Join us Tues., Aug. 15, 5 pm as Nicole Seitz discusses and signs her new novel The Cage-maker (Story River Books, hb., 248 pp., $28).
Bringing the New Orleans of the late 1800s and early 1900s vividly to life, Nicole’s novel unfolds as a series of letters, journal entries, and newspaper articles discovered in the secret compartment of an enormous and exquisitely detailed birdcage that Trish, a twenty-first-century blogger, has inherited from a heretofore unknown relative. As she peruses the documents, Trish finds herself irresistibly drawn into the history of her family―a tale that is, as one letter puts it, “part love story and part horror and madness.”
The Cage-maker is based on stories Nicole unearthed while researching her own family’s history in New Orleans. Featuring illustrations by the author, this engrossing epistolary novel offers fresh twists on the Southern Gothic genre. It reveals much about criminal justice, about early-twentieth-century notions of care for the mentally ill, and, most important, about the many ways in which the weight of history hangs over the present from one generation to the next.
Nicole Seitz is the author of six previous novels, including, most recently, Beyond Molasses Creek and The Inheritance of Beauty. She holds a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.F.A. in illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She lives in Charleston, where she teaches art and summer workshops for creative writing and illustration.
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