6 Quality Books That Were Years in the Making

January 25 2023
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For authors, there are moments in their careers when books seemingly write themselves, almost in an instant. There are, of course, also periods when new books are delayed by writer’s block, perfectionism, or even disinterest. And then there are works that authors have quietly cultivated for years—single stories so epic or personal (or both) that they must be given all the time necessary to properly craft and conclude.

These books, years in the making, hold a special place in readers’ hearts, as they not only compel us with plot and prose but inspire us by their very creation. Here’s a collection of works that required years, and sometimes decades, to complete and that, in our opinion, were well worth the wait.

The Deluge
by Stephen Markley

In the case of Stephen Markley’s sprawling new book, THE DELUGE, it could be as simple as this: creating a hyperrealistic plot about the complete collapse of civilization is going to take a long time to write. But it doesn’t disappoint. The crisis, predictably, is a climate catastrophe that forecasts in visceral detail ravaging forest fires, apocalyptic flooding, and a political system ill equipped to handle any of it (sounds so familiar . . .). Following an eccentric cast of characters, including a visionary scientist; a rebel activist; a skilled, immoral adman; and a drug addict, Markley’s expansive work captures the slow demise of the world, with each event seemingly a direct consequence of our actions—or lack thereof. As their fates intertwine, each character must sacrifice a part of themselves to make humanity’s last stand amid the ecological disasters and subsequent violence. A once-in-a-generation novel from the bestselling author of OHIO, THE DELUGE is Stephen Markley’s masterpiece and a terrifying reality check.

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The Deluge
Stephen Markley

“This book is, simply put, a modern classic. If you read it, you'll never forget it. Prophetic, terrifying, uplifting.” —Stephen King

From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.

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Damnation Spring
by Ash Davidson

As she shared with us in an author guest post, Ash Davidson “read about three hundred books in the ten years I spent writing my first novel, DAMNATION SPRING.” In her efforts to teach herself how to write a book, she composed a compelling story of a family in conflict. The Gunderson clan lives in a timber town on the California coast in the late 1970s. Rich makes his living off the logging industry, as does most of the community. It’s dangerous work, but, third in a generation of tree toppers, he’s convinced it’s the key to his family’s happiness, especially that of his son, Chub. That is, until Rich’s wife, Colleen, experiences a miscarriage and blames herbicides being used by the local logging company. The couple quickly find themselves on opposing sides, with a community equally in chaos as their very way of life becomes threatened. An intimate portrait of a family, and a community, facing extinction, DAMNATION SPRING is a moving epic that’s filled with emotion.

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Damnation Spring
Ash Davidson

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Named a Best Book of 2021 by Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times

“A glorious book—an assured novel that’s gorgeously told.” —The New York Times Book Review
“An incredibly moving epic about an unforgettable family.”CBS Sunday Morning
“[An] absorbing novel…I felt both grateful to have known these people and bereft at the prospect of leaving them behind.” —The Washington Post

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

Colleen and Rich Gundersen are raising their young son, Chub, on the rugged California coast. It’s 1977, and life in this Pacific Northwest logging town isn’t what it used to be. For generations, the community has lived and breathed timber; now that way of life is threatened.

Colleen is an amateur midwife. Rich is a tree-topper. It’s a dangerous job that requires him to scale trees hundreds of feet tall—a job that both his father and grandfather died doing. Colleen and Rich want a better life for their son—and they take steps to assure their future. Rich secretly spends their savings on a swath of ancient redwoods. But when Colleen, grieving the loss of a recent pregnancy and desperate to have a second child, challenges the logging company’s use of the herbicides she believes are responsible for the many miscarriages in the community, Colleen and Rich find themselves on opposite sides of a budding conflict. As tensions in the town rise, they threaten the very thing the Gundersens are trying to protect: their family.

Told in prose as clear as a spring-fed creek, Damnation Spring is an intimate, compassionate portrait of a family whose bonds are tested and a community clinging to a vanishing way of life. An extraordinary story of the transcendent, enduring power of love—between husband and wife, mother and child, and longtime neighbors. An essential novel for our times.

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MENTIONED IN:

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By Ash Davidson | November 29, 2021

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Properties of Thirst
by Marianne Wiggins

National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins was eight years in and nearly ready to complete her great American classic when tragedy struck. A massive stroke disrupted her memory and ability to create a logical sequence of events, leaving her work in jeopardy—that is, until her daughter, Lara Porzak, stepped in to preserve her mother’s legacy and finish the novel with the help of Wiggins’s notes and a collaborator. The work itself centers on Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes, who is fighting to protect the California ranch where he and his wife, Lou, raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, from the LA Water Corporation. But when Pearl Harbor is bombed, Rocky must watch as Stryker joins the war effort, leaving him and Sunny on the ranch. But in another twist, the Department of the Interior decides to build a Japanese American internment camp right next to the family’s land, and their way of life is again thrown into chaos. To make matters worse, Sunny and the camp’s leader begin to fall for one another, until he begins to truly understand the atrocities he’s supervising. An honest and at times unforgiving snapshot of one of America’s darkest periods, PROPERTIES OF THIRST is profound, and we’re grateful it was completed.

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Properties of Thirst
Marianne Wiggins

Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a novel destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American Dream.

Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved wife Lou raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it is here where Rocky has mourned Lou in the years since her death.

As Sunny and Stryker reach the cusp of adulthood, the country teeters on the brink of war. Stryker decides to join the fight, deploying to Pearl Harbor not long before the bombs strike. Soon, Rocky and his family find themselves facing yet another incomprehensible tragedy.

Rocky is determined to protect his remaining family and the land where they’ve loved and lost so much. But when the government decides to build a Japanese-American internment camp next to the ranch, Rocky realizes that the land faces even bigger threats than the LA watermen he’s battled for years. Complicating matters is the fact that the idealistic Department of the Interior man assigned to build the camp, who only begins to understand the horror of his task after it may be too late, becomes infatuated with Sunny and entangled with the Rhodes family.

Properties of Thirst is a novel that is both universal and intimate. It is the story of a changing American landscape and an examination of one of the darkest periods in this country’s past, told through the stories of the individual loves and losses that weave together to form the fabric of our shared history. Ultimately, it is an unflinching distillation of our nation’s essence—and a celebration of the bonds of love and family that persist against all odds.

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The Last Chairlift
by John Irving

John Irving’s THE LAST CHAIRLIFT gives us plenty to be excited about. For starters, it’s been a full seven years since his last novel, and we’re eager to devour another compelling page-turner. What’s more, this novel has been in the works for a number of years—20 to be exact(ish)—and it includes all the elements of an Irving classic, not to mention some autobiographical details throughout. Perhaps the most critical event in this novel occurs in 1941, when slalom skier Rachel Brewster is impregnated in Aspen, Colorado. She returns to New England to raise her son, Adam, and marries an English teacher to maintain appearances. Rachel, or “Little Ray,” as she’s known, is gay, and spends part of the year with her partner, Molly. For Adam, growing up around these loving women is a blessing, yet he still wonders about his biological father. Haunted—literally, in the form of ghosts that appear throughout the novel—by the question, Adam travels to the hotel in Aspen where he was conceived. Imaginative and emotionally affecting, THE LAST CHAIRLIFT is a ghost story and a love story all in one, shining a light on sexual politics and the universal desire to feel supported..

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The Last Chairlift
John Irving

John Irving, one of the world’s greatest novelists, returns with his first novel in seven years—a ghost story, a love story, and a lifetime of sexual politics.

In Aspen, Colorado, in 1941, Rachel Brewster is a slalom skier at the National Downhill and Slalom Championships. Little Ray, as she is called, finishes nowhere near the podium, but she manages to get pregnant. Back home, in New England, Little Ray becomes a ski instructor.

Her son, Adam, grows up in a family that defies conventions and evades questions concerning the eventful past. Years later, looking for answers, Adam will go to Aspen. In the Hotel Jerome, where he was conceived, Adam will meet some ghosts; in The Last Chairlift, they aren’t the first or the last ghosts he sees.

John Irving has written some of the most acclaimed books of our time—among them, The World According to Garp and The Cider House Rules. A visionary voice on the subject of sexual tolerance, Irving is a bard of alternative families. In The Last Chairlift, readers will once more be in his thrall.

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Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee

We have twenty, we have twenty—do we hear thirty? Yes! Yes, we have thirty years in the making for Min Jin Lee’s PACHINKO! Having gotten the idea for the novel way back in 1989 while she was in college, Lee didn’t feel that she had the knowledge or skill to do this story justice. But three decades, countless hours of research and interviews, and several drafts later, PACHINKO was born. An old-fashioned epic, the story is set in early-twentieth-century Korea, where an aging fisherman and his wife run a boardinghouse. A loving couple who experience many losses, they cherish their smart, industrious daughter, Sunja—that is, until the teenager becomes pregnant after a night with a wealthy, married boardinghouse guest. A sickly minister en route to Japan offers to marry Sunja and bring her along for the trip. While Sunja’s life blossoms in Japan with a family that can support her handsomely, her first son’s father’s presence is always near. Following the story down through the generations, readers witness the love, luck, and misfortune that any family could experience, while also learning of the hardships associated with being Korean and living in Japan.

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Pachinko
Min Jin Lee

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