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ABOUT LOW APRIL SUN:
Squires’ novel explores not only the bombing itself but what she calls the “long game” of trauma in the lives of individuals and communities.
The novel proceeds along two alternating timelines, the first set in 1995, during and immediately after the bombing, and the second set twenty years later, on the eve of the bombing’s 20th anniversary, as the novel’s main characters, all touched by the bombing in some way, come together to grapple with the long-term effects of that fateful day.
Edie Travis, who long believed she lost her sister in the bombing, gets a mysterious Facebook message that turns everything she thinks she remembers on its head.
At the same time, her new friend August grapples with a chance meeting he had as a child in Elohim City, with the man who would become the most notorious domestic terrorist in U.S. history.
Squires’ work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Dublin Quarterly, Shenandoah, Identity Theory, The Rolling Stone 500, and other magazines.
Lou Berney, Edgar-winning author of Dark Ride, says, “LOW APRIL SUN is a moving and elegant exploration of grief and forgiveness, of regret and redemption.
Constance Squires also tells a helluva story, riveting from first page to last.”
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MORE ABOUT THE BOOK:
On the morning of April 19, 1995, Delaney Travis steps into the Social Security office in Oklahoma City to obtain an ID for her new job. Moments later, an explosion shatters the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building into rubble. Her boyfriend Keith and half-sister Edie are left to assume the worst—that Delaney perished in the bombing, despite lack of definitive proof. Twenty years later, now married and bonded by the tragedy, Edie and Keith’s lives are upended when they begin to receive mysterious Facebook messages from someone claiming to be Delaney.
Desperate for closure, the couple embarks on separate journeys, each aiming for an artists’ community in New Mexico that may hold answers. Alongside their quest is August, a recovering alcoholic with a haunting connection to the bombing. Raised in the separatist compound of Elohim City, August harbors secrets about Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the attack, and his own possible involvement in the tragedy. When his path crosses with Edie, he must choose whether to tell anyone about his past.
As the 20-year anniversary of the bombing approaches, fracking-induced earthquakes shake the ground of Oklahoma City, mirroring the unsettled lives of its residents. In their quest for answers, Edie, Keith, and August seek to understand how the shadows of the past continue to darken the present, as the ground beneath them threatens to give way once again.
In Low April Sun, acclaimed author Contance Squires has written the first novel to explore the enduring impact of the Oklahoma City bombing. While masterfully weaving a spellbinding mystery, Squires ultimately offers us a moving meditation on grief and forgiveness.
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A Conversation with Constance E. Squires, author of
LOW APRIL SUN
Q How did you decide to write the first novel that deals with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995?
A I live in Oklahoma City and was here when the bombing happened, and for years I’ve been looking around for the novel about the subject. I’ve talked to other writer friends about it, thinking one of them might do it, and I’ve watched as other national disasters are relatively quickly dealt with in fiction, especially 9/11, which was grappled with in a short story by John Updike in Harper’s within two months, and which Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer and many, many others wrote novels about. It stayed on my mind and at some point it became clear to me that I had a story to tell.
Q How did the two timelines, April 1995 and April 2015, in the book develop?
A I realized that the story I had to tell was more about trauma’s long game in the lives of individuals and communities, and that this meant a main timeline situated years after the bombing. I didn’t want to write a traditional historical novel set in 1995, and I felt reverential about the details of the event, about the lives lost, and I didn’t want to use that material for fiction more than was necessary for the story’s realism.
Q Family is a major topic in this story. Siblings, parents and children, spouses, all impact each other in big ways. What is the importance of telling family stories?
A I’m not sure we’re ever not telling family stories, even when we try not to, simply because of the way identity is formed by family. The deep-seated patterns of behavior and the roots of our identities, for good or ill, come from what our families gave or didn’t give us, so needing healing in these relationships takes the story right to deep wounds with high stakes that, as a reader, I always feel deeply, so I’m drawn to creating that experience for readers in my work. This is a story of sisters, of a marriage, of a boy indifferently parented in 1995, and a little boy anxiously but lovingly parented in 2015. It is about the effects of conditional and unconditional love and how our decisions as adults are still so often rooted in what sort of love we receive as children.
Q What did you learn writing the book about what the Oklahoma City bombing has to teach us about the nation’s ongoing issues?
A Right now, thirty years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the anti- government and white supremacist forces in the country seem more present than ever, and my research in writing this book made me feel that much of that is related to how the Oklahoma City bombing was solved as a crime and prosecuted. There was a tremendous need to give the country closure and let healing begin after the tragedy, and it seems clear in retrospect that a number of people and networks who probably at the very least bore looking into seriously, were dropped and allowed to continue with their activities once the narrative around McVeigh as the main criminal hardened. Some of this is fact, some speculation, and I don’t think there’s anyone saying that McVeigh didn’t do it, but it was interesting to read about the process of his conviction and to think about the long-range effects of giving a pass to people and groups that have spent the last thirty years getting stronger. Keeping in mind Hemingway’s writing goal of “presentation without commentary,” I tried to give different attitudes and theories about these matters to different characters to let the various takes on the issue have room in the story. In Oklahoma, there’s hardly anyone old enough who doesn’t have a story about the bombing and their own take on the how and why of it, and I realized that I really wanted to give a sense of that dynamic, because it’s part of how the tragedy has been and is still being processed at the individual and at the community level.
Q Low April Sun has a strong sense of place, with Oklahoma City being almost another character and the characters journeying through the Oklahoma-Texas-New Mexico region separately and together. How do you see the role of strong place-driven fiction in the national literary identity?
A The story of the United States as it appears in our literature is dense and well represented in some parts of the country and sparsely so in others. For me, the drive from Oklahoma City to Santa Fe feels like home the whole way, and most of it still looks like it must have looked for hundreds of years. You still feel like you’re witnessing something others don’t know about. We have some excellent writing to have come out of this region, but there are so many untold stories, and more every day. I feel like national literature must be as granular and specific to the places being written about as a character has to be in order for it to impact readers. The details of place that we know from firsthand experience often seem commonplace and somehow not literary enough to us, but it’s been my experience that it’s this very material that fascinates and intrigues readers. Talking to readers in the current-day United States about my novel set in West Germany before the end of the Cold War and about a funky little town in Oklahoma to readers on the coasts have cemented my understanding that readers love to be taken to places they haven’t been. Representation in literature impacts representation in the national conversation, in the nation’s evolving identity, so it seems important that we, as writers, get over the idea that “life is elsewhere” and bring to the conversation the places and spaces that only we can.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Constance E. Squires is the author of Live from Medicine Park, Along the Watchtower, which won the 2012 Oklahoma Book Award, and Hit Your Brights.
Her short stories have been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Dublin Quarterly, Shenandoah, Identity Theory, The Rolling Stone 500, and other magazines.
Squires teaches creative writing at the University of Central Oklahoma.
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