Meg Mitchell Moore grabbed our attention last year with her riveting debut, The Arrivals (out in paperback now) and is back with an equally gripping novel, So Far Away (out May 29). She took time out of her busy book tour (and life!) to give us the inside scoop on her latest novel, her next novel and the books that have her attention right now.

Lisa Steinke: What three words would you use to describe your book?
Meg Mitchell Moore: Suspenseful, melancholy, hopeful

LS: What is your favorite thing about your book?
MMM: After many, many revision, the fact that I connected three seemingly unconnected characters

LS: What was your high point while writing your book? Low point?

MMM: High point: When my editor read the first draft and said she loved it; this was part of a two-book deal and I was nervous about disappointing.

Low point: partway through the first major revision when I really didn’t think the story was going to come together.

LS: How did you come up with the title of your book?
MMM: Oh boy. This title went through so many meetings I have lost count. I started with the title Solace and the publisher first said, “No, too quiet.” We went around and around through a million other titles and came back to Solace only to find that another book had recently been published with that name. So So Far Away came into being. The funny thing is that in the Publisher’s Weekly review of the book, “solace” is the first word of the first sentence.

LS: What are you reading now? What’s up next?
MMM: I have two books waiting for me and will start one of them next: The Underside of Joy  by Sere Prince Halverson and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?  by Jeanette Winterson.

LS: If you could see one person, alive or dead, reading your book, who would it be?
MMM: Alice Munro

LS: What’s the best compliment you’ve received about your book?
MMM: Some early readers told me they stayed up all night reading it. I can’t stay up all night for anything.

LS: What’s the #1 thing you want people to feel after reading your book?
MMM: Satisfied.

LS: Favorite line or passage from your book?
MMM: “You drop a gravy boat; a doctor touches your swollen
ankle; your world changes forever, the blink of an eye, a lost girl,
found.”

LS: Are you working on your next book? If so, any hints?
MMM: It’s tentatively titled THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER, and in it the daughter of a lobsterman from a small fishing village in Maine returns to the town she thought she escaped when her father’s boat goes missing, and confronts her past as well as some uncomfortable truths about her present.

To find out more about Meg Mitchell Moore, visit her website. Pre-order Meg's upcoming novel, So Far Away here. And be sure to check out her first novel, The Arrivals  available in paperback now.