as form and color, but as a rich and meaningful history, slowly understood.  There are great pleasures in writing a book at a quiet pace, in writing toward the not easily known.  You steep until the material owns you.  You steep, you read, you keep consulting those maps, you watch those films, you listen to those people speaking their foreign tongues until they don't sound so foreign after all.  And then one day you wake up, and you own it.  One day it's not about what you are studying, but what you know.  It takes time.  It is—indisputably—one of my very happiest times.  I have Tamra Tuller of Philomel to thank for the great privilege.  For being there, and for caring, while I work these details through.

To add to my happiness there is this.  Last night I discovered that that pretty spectacular reading/blogging/librarian team—Two Heads Together—cited You Are My Only as the top YA book of the year.  What?  You don't think that made me dance?  Check out all their reads, and the intelligence with which they present their musings, here.

Thank you, Ed and Susan.  (so much)

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On Berlin, Re-reading, and Book of Clouds

David Bowman has an interesting and timely back-page essay in The New York Times Book Review this weekend.  It's called "Read It Again, Sam," and it celebrates books fine enough to be read again.  Patti Smith reports on her plan to read again An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter.  Stephen King professes to having read Lord of the Flies eight or nine times.  Bharati Mukherjee reveals that she re-read all of Louise May Alcott at least a half-dozen times at the tender age of 9.

And you?

Earlier this week, while on a plane home from London, I reached for Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis), a book I'd read at once upon its release in 2009.  It's just the right size for an eight-hour flight (with a nap tucked somewhere in between), and I'd wanted to re-read it because I craved the surreal mood it had engendered within me—the fog, the mist, the strange; I craved the Berlin at the book's heart.  How had Aridjis achieved her effects?  I would examine this.  I would study it.

I had remembered Clouds as a lyric of a book, and indeed extraordinarily beautiful images float throughout. But what was also fascinating to me, upon my second review, is that Aridjis is not tricking her reader with language here; she is never overreaching.  Indeed, some of her oddest moments and most surreal, memorable constructions are rendered with thoroughly uncluttered, even straightforward prose—a glorious effect that I had not deconstructed my first time through.  So caught up was I in the mood of her Berlin—in the underground worlds, in the residues of a sinister past—that I failed to see that passages like this one, describing an abandoned bowling alley beneath the streets, had been meticulously and not (until the very end) metaphorically put forth.  Aridjis gives us the facts.  She lets us do with them what we will. 

After traversing several dark, damp rooms, plowing ever deeper into the labyrinth, though it was hard to tell how many doorways we'd actually crossed, we arrived at the so-called Gestapo bowling alley, a rectangular room, somewhat larger than the others as far as I could tell.  Our guide asked us to fan out so that everyone could see and directed his flashlight at different spots.  I stepped out from behind a girl with pigtails and began to look around.  It was a pretty chilling sight.  Everything, it seemed, was just the way it had been left decades ago.  At the center of the room lay a metal contraption, about eight feet long, an obsolete machine once used for spitting out wooden bowling balls, and with its rusty corners and thin bars, it looked, at least from afar, like a medieval instrument of torture, like those racks to which victims were bound by their hands and feet and then stretched.

I would not have known this about Clouds had I not read the book a second time.  I would have carried with me a false idea about Aridjis method—a first-blush idea, not a studied one.  I loved the book even more the second time I read it through.  I loved it, though, for somewhat different reasons.

Always, in perpetuity, Clouds will be a signifier for me—a book that in large part sent me to Berlin this past summer, a trip that subsequently led to my own work on a new (and very different) book set in that city for the beautiful Tamra Tuller of Philomel.  Without Clouds, I would not have taken that trip, in other words.  Without Clouds, I would not now be sitting here, surrounded by books and films about Berlin's past.  This was a book that had deserved a second reading.  Most good books do.

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the two-book deal with Philomel

 

It is with tremendous happiness—and a sense of terrific good fortune— that I share the news that I will again be working with Philomel on two new books, a deal that was announced earlier today in both Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch.  My experience throughout the editing and pre-launch of Small Damages (due out July 19, 2012) has been unparalleled.  My respect for Tamra Tuller (my editor), Michael Green (Philomel president), and indeed the entire Philomel team—and author list—cannot be quantified.  My appreciation for their kindness and care, their intelligence and wisdom, and their faith in me is unspeakable.

It is a remarkable thing to be believed in by people this smart and this good. 

Here is the deal as Publishers Lunch noted it earlier today.  My thanks to my agent Amy Rennert for helping to make this happen, and for being there through all the years.

National Book Award finalist and author of more than a dozen books including the new YOU ARE MY ONLY and the forthcoming SMALL DAMAGES, Beth Kephart's two untitled novels, the first of which introduces a teenage graffiti artist living in Berlin in the early 1980s on the eve of a daring escape, to Tamra Tuller at Philomel, by Amy Rennert at the Amy Rennert Agency (World).

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