Jeremy Eaton
Jeremy Eaton
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Just try to find a free table and electrical outlet at your neighborhood coffee shop. Everyone's busy working on their laptop, and they're not just blogging. Seattle is crammed full of writers who don't always make the Sunday New York Times Book Review. So it's time to survey some of our homegrown talent, ranging from newbies to veterans to best sellers, to see what they're adding to our sagging bookshelves. Sometimes under the radar, sometimes working in narrow genres, sometimes doing their own publishing and publicity, they're tap-tap-tapping away at the keyboard in all corners of the Northwest—at the Starbucks, on the bus, or in office cubicles prepared to Alt-Tab back to that spreadsheet they should be working on. Your local bookstore has—or should have—a section showcasing local authors; here's a sampling of what you'll find there. Eds.
Chikodi Añunobi
Though he writes historical fiction, Añunobi works in the high-tech present.
These days, when Nigeria makes the news, the headlines generally concern government corruption, Western oil company payoffs and pollution, guerrilla insurgencies, and kidnappings in the disputed Niger delta drilling region. But debut novelist Añunobi looks back to a more peaceful past in Nri Warriors of Peace (Zenith, $19.95). About 12 centuries back. In that country's southeastern precolonial Igbo region (usually pronounced "Ibo"), Añunobi's homeland, the Nri kingdom flourished from roughly the ninth to the 15th centuries. Though this period is taught in outline in Nigerian schools, it wasn't until Añunobi's studies at the UW during the '90s that he discovered the Nri left bronze artifacts as early as the ninth century. "I was interested in history, but this was my ancestors, my history," he explains. His inference, supported by years of self-directed study while working in the software industry, was that the Nri could've used bronze weapons for conquest and expansion but elected not to. (Today, having come to the U.S. in 1987, Añunobi is a citizen residing in Bellevue with his wife and family.) Ironically, it was the dot-com crash and four months of unemployment that got him to finally write Warriors, a historical novel celebrating Nri culture and traditions of peaceful coexistence with other kingdoms.
"It doesn't sell books to write about peace. It's a historical fiction. More than half of it is real material," says Añunobi. But, mindful of the limited media view of Africa (war, famine, AIDS, Western exploitation, etc.), he intends the book to be a lesson as well. "It's another way of looking at Africa."
As a result, even though he sees the need for regime change and more democratic institutions in Nigeria, where he visits regularly and hopes to publish his book, Añunobi says, "I have to be optimistic" about Africa. He sees for the continent an instructive example in the Nri, who were "ambitious but not selfish. Power shouldn't intoxicate us." Of course, African history is also American history—since the slave trade reached into the former Nri territory—and that lesson applies to our politics as well. BRIAN MILLER
Peninsula sophisticate Banerjee.
A Calcutta-born, Berkeley-educated Olympic Peninsula resident who grew up in Canada with an adopted Native American sister and Italian stepmother, Anjali Banerjee knows something about cultural complexity. Previously a writer of young-adult novels, her Imaginary Men (Downtown Press, $13) draws on her experiences and the dislocation she felt when visiting India as a child and thereafter. "Canada felt like home, while India felt like a bizarre, distant planet," she explains. "Still, my Indian heritage will always inform my life to some degree." Thus was born protagonist Lina, a modern Bay Area woman who invents a fiancé to alleviate family pressure to enter an arranged marriage. In a Bend It Like Beckham–like culture clash, Men begins: "I'm allergic to India."
Banerjee could've easily slipped into a scientific career, with both her parents Ph.D.s, but she was hooked on words, like her maternal grandma, a British-born author who married a Bengali and moved to India. "I guess I inherited her love of writing fiction. As a child, I typed stories, stapled the pages together, and pasted copyright notices inside the front covers."
Thoroughly at home in the Pacific Northwest since 1997, she lives with her husband, three cats, and a black rabbit named Friday. Planned for September is Invisible Lives, about a sari shop owner in a fictional Seattle suburb "with the mystical ability to see into every heart but her own." The local scenery is "so lovely," Banerjee can't help but be inspired: "I love the view from the top of Hurricane Ridge, or the trails in the Hoh Rain Forest. In Seattle, I love browsing Elliott Bay Book Co. on a rainy day, or strolling through the shops in Pike Place Market, or buying papaya at Whole Foods Market and lychee fruit in Uwajimaya." SARA NIEGOWSKI
Mary Daheim
Her Emma Lord mystery series offers as its heroine a smart, wry, 50ish, slightly bohemian, unapologetically sexual weekly newspaper editor in a small Washington town. Emma's insatiable investigative jones makes her the valued ally of laconic Sheriff (and ex-lover) Milo Dodge, and she's aided by her imperious editor, Vida Runkel, wearer of flamboyant hats and nexus of all Alpine's gossip.
