Robert Harris on Act of Oblivion: A Novel: Fiction

Bruce Holsinger is the author of The Gifted School, which won the Colorado Book Award. He teaches at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. But in The Displacements: A Novel (Riverhead Books), their deluxe Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna – the world’s first Category 6 hurricane – upends everything they have taken for granted. When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort for the family. Their home is destroyed, two members are missing, and their finances are abruptly cut off. They find themselves swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter. Their new community includes an insurance agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. The Displacements explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.

Robert Harris is the author of 14 novels, including bestsellers worldwide such as Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, and a trilogy of books about the Roman statesman Cicero – Imperium, Conspirata, and Dictator. Before becoming a full-time novelist, he worked as a BBC reporter, political editor of The Observer, and columnist at The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. Act of Oblivion: A Novel (Harper) is his first historical novel set predominantly in America. It is 1660 in England and General Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, board a ship bound for the New World. They are on the run, wanted for the murder of King Charles I. Ten years after Charles’ beheading, the royalists have returned to power and the 59 men who signed the king’s death warrant and participated in his execution have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. Some are already dead; others have been captured, hung, drawn, and quartered. A few are imprisoned for life. But the two who escaped to America are now being hunted by Richard Nayler, the secretary of the regicide committee who is charged with bringing these traitors to justice – and he will stop at nothing to find and capture them, dead or alive.