Author: Amy Harmon

Raised in rural Utah in a house without a television, Amy Harmon filled the time with books, songs and stories, and put out her first novels herself before trade publishers took an interest. Her work has been translated widely, and the range across it is unusual. The Smallest Part, from 2018, follows Noah, Mercedes and Cora, close since childhood, through the grief that rearranges what the three of them are to each other. The First Girl Child opens the Chronicles of Saylok in 2019: a dying woman's curse has stopped daughters being born in the kingdom, and Bayr, a chieftain's unacknowledged son raised by temple keepers, protects Alba, the first girl born there in nearly twenty years. The Songbook of Benny Lament, published in 2021, sets a Bronx piano player whose father answers to the mob alongside a singer called Esther Mine in 1960s New York, and frames the whole thing as a radio interview given nine years later.