Karl Marlantes
Our guest on today's episode is the writer Karl Marlantes, who burst onto the literary scene in 2010 with his critically acclaimed, bestselling novel Matterhorn, the story of a company of soldiers who build, abandon and retake a firebase in Vietnam. He followed that with the bestselling nonfiction work What It is Like to Go to War. Now, Marlantes has returned to fiction with Deep River, drawing on his family's own history as political refugees from their native Finland who made their way in the logging community of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century. Deep River is a story of siblings, of family and survival, love and ambition set in a natural world of mythic grandeur. Marlantes talked with B&N's Miwa Messer about the true stories that inspired this epic tale -- but first, she asked him to go back in time to his unusual arrival on the publishing scene, after years of writing, with Matterhorn.