Introductions: Tana French in Conversation with Ruth Ware
October 13, 2020
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director
We are here tonight to celebrate the publication of Tana French’s eagerly anticipated new novel, The Searcher. I will confess that Tana French is one of the writers I’d been hearing everyone from Nancy Pearl to a childhood friend rave about for years but hadn’t yet read until this fall, when I dove headfirst into her books. And as I found myself unable to put them down, reading later and later into the night, I finally understood why Stephen King has called French’s work “incandescent,” and Gillian Flynn has called her “absolutely mesmerizing.”
Tana French is the author of seven books, including In the Woods, The Likeness, and The Witch Elm. Her work has been awarded an Edgar, Anthony, and Barry Award, the L.A. Times Award for best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. While her books explore murders with irresistible and intricate plots, they also dazzle in their prose and exploration of not just what motivates a murder, but also what it means to live.
As French writes in The Likeness, “Ask any ice skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.” And so all we readers are grateful for Tana French’s extraordinary work and writing in making novels that feel both intoxicating and effortless. I join a huge chorus of readers in saying we can’t wait to learn what happens in her newest, The Searcher.
Crime-fiction writers Tana French and Ruth Ware were in conversation on October 12, 2020, as part of our SAL Presents series of special events; SAL Executive Director Ruth Dickey delivered this introduction.