Joshilyn Jackson

I call it, “Weirdo Fiction with a Shot of Southern Gothic Influence for Smart People Who Can Catch the Nuances but Who Like Narrative Drive, and Who Have a Sense of Humor but Who Are Willing to Go Down to Dark Places.”

My last four books have leaned into Domestic Noir/Suspense, but they are still book club books that explore justice, motherhood, class issues, and the thorny mechanics of redemption. I think the description holds.

The American South, and yes, hugely. I love my homeland, but our soil is dark with bloody history, so of course that love is fraught and ambivalent. When I leave the South, I tend to see it more clearly and write about it more fiercely. It never occurred to me to write about it all until I moved to Chicago for grad school. That showed me how weird we are, for one thing. Last year, we left the ATL after 25 years for upstate New York, and my WIP is the most Southern thing I've written in years.

Voracious, immersed, eclectic. I got stacks from the library every week and tore through them, I was unable to hear my name being called or notice the house on fire when I was reading, I leap-frogged between "appropriate girl child fare" like The Secret Garden, to my older brother's high fantasy and Conan-esque pulp, and whatever I found on my parents shelf and snuck-read under cover of covers with the proverbial flashlight. Before I turned 11 I had read Roots, Tender Is the Night, To Kill a Mockingbird, tons of Ian Fleming

Thriller/domestic suspense lovers: Mother May I

For your book club: Someone Else's Love Story

Southern fiction lovers: The Almost Sisters

A gift for your gentle Granny who might be scandalized by the above, but you really want to introduce her to my work: Between, Georgia

That changes a lot. Hrm! There are some classics I return to endlessly, like Austen and Dickens, but who doesn't love P&P? And you don't need me to recommend the huge household names I read religiously---Celeste Ng, Liane Moriarty, Karin Slaughter, Ruth Ware---because you are already reading them. SO! Here are five authors I never stop rereading and recommending:

Lydia Netzer, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Kathy Hepinstall, Abbott Kahler

If anyone gets pregnant in my vicinity, I HAVE to give them Great With Child by Beth Ann Fennelly. If you have ever been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant or loved a pregnant person or if you have a mother, you should read it.

That is hard to say. Sometimes I don't realize how close this or that character is until years after a book has been published. Overtly? Honor Mills from With My Little Eye is a cut and paste of me at 12.

Impossible question! The Indies gave me a career. I could list thirty that have meant the world to me without pausing to inhale. Book House at Stuyvesant Plaza is my local, and they ROCK.

We live in an 1876 Victorian row house, and for the first time in my life I have a dedicated office instead of part of the laundry room or dining room. It's the whole second floor (which sounds more impressive than it is; this is a tall, skinny house so the "second floor" is one longish room with a pocket door cutting it in half + a bathroom). It has gorgeous, peaceful gray-green walls, a lofted tray ceiling with a center medallion, and a stone fireplace flanked by floor to ceiling bookshelves. I LOVE it.

I read everywhere. My couch, my dining room table, my bed, my office, the train, the park, a coffee house. Books are transportive so I don't care much where I am to do it. The only place I don't like to read is the beach. Hot. Sandy. Glaring sun on pages. Why is this a thing? People LOVE it. I do like to read on the shady porch of a beach house, though.