Attica Locke’s new novel, “Guide Me Home,” is the final installment in her critically acclaimed Highway 59 trilogy of crime novels featuring Darren Mathews, a Black Texas Ranger.

Here, she takes the Book Pages Q&A.

Q: Is there a book or books that you always recommend to other readers?

“We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves” by Karen Joy Fowler is one of my all-time favorite books. I also frequently recommend “13 Ways of Looking at the Novel” by Jane Smiley to people who are interested in writing.

Q: What are you reading now?

I’m the last person on Earth to read “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. I’m deeply, deeply, deeply enjoying it. Before that it was Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s “Long Island Compromise,” which I loved. I also read “The Cliffs” by J. Courtney Sullivan, and Percival Everett’s “James” literally just knocked me on my ass.

Q: Do you listen to audiobooks? If so, are there any titles or narrators you’d recommend?

I just taught myself to listen to podcasts. And what I mean by that is I am a daydreamer. What happens to me is that I start listening and then I start daydreaming about something else. Then I am constantly having to rewind and go back because I wasn’t paying attention. My concern is that with an audiobook, I would be constantly rewinding because I would not be paying attention. So I’m working my way up to an audiobook.

Q: Is there a genre or type of book you read the most – and what would you like to read more of?

I read more fiction than I read nonfiction. And what would I like to read more? I think I’d probably like to read more biographies, but sometimes they feel very daunting. They all look really big and serious.

Q: Is there a person who made an impact on your reading life – a teacher, a parent, a librarian or someone else?

I had two teachers in my life that are really the reason why I am where I am. One of them was my high school sophomore-year English teacher, Ms. Joyce Eddings, she was the first person who read something of mine and went, “Whoa, you can write!” To have an adult say that was a kind of life-changing experience. It made me sit up a little bit taller and take my little scribblings seriously. I also will always thank her for drilling Latin root words into us. I still use that all the time.

The other teacher was a theater teacher, Mr. Paul Crump, and he also had this really kind of outside the box way of thinking about theater. Somewhere between these two people is how I live as a novelist and a person who works in drama who is always looking for a new way to tell a story in that form.

Q: What is something about your book that nobody knows?

How absolutely terrified I was while I was writing it. I was really, really, really scared that this was not going to go over with people, that it wasn’t going to be what they wanted. That I was signaling that I was not following the tropes of the genre of crime fiction and that I would upset people. I was really, really afraid, even though I knew this was the book that had to come out.

Q: If you could ask your readers something, what would it be?

I think I would be very curious how they read the book. Is it at the beach? Is it at home? Is it at the library? I would just be very curious to know how they take in the book.

©2024 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit ocregister.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.