Nell Zink’s story has already become the stuff of publishing fairytales. A former bricklayer and cocktail waitress who had written experimental stories for years but never shown her work to anyone bar a few close friends, Zink was a total outsider to the American literary establishment when, approaching 50 and living in Germany, she struck up an antagonistic correspondence with Jonathan Franzen on the subject of endangered birds. He encouraged her to write something more commercially appealing and promised to champion it. Her first novel, The Wallcreeper, was published last year by a tiny independent press in the US, but it was her follow-up, Mislaid, that won her a six-figure advance when Franzen’s agent took it on, and now sees her feted as one of the most exciting new voices in American fiction in recent years.
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