the lioness a novel book review

Review: Why a new historical thriller on the Serengeti is better (sorry) than Agatha Christie

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The Lioness

By Chris Bohjalian Doubleday: 336 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Chris Bohjalian, bestselling author of 22 novels , manages something rare these days: He combines prolific output with bona fide range and originality . His 2021 novel, “The Hour of the Witch,” about colonial Massachusetts, came out a year after “The Red Lotus,” about an American lost in contemporary Vietnam. “The Flight Attendant,” a contemporary thriller published in 2018, is now in its second season as an HBO Max series . And his new novel, “ The Lioness ,” takes place in early 1960s East Africa during a Hollywood star’s honeymoon safari.

Katie Barstow has reached the pinnacle: Not only is she a sought-after screen actor, she’s just married the love of her life, David Hill, a man she’s known since childhood who now works as a Los Angeles art gallerist. She’s beautiful and 30, and she has the means to bring along a robust entourage on her Serengeti trek: psychotherapist brother Billy and his pregnant wife Margie; best friend and fellow actor Carmen and her aspiring-agent husband Felix; her agent, director, and Terrance Dutton, her favorite co-star, who happens to be Black.

These old-school glampers plan “to photograph elephants, not shoot them,” while preserving all the creature comforts: canvas bathtubs filled nightly by their guides, a “kerosene-powered ice maker” (because “you had to have a proper gin and tonic at the end of a long day on safari”) and proper beds set up in their tents.

Best-laid plans. Bohjalian is at heart a thriller writer, eager to upend charming scenes of wildlife-spotting with a deadly twist. On a morning when the tourists and guides have filled two jeeps for an expedition, gunfire erupts. Most of the African guides are immediately killed, leaving one group speeding off to safety and another behind. Yes, more deaths will come, some of them quite surprising and gut-wrenching. For all its open sky, “The Lioness” better resembles an Agatha Christie locked-manor-house mystery, with bodies falling like clockwork, than a gripping survivalist yarn.

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Where Bohjalian one-ups Christie (with apologies to the grande dame) is in his character development, going beyond the primary question (what do these Russian mercenaries want with their kidnapped Americans?) to explore the psychology of the survivors. Each chapter alternates real-time drama with backstories that may or may not overlap. The result is a puzzle along two axes, interconnecting individual survival stories with a larger, much more sinister game afoot.

With the help of strategically placed clues, readers can figure out what the Russians are really up to, which is more than just collecting ransom. Yet the strength of “The Lioness” lies not in those twists and turns but in the backstories that illuminate them.

Ultimately, every single person’s motivation has something to do with their fate. Billy and Katie, for example, were brought up by hard-drinking and abusive parents whose pathologies still darken their children’s lives. When the mercenaries toss Billy into a dark tent by himself, he’s brought back to the many times his mother locked him overnight in a hall closet, alone and terrified.

This post-traumatic paralysis determines what will happen next to poor Billy, just as past is prelude for the rest of the glamorous crew. Bohjalian tracks his players as keenly as a leopard does its prey, matching psychology to fate with an almost pathological precision.

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Where this wears most thin is in the portrayal of African characters. One guide who survives, Benjamin Kikwete, and his older mentor, Muema Kambona, sound at times like Hollywood versions of themselves, using tired terms like “bwana” and saying improbable things about the landscape such as, “This could never grow tiresome.” On the other hand, Bohjalian also makes astute observations about these men whose livelihood depends on rich Western tourists. And he is smart enough to avoid cringeworthy dialect.

It must have been even more of a challenge to build Terrance Dutton as a character without succumbing to cliché, especially since Terrance stands in for so many Black actors of the time — a man brought in to add what 1960s filmmakers saw as exoticism, but never allowed to film a love scene with a white woman. Terrance comes alive in a way the guides do not, particularly when he muses on the Black actor Dorothy Dandridge’s relationship with married director Otto Preminger: “God, the things they had whispered … and that was Hollywood just a couple of years ago.” His bitterness over his relegation to belittling roles both on and off screen sets Terrance apart from the other survivors.

And yes, there’s a lioness among them, a woman whose power and determination lifts her above her comrades. As in many of his other novels, including “The Hour of the Witch” and “Secrets of Eden,” Bohjalian foregrounds a strong woman against a chaotic backdrop not to insist on gender equality, but to illustrate women’s particular and distinctive strengths. As on the savanna, this book’s lioness is partnered with a lion, an aging man whose deeply traumatic World War II service prepares him for the current struggle in ways he wishes it didn’t.

Eras change; so do the styles of movie stars and the types of honeymoons they take. But the entourage is eternal, and it’s the breakdown of one such group that gives Bohjalian a big cat’s feast of a plot. Drawing on its cast for both color and depth, “The Lioness” provides a meaty look at what makes us animals in what we call civilization — and what makes us human when we’re out in the wild.

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The Lioness

Chris bohjalian.

313 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 2022

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THE LIONESS

by Chris Bohjalian ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 10, 2022

Perhaps A-list screenwriters will be able to spin TV gold from this sketchy treatment.

An actress and her entourage are kidnapped by Russians in Bohjalian’s uneven thriller.

In 1964, Hollywood’s gossip rags are agog as movie star Katie Barstow marries gallerist David Hill and takes her inner circle along on her honeymoon. And an adventuresome honeymoon it is—on safari in the Serengeti with aging big-game hunter Charlie Patton, who once helped Hemingway bag trophies. But Katie is not the star of this ensemble piece. The populous cast—a who’s who at the beginning is indispensable—includes Katie’s publicist, Reggie Stout; her agent, Peter Merrick; her best friend, Carmen Tedesco, a supporting actress who plays wisecracking sidekicks; and Terrance Dutton, Katie's recent co-star, a Black actor who's challenging Sidney Poitier's singularity in Hollywood. With obvious nods to Hemingway’s worst fear—masculine cowardice—Bohjalian adds in Felix Demeter, Carmen’s husband, a B-list screenwriter who reminds his wife of Hemingway’s weakling Francis Macomber. Felix seems a superfluous double of David, who feels inadequate because Katie is the breadwinner and his father is CIA. Then there’s Katie’s older brother, Billy Stepanov, whose abuse at the hands of their mother shaped the psychologist he is today; Billy’s pregnant wife, Margie; and Benjamin Kikwete, an apprentice safari guide. Thus, a proliferation of voices whose competing perspectives fragment rather than advance the story. The kidnapping plot seems less designed to test each character’s mettle than to exercise Bohjalian’s predilection for minute descriptions of gore. The most heartfelt portrayal here is of the Serengeti and its flora and fauna, but none of the human characters net enough face time to transcend their typecasting. The motives behind the kidnapping might have lent intrigue to the proceedings, but foreshadowing is so slight that the infodump explainer at the end leaves us shocked, mostly at how haphazard the plot is.

Pub Date: May 10, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-385-54482-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | HISTORICAL THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Chris Bohjalian

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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BOOK TO SCREEN

YOU'D LOOK BETTER AS A GHOST

by Joanna Wallace ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2024

Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.

Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.

While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer , 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.

Pub Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780143136170

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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BookBrowse Reviews The Lioness by Chris Bohjalian

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Lioness

by Chris Bohjalian

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• Eastern Africa
• 1960s & '70s
• Strong Women

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The Lioness is a high-octane thriller set in the African Serengeti.

Veteran author Chris Bohjalian's latest, The Lioness , is the tale of a pleasure trip gone horribly wrong. Katie Barstow is 1964's "it girl," a gorgeous, talented actress with a theatrical pedigree that goes back generations. She and her new spouse have decided to honeymoon in Tanzania, and hire a world-famous hunting guide to take them on a photographic safari. It's planned to be a laid-back but luxurious affair, complete with gourmet meals, canvas bath tubs dutifully filled each night by porters, and even a kerosene-powered ice maker ("because, of course, you had to have a proper gin and tonic at the end of a long day on safari"). They convince family members as well as several friends — Hollywood elite — to join the adventure, telling them that "These days, a safari is like a long, elegant picnic. Nothing's going to eat you and no one's going to shoot you." That statement turns out to be wildly incorrect; kidnappers beset the group, with tragic results. Bohjalian has long been one of my favorite authors. His books are almost always entertaining, marvelously written and well-researched, with great characters; The Lioness is no exception. Setting the novel against the Simba Rebellion (1963-1965), which took place in the region near Tanzania now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the author captures the politics behind the revolt, though its complexities are not a heavily featured part of the story. He also brilliantly illustrates the beauty and danger of the African veldt, as well as the glamor and glitz of the film industry in the early 1960s. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the book is Bohjalian's characters — and there are a lot of them (nine Americans, the guide and his crew of 17, and a dozen or so kidnappers). The chapters rotate between 10 different points of view, which in the hands of a lesser author might have been hugely confusing; Bohjalian, however, manages this large cast with aplomb. Each character has a unique voice and perspective that make them stand out. A snippet from a fictional Hollywood gossip magazine starts each chapter, helping remind the reader who's who, and if all else fails, there's a cast list at the front of the book for handy reference. The author's skill is such, though, that I never lost track of which character was being highlighted — this is further helped by the fact that there are fewer characters to monitor as the story progresses. Which brings me to my next point: Although the violence isn't terribly graphic, there's a lot of it, it's unrelenting, and the good and the bad suffer equally. Those who are sensitive to people killing each other might want to give this one a miss. But if you don't like books where animals are hurt, you needn't worry; no four-legged beasts are harmed by the humans, other than a couple of hyenas who definitely deserve it. My biggest concern about this book is that it's such a departure from Bohjalian's earlier works. I'd classify his other novels as literary or historical fiction; this one, however, is sheer over-the-top entertainment. It's far more cinematic and action-packed than his previous novels, to the point where I felt it could have been written with the specific intent of turning it into a summer blockbuster (kind of like Jurassic Park , except most of the dangerous creatures have guns). And, although The Lioness is set in a politically volatile time and place, the author mostly glosses over the particulars, something I feel is a departure from his usual style. I suspect many long-time fans will be disappointed with the book's plot, especially if they go in not knowing what to expect, but that it'll likely be a huge commercial success — the season's first "beach read." I enjoyed The Lioness tremendously, and thought it was an excellent piece of escapism, exactly what I needed to distract myself from the headlines. I highly recommend it to readers looking for a well-written, engrossing page-turner they don't have to think about too much; in short, it's excellent mind-candy.

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Book Review: The Lioness

Tanzania, 1964 . When Katie Barstow, a thirty-year-old A-list actress, and her new husband, David Hill, a gallerist, invite their Hollywood friends to accompany them on their honeymoon to the Serengeti, they envision giraffes gently eating leaves from the tall acacia trees, great swarms of wildebeests crossing the Mara River, and herds of zebras storming the sandy plains. Their glamorous guests — including Katie’s best friend, Carmen Tedesco, and Terrance Dutton, the celebrated Black actor who stars alongside Katie in the highly controversial film Tender Madness — will spend their days taking photos, and their evenings drinking chilled gin and tonics at camp, as the local Tanzanian guides warm water for their baths. The wealthy Americans expect civilized adventure: fresh ice from the kerosene-powered ice maker, dinners of cooked gazelle meat, and plenty of stories to tell over lunch back on Rodeo Drive.

What Katie and her glittering entourage do not expect is a kidnapping gone wrong, their guides bleeding out in the dirt, and a team of Russian mercenaries herding their hostages into Land Rovers with guns to their heads. As the powerful sun gives way to night, the gunmen shove them into abandoned huts and Katie Barstow, Hollywood royalty, prays for one simple thing: to see the sun rise one more time.

The Lioness , by bestselling author Chris Bohjalian , is a thriller in which he explores fame, race, love, and death in a world on the cusp of great change.

Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-two prior books, including Hour of the Witch , that have been translated into thirty-five languages. Three of his books have been adapted for film and The Flight Attendant became a television series that garnered several industry nominations. He is also a playwright, and has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including The Burlington Free Press where he served as a weekly columnist from 1992 through 2015. A graduate of Amherst College, Bohjalian also holds several Honorary Degrees. He resides in Vermont with his wife, Victoria Blewer, a photographer.

Bohjalian says his inspiration for The Lioness was movies. He loves them. One day in 2019 he attended a matinee and was the only person in the theater. He describes emerging from the dark theater into the bright daylight as a “transformative” experience and found himself wondering why he had never written a Hollywood novel. He knew the book would have to be historical fiction because movies no longer “penetrate the cultural zeitgeist” the way they used to. These days, people talk about the shows they watch on various streaming platforms. Case in point: the very first movie he ever saw in a theater was Bonnie and Clyde, released in 1967. Additionally, Bohjalian considered that he had never written a book set in the era in which he grew up — the 1960’s and 70’s. He resolved to set a book in the 1960’s because it was “an era of great cultural and social transformation in the United States and the world.” Next he had to think of a locale to which he could transport Hollywood people and put them in jeopardy. In the 1960’s, Cold War proxy wars were taking place and the Simba rebellion was unfolding as East Africa sought to escape from colonialism, the brutality of the Belgians, and the United Kingdom. So he decided on the Serengeti.

Once he pulled all the elements together, he says the book’s premise was simple: “The biggest star in Hollywood finally gets married and decides to bring her entire entourage with her on a honeymoon safari” which quickly goes horribly wrong. Although he is not usually thought of as a thriller writer, Bohjalian notes that he includes thriller elements in all of his books for two reasons: he loves “dread” and wants his readers “to keep turning the pages.”

Bohjalian and his wife were lucky to go on safari in the Serengeti to conduct research in October 2019, a mere two months after he cemented the concept for The Lioness . He describes the trip as “life-changing for me as a human being and as a novelist.” Far from civilization, their plane landed on a grass strip where two Land Rovers sat ready to carry them to their first camp. His observations of the native wildlife included watching the wildebeest cross the Mara River, as well as instances of natural predators conquering their prey. He also had the opportunity to pose numerous, frequently macabre, questions to his knowledgeable guides, who assured him that the key to remaining safe on safari is following the directions provided. They also shared stories of tourists who failed to do so, which can lead to deadly consequences. The guides explained that exiting a vehicle or leaving a tent at night can prove fatal because “there are so many animals (including snakes) and trees that will kill you.”

Bohjalian deftly incorporates those tangible dangers into The Lioness , making it terrifyingly suspenseful. Some of his characters fail to heed the guides’ warnings, while others find themselves in the wild without their guides by their side through no fault of their own. Regardless, many of Bohjalian’s characters are forced to use what knowledge they possess about nature in an effort to stay alive. Not all of them succeed.

The world shut down in March 2020 when the COVIC-19 pandemic struck. Fortunately, as he and his family sheltered in place, Bohjalian was able to mentally transport himself back to the Serengeti in 1964 as he focused on drafting The Lioness . He says the book will always be close to his heart not only because he is proud of how well it turned out. At a time when he was “in my worst emotional place of my life, it was the book that kept me going.” By mid-March 2020, Bohjalian lost his voice, although he experienced no other symptoms of COVID-19. It took several months to receive an accurate diagnosis, but doctors eventually concluded it is a symptom experienced by a small number of “COVID long-haulers,” including Bohjalian.

Indeed, The Lioness is a masterfully crafted, engrossing story of a thirty-year-old actress, Katie Barstow, who is a major Hollywood star. Bohjalian says the character is an amalgam of Natalie Wood and Elizabeth Taylor. She and her older brother, Billy, are the children of acclaimed stage actors who were abusive. They grew up on Central Park West in a sprawling apartment and Billy bore the brunt of their mother’s toxicity as their father mostly just went along with her actions. Katie has just married Billy’s lifetime best friend, David Hill, whose family resided in the same New York City apartment building. David owns a struggling art gallery in Beverly Hills, and insists that his father works for the CIA but is merely a “paper-pusher” laboring in the agency’s personnel department. Billy is married for the second time to Margie and they are expecting their first child.

Accompanying them on the safari are Felix Demeter, a screenwriter, and his wife, Carmen Tedesco, an actress who has appeared in supporting roles in films with Katie; actor Terrence Dutton, Katie’s co-star and good friend; Reggie Stout, Katie’s publicist; and Katie’s agent, Peter Merrick. At Katie and David’s wedding, they nickname themselves the Lions of Hollywood. Charlie Patton, renowned for leading hunting safaris with Ernest Hemingway, among others, leads the expedition.

You’ll know your moment.

Four days into the safari, the group is kidnapped by evil Russian mercenaries and Bohjalian takes readers along with his characters on a harrowing journey. They are transported in two groups by armed captors led by an intriguing and intermittently charming leader “with ice-blue eyes and a nose that a casting director would kill for if he ever needed a boxer.” As the characters attempt to discern the motive for their abduction, they witness and are subjected to appalling violence. Individually and collectively, they assess whether they can outsmart and overpower their kidnappers, and make their way to freedom. But, of course, they are far from civilization with no idea how far they might have to travel to enlist help. And they are in the Serengeti, surrounded by wildlife including leopards, hyenas, and venomous snakes, so they are forced to weight the risks, including the very real possibility that they might evade their abductors only to perish in the wild. The setting is inarguably one of Bohjalian’s characters, and he vividly describes the landscape, making readers feel the remoteness and isolation, and looming presence of those things that will kill you. He unsparingly details the dangers his characters encounter. “Character and geography intersect in all of my books,” he notes, but they are inextricably and palpably intertwined in The Lioness .

The narrative structure of The Lioness is creative and highly effective. The Prologue, related via a first-person narrative from, presumably, the Lioness, declares, “We went there and (most of us, anyway) died there in 1964.” Each successive chapter focuses on a specific character. Bohjalian reveals both the character’s history and relationship with the other characters, as well as his/her expectations for the trip and what they are experiencing in Africa. Readers learn about the characters’ Hollywood careers and alliances. Bohjalian propels the story forward at a steady pace, but his deftly-timed respites from his characters’ fraught circumstances allow readers to understand, relate to (or not), and develop emotional attachments to the characters so that they become invested in the characters’ fates. Some of the characters are innocent victims who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. And for some of them, the horror they are experiencing dredges up painful memories. For instance, Katie and Billy’s mother used to lock him in a large closet in their home for hours at a time. So when, with his hands and feet bound, he is tossed into a dark hut where all manner of creepy, crawly things might attack, the abuse he sustained as a child intensifies his fears and anxiety. Bohjalian acquaints readers with Benjamin Kikwete, a porter and guest liaison, who proclaims that he’d “rather die charging like a rhino than bleating like a goat.” His story is nothing less than heartbreaking, if inspiring. Some of the characters harbor dark secrets and scandalous pasts that, if brought to light, would cause relationships to fracture and derail careers. Some are betrayers . . . some have been betrayed, but may not know it.

The Lioness is a cautionary tale about fame. Like the Serengeti, Hollywood is a critically important character in the book. At the beginning of each chapter, Bohjalian includes blurbs — some actual, some invented — from a magazine or newspaper that was published in 1964, among them The Hollywood Reporter and Movie Confidential. To do so, he researched the popular movie magazines of the era, dubbing them “Twitter’s ancestor.” Much the way social media does today, those magazines influenced the public’s beliefs and perceptions about actors and actresses, often exploiting but sometimes keeping performers’ secrets (e.g., Rock Hudson, Liberace), and spreading fake news. Bohjalian also weaves pop culture history into the story, including references to stars of the day. For example, famed Caucasian film director Otto Preminger dated Dorothy Dandridge, a Black actress, but their relationship was “only alluded to” in the magazines and trade publications. As the story progresses, Bohjalian cleverly unveils how fame plays into his characters’ predicament, paving the way for the horrors they experience.

Bohjalian also explores racial tensions. Terrence Dutton, a successful Black actor, recently co-starred in a film with Katie. They have been great friends for some time, but their relationship has remained platonic, in part, because if a romance became public, Katies observes, Terrence would never again work in Hollywood. The movie they made was controversial and one particular scene stopped short of their characters kissing. Bohjalian examines how Terrence’s experiences and complex emotions as a Black American visiting Africa differ from those of the other members of the group. He interacts not only with his traveling companions, but also with the African guides and porters who work for Charlie Patton. For example, Benjamin is thrilled to be serving the group and notes how down-to-earth Terrence is. He can’t wait to tell his father that Terrence, who is only the third Black man from America Benjamin has ever met, told Benjamin to address him by his first name. Will he get the chance?

Reminiscent of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and, more recently, Peter Swanson’s Nine Lives , characters are eliminated, one by one, in various dramatic and horrific ways. Simultaneously, Bohjalian reveals who organized the kidnapping and why, pulling together various story threads and clues dropped along the way, and again demonstrating what an adept and creative storyteller he is.

The Lioness is an engrossing, entertaining, and wildly inventive mystery populated with fully developed, compelling characters. It’s a page-turner — an adventure set in the most exotic location imaginable — filled with plenty of themes to keep readers both guessing and thinking about the price of fame and glamor, and how well anyone can really ever know those closest to them. What might they do if faced with similar threats? And what about the title character? Who is The Lioness ? Does she survive? Once again, Bohjalian has created a strong female character who exhibits bravery, determination, and resolve she did not even know she possessed until faced with unimaginable danger. By the end of the story, she confesses, “I really do see myself in my mind as a lioness . . .”

Excerpt from The Lioness

Chapter One

Katie Barstow

Hollywood royalty gathered Saturday night at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Katie Barstow wed Rodeo Drive gallerist David Hill. The two of them left afterward for Paris and then the wilds of Africa on a “safari.” Rumor has it that the actress is bringing along an entourage into the jungle that will include her brother and sister-in-law, Billy and Margie Stepanov; her agent, Peter Merrick; her publicist, Reggie Stout; actress Carmen Tedesco and her husband, Felix Demeter; and Katie’s friend and co-star in the still controversial Tender Madness, Terrance Dutton. The little group has nicknamed themselves the Lions of Hollywood — though anyone who knows Katie Barstow or has seen her on the screen understands that she is the lioness in charge of this pride.

— The Hollywood Reporter , November 9, 1964

She was watching the giraffes at the watering hole after breakfast, no longer as awed by their presence as she’d been even four days ago, when she’d first seen a great herd of them eating leaves from a copse of tall umbrella acacia, their heads occasionally bobbing up to stare back, unfazed and not especially alarmed by the humans. Their eyes were sweet. Their horns were the antennae on a child’s extraterrestrial Halloween mask. The inscrutable creatures were wary of these humans, but they felt no need to flee.

They’d just finished breakfast and were still at their camp. Her husband, David, was on her left, and her brother, Billy, was on her right. Both had their cameras out. Terrance was sitting nearby with his notebook on his knees, sketching the creatures. Katie had known that Terrance was as talented a visual artist as he was an actor–her husband loved his paintings — but she was still stunned by how quickly and how remarkably he was drawing the animals they saw. The eyes of his elephant had broken her heart. Earlier that autumn, when they were still in L.A., David had said it was only a matter of time before he could risk giving the man a show. (“He’s a movie star,” she told David when she heard the hesitation in his voice. “He’s a Black movie star,” David had reminded her, and while he was only acknowledging the backlash he might face from some quarters, she had still felt the need to remind him it was 1964, not 1864. His gallery’s fiscal foundation couldn’t possibly be so weak that it couldn’t withstand blowback from racist critics and so-called connoisseurs.)

The group, all nine of them and their guides, were about to climb into the Land Rovers and start the drive to the next camp, a journey through the savanna that would take three hours if they didn’t stop, but would, in fact, take seven or eight because they expected to pause often for the Serengeti’s great menagerie of animals. You just never knew what you would see and where you might detour. Yesterday, they had been particularly lucky. They had witnessed the great wildebeest crossing at the Mara River: thousands of wildebeest and zebras storming down the sandy banks into the water and attempting to reach the grass on the other side.

There were five giraffes this morning, three with their legs splayed awkwardly as they stretched their long necks down to the water to drink. She felt a small pang of guilt that she was taking for granted her witness to their presence, animals over fifteen feet tall — their legs alone were taller than she was — with their cream-colored coats and those iconic tawny spots. She wondered at the way her mind was wandering instead to the differences between coincidence and synchronicity. Her brother, Billy, a psychologist, had been expounding on the two words over breakfast in the meal tent.

A coincidence, he had said, was the fact that there were nine Americans on this photo safari, and last month two had been caught in the same end-of-the-world traffic jam that brought freeway traffic to a standstill before the Beatles’ appearance at the Hollywood Bowl: Katie’s husband and Katie’s agent. Though David Hill was nearly thirty years younger than Peter Merrick, the idea that they had turned off their engines and stood smoking Lucky Strikes on the highway beside their cars at almost exactly the same moment near almost exactly the same exit had still been fascinating enough that it had broken the ice their first night in the Serengeti, and led David and Peter to bond in ways that transcended the generation and a half that separated them. (It also gave them something less awkward to discuss than the reality that Katie Barstow, their more obvious commonality, made dramatically more money than either of them, or that they were two big, strapping men who depended upon the earning power of a one-hundred-pound woman with a childhood more freakish than fairy tale who was barely five feet tall.)

Synchronicity was something more profound, a connection that suggested a higher power was at work. In this case — on this safari — it was the idea that on their second afternoon in the savanna, one of their guides overheard two of the guests discussing Katie’s latest film and the MGM lion that was the first thing a person saw in the theater, and on a hunch drove the Land Rover to the far side of a tremendous outcropping of boulders, one of the kopjes not far from their camp, and there they were: a female lion and four of her cubs. Regal and proud, the cubs content, all of them lounging in the grass beneath the trees that grew beside the rocks. Even when the second vehicle had roared up behind the first so that everyone could see the animals and snap their photos, the mother lion had done little more than yawn. The cubs looked on a bit more intently, slightly more curious, but since their mother wasn’t alarmed, they merely rolled over, stretched their small arms with deceptively large paws, and found more comfortable positions in the grass. The two Land Rovers were barely a dozen yards from the lioness.

She turned now toward David.

“I think we need to bring a few home,” her husband said, motioning at the giraffes at the watering hole. “And a couple of zebras. We’d never need a lawn service.”

“The zebras would certainly help. But giraffes don’t eat grass,” she reminded him. They’d just bought a ranch. Or, to be precise, she had just bought a ranch. Thirty acres. It was near Santa Clarita, north of the valley. She’d considered buying something in Malibu, but she’d grown up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a theater kid born to theater parents, and now that she was — and the words simultaneously made her bask and cringe–a movie star, she wanted to steer clear of the mod world that these days marked the sands: the beach houses with their massive windows, circular fireplaces, and Peter Max paintings against the crisp, white walls. She imagined someday she might have a horse. Or horses. One would be lonely. She’d ridden horses in two different movies and enjoyed the experience. She’d felt horrible when she’d watched her stunt double put the animal through some terrifying gallops and then send it to its knees after the creature was, supposedly, shot.

“Point noted,” David agreed.

Beside them, her brother, Billy, was photographing the giraffes with a camera that had a lens so stout it looked to Katie like a club, and his wife, Margie, was staring at the giraffes through binoculars so delicate they reminded Katie of opera glasses. Billy was thirty-five, David’s age and five years her senior, and Margie was thirty-three. Margie had found out she was pregnant in August, and her doctor had thought morning sickness alone was a reason why she shouldn’t go on the safari, but she was game. Said she wouldn’t miss it. This was both her brother’s and Margie’s second marriage. Billy had a four-year-old son at home from his first, but Margie had left no children in her wake when her previous marriage had imploded. Katie knew that she was supposed to want children, and speculated sometimes what it meant that she didn’t. Perhaps she was too ambitious. Or immature. Or selfish. Perhaps it was her hatred of her own parents, who had made her career possible, and yet had also been mercenary and mean and fake. And, yes, cruel. They had not been cruel to each other, which in hindsight was rather surprising, but they had been cruel to Billy and her. (Billy, however, had borne the brunt of the abuse. Most of the real horrors had been inflicted upon him, and it was their mother who was behind the lion’s share of that carnage. How Billy had wound up who he was, rather than whoever was strangling all those women in Boston, was a mystery to her. But, thank God, he had wound up a pretty gentle therapist instead of a pretty violent monster.)

Katie’s team at the studio, her publicist, and her agent all expected that someday soon she and David would have a baby. And most of them had mixed emotions about that. On the one hand, at thirty she was already outgrowing “starlet”: how many more times could she play the ingenue? Besides, now that she was married, it would be unnatural not to have a baby. What would her fans think? On the other hand, most of her entourage disliked the idea of her taking time off, given the box office bullion of everything she touched. Even Tender Madness, her movie with Terrance, had done well, despite the inference in one of the scenes at the mental hospital that the pair had kissed after the cut. (They had, though the moment had wound up on the cutting room floor.)

Reggie Stout was the lone exception: he honestly seemed to want only what she wanted. He was far more to her than a publicist and she put considerably more stock in his counsel than she did in even her agent’s — and she trusted Peter Merrick a very great deal. Reggie seemed as invested in her future and her happiness as a real father might be, though this was supposition since some days she hoped desperately that Roman Stepanov was not her real father. Even now, she and her brother, Billy, joked that both of them were babies who had been swapped out at birth, and they weren’t really related to the two grown-ups who had pretended to be their parents. She had chosen Billy to walk her down the aisle the week before last, since her own father had died last year within days of Jack Kennedy, though in far less dramatic circumstances. He’d had a heart attack in a cab on the way home from the theater. The cabbie, at her mother’s direction, had turned around and raced to St. Luke’s, but her father was dead by the time he was wheeled into the emergency room.

The New York papers would have devoted more space than they did to the Broadway icon’s death, but the president took precedent. Katie was grateful, because the last thing she would have wanted that horrible week was to do press with her mother and have to feign grief. She was a good actress — but not that good. Billy was convinced she had chosen movies over the stage, which was the family business, because it meant that she was usually at least three time zones away from their mother, a woman he once called “a singular rarity: a cold-blooded mammal.” Both siblings detested her. They had disliked their father, with reason, but they had loathed their mother–though, arguably, Billy had greater cause than Katie.

“This is when the giraffe is most vulnerable,” Emmanuel, their African guide, was saying, his accent sounding both British and Maasai to Katie. “How much does a giraffe’s neck weigh?” he asked good-naturedly. He was easily seventy, and he was like a schoolteacher with these Americans. He didn’t merely want them to see the Serengeti: he wanted them to understand it. It was a world that he loved and a world he loved sharing.

“Easily six hundred pounds,” Katie answered. She was the only one of the nine guests who’d never been to college, and she understood it was a little pathetic the way she always had to be first with the correct answer. But she did. She needed Emmanuel’s approval.

Carmen was like that, too, though she had been to college. In her case, Katie supposed, it was because Carmen always played supporting roles: she was usually the leading lady’s best friend or sister, the gal with a couple of memorable wisecracks but never the sort of scene that allowed her to show off real acting chops. Being the smartest woman in the room was her way of compensating.

“Good, good,” Emmanuel was reassuring her. “It takes time to look up and look around. That’s why they don’t all drink at once.”

“And their legs,” Katie said. “They’re in no position to run.”

“No,” Emmanuel agreed. “Excellent.”

David put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him. He whispered into her ear, “Thank you.”

She turned from the giraffes to her husband. They’d now been married thirteen days. They’d honeymooned alone–in style and civilization–in Paris, before meeting the other seven guests she was bringing on safari at the airport outside Paris and flying to Nairobi. Now they were still traveling in style and in a most civilized fashion–the kerosene-powered ice maker the excursion company provided awed her, because, of course, you had to have a proper gin and tonic at the end of a long day on safari–though the civilization was provided by an entourage of seventeen Kenyans and Tanzanians (including two armed rangers), sixteen of whom were Black. The exception was Charlie Patton, no relation, he pointedly told everyone as soon as he was introduced, to the American general. Patton had once been one of the great white hunters, born to colonials at the very end of the nineteenth century–he still had the sort of handlebar moustache she associated with cavalry officers from another era–but he had figured out the real money now was with the likes of movie stars such as Katie Barstow. People who wanted to photograph elephants, not shoot them. People who might want a zebra rug or a zebra purse but didn’t want to see the damn thing actually killed.

“Thank you for what?” she asked David, turning from the guide to her husband. She spoke softly in response to his whisper. The camera loved it when she spoke quietly, and directors had often told her that her voice, when she murmured, was gold.

“For this,” he said. “For bringing me here. For bringing us here.”

She took his fingers that were on her shoulder and brought them to her lips. She kissed them. Though David was her first husband, three years ago she had been briefly engaged. That fellow — that actor — had been threatened by her bank account. Not by her, but by her box office grosses. She had broken it off when he disappeared, drunk, the night of the Wild Girl premiere. He ended up going to Italy to lick his wounds and be the bad guy in bad films: Gunfight in Bloody Sands and The Smoking Winchester. Her brother the shrink had warned her that it would be difficult to find a man she might actually love who would ever be completely comfortable with her success, unless he were at least as successful. But men like that? They were rare. Grace Kelly had had to marry an honest-to-God prince. Elizabeth Taylor had just married her fifth husband, Richard Burton, an actor whose star was as bright as hers, even if the movies weren’t the blockbusters that Liz’s were.

But David was different. He was a gallerist: he owned a gallery in Beverly Hills. He’d grown up in Manhattan, too, in the same building as her own family, and had always been in her world because of his friendship with Billy. In some ways, he’d been like an older brother to her, too — albeit one she lost touch with until he moved west and opened a gallery on the corner of Rodeo and Brighton. Her brother was the one who’d suggested they get together, and so they had: he’d brought David to her house that first time and then had the two of them to his place for lunch. Their first date had been dinner at Taylor’s Steakhouse.

“It is amazing, isn’t it?” she said to him now. “More magic than I ever expected.”

The giraffes that were drinking raised their gargantuan necks and joined the two others that were staring at the five humans. They grew more attentive. Alert. She tried to imagine what one of them had done to interest the giraffes, but suddenly they were retreating, retreating fast, racing in that distinctive giraffe gait: what Emmanuel called “pacing,” the two right legs moving and then the two left. She smiled at their beauty, their grace, but then she heard the pops behind her, understood they were gunshots, and — more curious than alarmed — along with all of the people around her turned to look back at the camp.

Excerpted from The Lioness by Chris Bohjalian. Copyright © 2022 by Chris Bohjalian. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday Books. All rights reserved.

Also by chris bohjalian:.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received one electronic copy of The Lioness free of charge from the author via Net Galley . I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own. This disclosure complies with 16 Code of Federal Regulations, Part 255, “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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The Lioness: A Novel Hardcover – May 10 2022

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• Print length 336 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Doubleday
• Publication date May 10 2022
• Dimensions 16.26 x 3.05 x 24.38 cm
• ISBN-10 0385544820
• ISBN-13 978-0385544825
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday (May 10 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385544820
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385544825
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 641 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.26 x 3.05 x 24.38 cm
• #2,503 in Women's Action & Adventure
• #4,695 in Crime Action & Adventure
• #5,021 in Historical Thrillers (Books)

About the author

Chris bohjalian.

Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 23 books. His work has been translated into 35 languages and three times become movies.

His forthcoming novel, "The Lioness," arrives May 10, 2022.

His most recent novel, "Hour of the Witch," was published in May 2021 and was an instant New York Times, Publishers Weekly, USA Today and Indiebound bestseller. It's a novel of historical suspense set in 1662 Boston, a tale of the first divorce in North America for domestic violence -- and a subsequent witch trial. The Washington Post called "historical fiction at its best. The New York Times called it "harrowing."

His 2018 novel, “The Flight Attendant,” debuted as a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and National Indiebound Bestseller. It is now an an HBO Max series, starring Kaley Cuoco that has been nominated for numerous Emmy, SAG, and Golden Globe awards. It was recently renewed for a second season.

His 2020 novel, “The Red Lotus,” is now in paperback. It's a twisting story of love and deceit: an American man vanishes on a rural road in Vietnam and his girlfriend, an emergency room doctor trained to ask questions, follows a path that leads her home to the very hospital where they met. Publishers Weekly called it “a diabolical plot reminiscent of a Robin Cook thriller,” and Booklist described it as “masterful…a cerebral and dramatic dive into what happens when love turns to agony.”

He is also a playwright and screenwriter. He has adapted his novel, “Midwives,” for a play, which premiered in 2020 at the George Street Playhouse, and was directed by David Saint. Broadway World said of it, “The fine playwriting by Bohjalian, the directorial talents of the Playhouse’s Artistic Director, David Saint, and the show’s accomplished cast make this play unforgettable.”

His first play, “Grounded,” premiered at the 59 East 59th Theatres in New York City in the summer of 2018 and is now available as an audiobook and eBook, “Wingspan.”

His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Bookpage, and Salon.

His awards include the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts; the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide; the ANCA Arts and Letters Award for The Sandcastle Girls, as well as the Saint Mesrob Mashdots Medal; the New England Society Book Award for The Night Strangers; the New England Book Award; Russia’s Soglasie (Concord) Award for The Sandcastle Girls; a Boston Public Library Literary Light; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Trans-Sister Radio; a Best Lifestyle Column for “Idyll Banter” from the Vermont Press Association; and the Anahid Literary Award. His novel, Midwives,was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah’s Book Club, and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. He is a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. He was a weekly columnist in Vermont for The Burlington Free Press from 1992 through 2015.

Chris graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Amherst College. He has been awarded Honorary Degrees as well from Amherst, Champlain College, and Castleton University.

He lives in Vermont with his wife, the photographer Victoria Blewer.

Their daughter, Grace Experience, is a young actor in New York City. Among the audiobooks she has narrated are Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, The Guest Room, and Hour of the Witch.

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The Lioness: A Novel

By Chris Bohjalian

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Book Review: ‘The Lioness: A Novel’ By Chris Bohjalian

by RedCarpetCrash | Apr 25, 2022 | Books | 0 comments

The year is 1964 and Hollywood starlet Katie Barstow is on her honeymoon with her new husband David. They’re in Paris and are going to meet up with her brother and his wife, her agent and publicist, another actor and some others to go on Safari in the Serengeti. Everything is set and they’re having a fun time, looking at the wildlife when they hear shots and suddenly they’re surrounded and at gunpoint. They’re being kidnapped and forced into vehicles and driven away. As they try and make plans to escape and figure out what’s going on, tragedy strikes and not everyone will make it out alive. And when they learn the shocking truth about what exactly is happening, it’s quite a twsit in the story. Author Chris Bohjalian ( The Flight Attendant, The Witch ) has written another thrilling story that you won’t want to put down. He writes each chapter from a different characters point of view and we learn a lot of each person’s backstory as we read each chapter. A great novel to kickstart your spring reading season.

You can pick up The Lioness in stores on Tuesday, May 10th from Doubleday.

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Jane Austen museum appeals to public for help deciphering brother’s memoir

Curators launch campaign after acquiring 78-page document that could hold new information about author

There may be gems about Jane Austen’s life and times buried in a memoir handwritten by her older brother – but it is proving difficult to decipher his tricky handwriting.

So museum curators at her old cottage in the Hampshire village of Chawton are asking Austen enthusiasts across the world if they can help transcribe the newly acquired 78-page document.

The head of collections, interpretation and engagement at Jane Austen’s House , Sophie Reynolds, said: “It’s really, really, rare to have new Austen family material come to light. It’s not fully known what is in there so that’s really exciting.”

As well as the unpublished handwritten biography, the museum has bought an album of watercolours and drawings Austen’s brother made during his career in the Royal Navy. Both have gone on display in an exhibition called Travels with Frank Austen – the name he was known by.

Anyone who wants to help can email the house to request a page to transcribe. Reynolds compared it to a citizen science project. “It’s genuinely useful, it’s a really valuable thing to do. Reading it is quite painstaking.”

The memoir is written in the third person and the pages towards the end of the book are particularly difficult to read as arthritis made the author’s handwriting go “spidery”.

Reynolds said: “Jane Austen left so little facts on her life. This is another piece of the puzzle that can go into the museum. Scholars will find it fascinating to pull things out. It’s about filling in some more of the details that sort of surrounded her. We can see the world a little bit as she would have done.”

Austen lived at Chawton for the last eight years of her life and wrote Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion there.

Both the manuscript biography and the watercolour album came up for auction at Bonham’s in London last June and were acquired by Chawton with funding from Friends of the National Libraries, a charity that saves the nation’s written and printed heritage.

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‘Lucky’ is a delightful trip through the 20th century’s greatest hits

Jane smiley’s new novel is a quirky fictional autobiography of a moderately successful folk-rock singer-songwriter.

Open Jane Smiley’s new novel, “ Lucky ,” and thank God for the internet, because if you’re like me (well, poor you), you will want to look up and listen to song after song. The quirky fictional autobiography of a moderately successful singer-songwriter in the folk-rock mode of what the narrator, Jodie, calls the “four J’s” — Janis, Joan, Judy and Joni — largely (and minutely) imagines life as itinerary and playlist, with the 20th-century American songbook soundtracking the character’s every painstakingly mapped move.

Jodie is an only child growing up in St. Louis, the product of an affair between her mother, a onetime aspiring musical performer, and a married man-about-town no longer in the picture. Jodie’s grandparents live in the neighborhood, as do an aunt, a cousin — the charming, guitar-playing Brucie — and her Uncle Drew, a financial wizard who places a bet for her at the horse races, netting her a roll of $2 bills that gives her story of luck its start. Again and again throughout the book Jodie will return to that roll of bills, which assumes a talismanic charm as she goes to college to study music, joins a band, writes songs and cuts a record successful enough (with the wise advice of Uncle Drew) to free her of financial concerns for the rest of her songwriting, affair-having, house-buying, traveling, occasionally performing life.

All along, Jodie details her movements so meticulously that you could probably find your way around many St. Louis neighborhoods (and a few in England) with the novel in hand. This level of detail can appear gratuitous, but it comes to seem critical to Jodie’s character, who is always observing, from a slight distance, even what she herself does. Much of what she sees becomes grist for a song, but eventually you understand, as she does, that she is trying to figure out how to be in the world.

In high school she sits “on the john in the girls’ bathroom and listen[s] to the others gossip,” figuring “out a way to stay out of their conversations.” In college, she eavesdrops on her two roommates from Philadelphia talking about sex. Later, she makes an effort: “I watched how people reacted to and greeted one another. I also paid attention to the people who were walking together — how they talked and what their body language was. Then I would walk past a store window and observe myself.” Indeed, in time, she has “learned to show an interest in people and to feel a connection.”

This is life as a lesson in how to live, for which you must write your own instructions as you go along. Sometimes an insight emerges, sometimes a song, sometimes an epiphany, and it’s hard to say why, as when Jodie tells us that observing the behavior of a bird “changed my life,” or that the way a friend “talked about … things made me believe that life goes on.” Luckily, this is Jane Smiley, so the details, the insights, the songs — those she writes, and the dizzying assortment she mentions — are entertaining enough to follow.

In the Last Hundred Years Trilogy , which ran from around 1920 to 2020, Smiley viewed the American century through the filter of one family, whose members managed to experience or witness virtually every major event or trend encompassed by those years. Similarly, “Lucky” distills nearly a century through one character’s life — a life that in its general shape and many particulars seems to track with Smiley’s own. Which makes the late appearance of an even more Smiley-like character — a gawky girl who went to high school with Jodie and ended up publishing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a farm and one set in Greenland in the Middle Ages — somewhat trippy, only to be out-tripped by one last narrative twist that it would be unfair to give away.

And after Jane and Jodie and any remaining J’s get to our own dark days, and to “Lucky’s” vision of an even darker future, a twist — please, a full-scale dislocation! — is precisely what we need.

It’s a fitting conclusion to a novel whose narrator tells us that “the great enigma … was the sense you have, that comes and goes, of who you are, what the self is.”

Ellen Akins is the author of four novels and a collection of stories, “ World Like a Knife .”

By Jane Smiley

Knopf. 384 pp. $29

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Jane Smiley’s Folk Music Novel Hits Some Bum Notes

“Lucky” features a 1970s singer-songwriter who finds improbable success.

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By Wesley Stace

Wesley Stace is a musician and novelist.

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LUCKY , by Jane Smiley

Fictional folk singers have generally been the butt of the joke, holy fools or total idiots: Think of “National Lampoon’s Animal House” when John Belushi’s Bluto brutally smashes the guitar of the young man whose only offense is singing “I gave my love a cherry…,” the sincere saps of “A Mighty Wind” or the Coen brothers’ prickly, unattractive Llewyn Davis. With the glorious late-career renaissance of Joni Mitchell and the eye-opening recent Joan Baez documentary “I Am a Noise,” however, perhaps the time is right for Jodie Rattler, the protagonist of Jane Smiley’s new novel, “Lucky.”

Born in 1949, Rattler grows up in St. Louis with her mother (“the problem was that my father was married to someone else”) and a large extended family where half-hour singalongs follow dinner. Her “luck” begins with a talismanic $86 roll of $2 bills she wins at age 6 at the racetrack with her Uncle Drew. Through a combination of talent and happenstance, she becomes a jobbing singer-songwriter while still at Penn State.

The lives of Jodie’s real-life influences — Joni, Joan, Judy, Janis and their contemporaries — were fraught with incident, from drug abuse and unwanted children to secret marriages and suicide. Rattler’s problem, beyond introversion, is of a different dimension: money (too much). Her debut Elektra single — and songwriters of the Spotify era may want to look away now — earns her three royalty checks totaling roughly $215,000, which, invested by her uncle, is worth a cool half million by 1974.

Jodie, who “didn’t need the success,” becomes her own directionless trust fund kid. There is a 1974 solo album, the admirably named “Fair Isle,” that doesn’t seem to sell, and by the age of 30, she wants “to use my performances to get to places I hadn’t been before, to explore.” Less of a vocation, then, and more an opportunity for sightseeing? The song titles and their accompanying lyrics are well observed (though it’s odd that none of them seem to have choruses) but as often happens in fiction, the band names — the Scats, the Ceiling Fan Fliers and the Garter Belts — aren’t.

Jodie finds and loses love, has, by her count, 23 compensatory affairs and returns home to look after her aging family, but doesn’t have enough drive to sustain a career. Her life in music is an impossible fantasia that requires no manager or agent, functions without interviews and radio appearances, and — least likely of all — features band rehearsals that start at 8 in the morning.

“Lucky” also presents surprising misinformation about, among other things, the British 20-pence piece (minted here a decade too early), toad-in-the-hole (which isn’t “neatly housed in a puffy pastry,” or any pastry) and the availability of birth control to unmarried women in the U.K. after the 1967 Family Planning Act; she only had to ask a doctor.

There is an undercurrent of anxiety in the book that I thought presaged a twist (the trauma that underpins Jodie’s lack of vim, for example) but this shoe hovers without dropping. Our narrator has proved herself a rather linear and fussy thinker — somewhat disappointingly, given her freewheeling spirit and laissez-faire attitude to her career — yet just when the reader is hoping for a satisfying fade, the epilogue takes a wild left swerve. It’s as if Smiley has awakened from a trance and sought to distance herself from everything that’s gone before with a little bad-faith bargain-basement postmodernism (though this does have the fringe benefit of providing some cover for the musical bum notes).

Earlier, Jodie admits that even audience applause is not much of a pleasure “because when you finish your set, you are thinking about the mistakes you made and what you might have done better,” adding, “Maybe this is true for all musicians.” I don’t think it is. But perhaps a novelist might think so.

LUCKY | By Jane Smiley | Knopf | 384 pp. | $29

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The Lioness: A Novel (Random House Large Print) Paperback – Large Print, June 7, 2022

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• Print length 464 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Large Print
• Publication date June 7, 2022
• Dimensions 6.06 x 0.84 x 9.19 inches
• ISBN-10 0593607791
• ISBN-13 978-0593607794
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (June 7, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593607791
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593607794
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.06 x 0.84 x 9.19 inches
• #18,384 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #18,911 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
• #35,187 in Women Sleuths (Books)

About the author

Chris bohjalian.

Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 23 books. His work has been translated into 35 languages and three times become movies.

His forthcoming novel, "The Lioness," arrives May 10, 2022.

His most recent novel, "Hour of the Witch," was published in May 2021 and was an instant New York Times, Publishers Weekly, USA Today and Indiebound bestseller. It's a novel of historical suspense set in 1662 Boston, a tale of the first divorce in North America for domestic violence -- and a subsequent witch trial. The Washington Post called "historical fiction at its best. The New York Times called it "harrowing."

His 2018 novel, “The Flight Attendant,” debuted as a New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, and National Indiebound Bestseller. It is now an an HBO Max series, starring Kaley Cuoco that has been nominated for numerous Emmy, SAG, and Golden Globe awards. It was recently renewed for a second season.

His 2020 novel, “The Red Lotus,” is now in paperback. It's a twisting story of love and deceit: an American man vanishes on a rural road in Vietnam and his girlfriend, an emergency room doctor trained to ask questions, follows a path that leads her home to the very hospital where they met. Publishers Weekly called it “a diabolical plot reminiscent of a Robin Cook thriller,” and Booklist described it as “masterful…a cerebral and dramatic dive into what happens when love turns to agony.”

He is also a playwright and screenwriter. He has adapted his novel, “Midwives,” for a play, which premiered in 2020 at the George Street Playhouse, and was directed by David Saint. Broadway World said of it, “The fine playwriting by Bohjalian, the directorial talents of the Playhouse’s Artistic Director, David Saint, and the show’s accomplished cast make this play unforgettable.”

His first play, “Grounded,” premiered at the 59 East 59th Theatres in New York City in the summer of 2018 and is now available as an audiobook and eBook, “Wingspan.”

His books have been chosen as Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Hartford Courant, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Bookpage, and Salon.

His awards include the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts; the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide; the ANCA Arts and Letters Award for The Sandcastle Girls, as well as the Saint Mesrob Mashdots Medal; the New England Society Book Award for The Night Strangers; the New England Book Award; Russia’s Soglasie (Concord) Award for The Sandcastle Girls; a Boston Public Library Literary Light; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Trans-Sister Radio; a Best Lifestyle Column for “Idyll Banter” from the Vermont Press Association; and the Anahid Literary Award. His novel, Midwives,was a number one New York Times bestseller, a selection of Oprah’s Book Club, and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. He is a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has written for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Reader’s Digest, and The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. He was a weekly columnist in Vermont for The Burlington Free Press from 1992 through 2015.

Chris graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Amherst College. He has been awarded Honorary Degrees as well from Amherst, Champlain College, and Castleton University.

He lives in Vermont with his wife, the photographer Victoria Blewer.

Their daughter, Grace Experience, is a young actor in New York City. Among the audiobooks she has narrated are Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, The Guest Room, and Hour of the Witch.

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