New York Times best-selling author Katherine Arden didn’t set out to be a writer.
After graduating from Middlebury College with a love of language and a bachelor’s degree in French and Russian, Arden felt a need to slow down, so she took a farm job in Hawaii. “Picking coffee in sight of the sea might be very Zen, but it’s not that interesting. To entertain myself, I started writing a book,” Arden explains.
Though she acknowledges that she “just kept on haphazardly stringing events together,” Arden stayed with the effort, and it paid off. In 2014 — after she’d traveled, taught at a school in the French Alps, and begun working in a real estate office back in the states — her first book, The Bear and the Nightingale, was published. The novel for adults became a bestseller and launched a trilogy.
Arden has also written for younger readers. Her picture book The Strangest Fish (2024) is about a girl who wins a fish, and it turns out to be magical. For middle grade readers, she’s written the Small Spaces Quartet, praised by R. L. Stine as “terrifying and fun.” Other accolades include being selected as the Best Book of 2018 by Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and the Chicago Public Library.
Arden’s newest novel for adult readers is The Warm Hands of Ghosts. She describes it as an amalgam of a lot of different ideas and experiences: “For me, every book takes inspiration from so many different things that it’s hard to pin one down specifically.” Among her influences were John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, the book of Revelation, “a ton of” World War I memoirs, Greek myths, 20th-century history and the battlefields of France and Belgium.
Set during the Great War, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is the story of a combat nurse who is searching for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise. It’s a hauntingly beautiful historical novel with a speculative twist. Diana Gabaldon (Outlander) calls it “a wonderful clash of fire and ice — a book you won’t want to let go of.”
Hear from this versatile and acclaimed author — about her craft, her books, and her latest release. Register now to attend an Evening with Katherine Arden, Thursday, October 2.
