Emily Arsenault (South Africa 2004-06) new novel is a psychological thriller

Emily Arsenault (South Africa 2004-06) first novel, The Broken Teaglass, was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Crime Book of 2009. She has now just published In Search of the Rose Notes, a psychological mystery about broken friendship and the unease of revisiting adolescent memories. Emily writes, “My initial intention was to write a suspense novel that dealt with some of the darker aspects of adolescence. I wanted to write about a female character in her twenties who, while relatively content as an adult, had a difficult adolescence that she still struggles to understand. I started with that character–Nora–and built the other aspects of the book (the friendship with Charlotte, Rose’s disappearance, the Time-Life books) around her.”

Before the Peace Corps and South Africa, Emily  worked as a lexicographer and an English teacher. While she grew up in Connecticut, today she lives with her husband, who served with her in the Peace Corps, in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts and is working on her third novel tentatively titled Just Someone I Used to Know, named after that old song Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton use to sing. If you want to know more about Emily, check out: www.emilyarsenault.com.

She is, as The New York Times Book Reviewer writes, “a very clever wordsmith.”