The novel James A. Michener (First UK edition)

SET IN PENNSYLVANIA Dutch country – the land of the Amish – and New York City, James A. Michener’s new novel is an exciting story about people whose lives revolve around books: a writer, his editor and publisher, a critic and a reader.

After years of struggle, Lukas Yoder has become one of America’s most popular authors. His novels about the world of the Pennsylvania Dutch are enormously successful, but in the final book of the series he is determined to try something different.

Inside the frenetic world of publishing Yvonne Marmelle, Yoder’s editor, battles to preserve her integrity. Her firm is the target of a corporate takeover and she is forced to confront a crisis that threatens Yoder’s career and her own.

Karl Streibert, a critic and teacher of literature, struggles with his feelings about Yoder’s success as his own ambitions for himself clash with his hopes for the work of his young students.

Jane Garland has long been an avid reader of Yoder’s work. A patron of Streibert’s college, her grandson is his most promising student, author of a precociously brilliant first novel.

As the lives of these characters intersect, their world is shattered by a mysterious act of violence – a crime that ultimately only Lukas Yoder can solve.

In this enthralling new novel, James Michener has made a radical departure from the huge historical sagas that have made him one of the world’s best-loved authors. An exciting, compulsively readable story, The Novel is Michener at his best – writing about the world he knows best.