More About the Author
Born in 1970 in Chicago, Andromeda Romano-Lax worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction. Her first novel, The Spanish Bow, was translated into eleven languages and was chosen as a New York Times Editors' Choice, BookSense pick, and one of Library Journal's Best Books of the Year. Among her nonfiction works are a dozen travel and natural history guidebooks to the public lands of Alaska, as well as a travel narrative, Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja's Desert Coast, which was an Aububon Editor's Choice. Andromeda lives with her husband and children in Anchorage, Alaska, where she co-founded and now teaches for a nonprofit organization, the 49 Alaska Writing Center.
On a more personal note, Andromeda also belongs to a book club of intelligent women who cook fantastic Alaska dinners and occasionally tease her for steering discussions away from the scallops and salmon and back to issues of character, theme, and language, of which she never tires. She keeps a log of everything she reads, including her personal reactions to those works, something she started years ago to address the gaps in her early education, which had previously focused on political science and marine science. She loves travel, especially with her husband and children, and running, cycling, and triathlons (well, maybe "loves" is too strong a word for those activities, but she does enjoy them in the company of friends). She has played cello off and on, but never a tenth as well as Feliu, the protagonist of her debut novel, The Spanish Bow. Her vices include red wine, tortilla chips and salsa (which she will eat to the point of stomachache), and towering piles of yet-to-be-read books on most surfaces. On a first weekend-long date with her future husband over twenty years ago, they argued late into the night about the Holocaust (his interest, not hers), neither expecting that she would later become a novelist interested in writing about Nazis and the Third Reich. Her favorite novelists include Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Kazuo Ishiguro, Paul Theroux, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Meg Wolitzer, Zoe Heller, Lionel Shriver, and Jon Clinch.
Andromeda blogs at www.romanolax.com and enjoys hearing from readers.
