Nicholas Sparks
In the early 1990s, a young pharmaceutical salesman in Washington DC sent a to a literary agent a manuscript about a pair of lovers separated by class and by war. Picked out of the slush pile by the agent, the book was published in 1996 and immediately leapt to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The Notebook — later adapted for film — launched the literary career of Nicholas Sparks, whose stories of love, loss, long-kept secrets and buried longing have made him one of the most widely-read authors of our time. The author of 20 bestselling novels joined us in the podcast studio to talk about his latest work of fiction, Every Breath, a story that crosses the ocean from Africa to North Carolina, and which hinges on a very unusual and quite real place — a mailbox in the middle of nowhere.