How do you turn 600 pages of your grandfather's notebooks into a novel author, Stefan Hertzmens,

will join us to talk about his new book, War in Turpentine, one of this year's 10 Best Books.

I had myself to grow a bit older as a writer in order to be his servants completely

and to write a book about the silent tragedies that time can do with people.

What do you do when you've read all of Conrad and Kormick McCarthy?

Chances are you'll want to turn to the Northwater.

Ian McGuire will tell us about his latest novel, also one of our 10 Best Books.

What I wanted to do, I suppose partly in Northwater, was to imagine the wailing as less heroic,

as much more kind of brutal and bloody than it actually ends up being in large parts of Moe v.

Plus, editors here will talk about their favorites among the 10 Best and the books that didn't quite make the cut.

Alexander Alter will give us an update from the literary world, and we'll talk a little bit about what we're reading.

This is Inside the New York Times Book Review, I'm Pamela Paul.

Stefan Hertzmens joins us now to talk about his new novel, War in Turpentine.

Stefan, thanks for being here.

Thank you.

My film is just a little rusty, I hope I got the pronunciation there, a very last name.

That's so correct.

So this is one of our 10 Best Books of the Year, congratulations.

For those who have not yet had the pleasure to read it, tell us a little bit about the book.

My book is called War in Turpentine.

That's what you call in literary terms, an oxymoron.

It means those are two things that don't go together, war and Turpentine.

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