Church of Marvels, the debut novel by The Offing Dead Letter Office editor Leslie Parry, is now out from Ecco!
The novel, which is set in New York City in 1895, follows four characters who are outsiders during that historical moment. Parry fills Church of Marvels with impressive details of time and place, but also a unique set of marginalized experiences — lives very much of the era and yet all too familiar even today. She discusses the novel in an interview that will appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books at the end of the week. In that conversation, Parry speaks to her influences:
I always loved reading books by women who wrote about difficult or obscure historical subjects, who moved their protagonists out of the parlor and into the street. Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, Lauren Belfer’s A Fierce Radiance, Tracy Chevalier’s Remarkable Creatures, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch, just to name a few. Books about independent, complex, sometimes violent or duplicitous women — women in milieus that we historically associate with masculinity: science, war, the West. History is the raveling of infinite threads; you only have to train your light in a different way, and something begins to glisten from the shadows.
The same can be said of Church of Marvels.