Q&A with Shelley Noble

  

Photo by Gary Brown

 

 

Shelley Noble is the author of the new novel The Sisters of Book Row. Her many other books include The Colony Club. She lives in New Jersey.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Sisters of Book Row, and how did you create your characters Celia, Daphne, and Olivia?

 

A: Book banning has been so much in the news lately that I decided I’d take a look. I remembered that there was a real Book Row in Manhattan, and I started looking for a story based there.

 

The sisters actually were inspired by three contemporary Cohen sisters who inherited the Argosy Bookstore from their father, and I thought … What if they had lived in 1915?

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic among the sisters?

A: They have a complicated but firmly entwined relationship. They’re stuck with each other through loyalty and love and duty to the store. Each has her own special desire for the future but the same love and duty, and sometimes fear, keep them from sharing or understanding the other.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: It takes place in 1915. There’s a wonderful book titled Book Row, but its emphasis is the later years. It was a great jumping off place, but I depended primarily on primary sources as much as possible. Newspapers, letters, theatre posters, all sorts of things give a real resonance to the period.

 

I was surprised by just how much our two periods are alike. But the best surprises were the tiny little details discovered in a sentence or description that gave life to what would become a whole scene or setting.

 

Q: How would you compare the cultural politics of the period you write about with those of today?

A: Unfortunately very similar. Books, women’s health, fear of immigrants, among other subjects were the brunt of Anthony Comstock’s rabidity in the flesh. His zombie law still casts a pall over our society.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on a novel that takes place in 1870 in Long Branch, New Jersey, which was President Grant’s summer White House. Another story about sisters, only this time, estranged, and on opposite sides of society and politics, but equally determined to thwart the other.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Just that I love writing about those small enclaves of people, especially women, often forgotten, or ignored, who helped weave the fabric of our history.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Shelley Noble.