Susan Meissner

The Nature of Fragile Things (2021) begins with a transcript rather than a scene: a United States marshal questioning Sophie Whalen Hocking in November 1906. Sophie is an Irish immigrant who answered a newspaper advertisement for a wife, left a New York tenement for San Francisco and married a man she knew nothing about, months before the earthquake and fire of 18 April 1906 wrecked the city. Susan Meissner, born in 1961, grew up in San Diego and studied at Point Loma Nazarene University. She lived in England, Germany and Minnesota, edited a weekly newspaper there, and moved back to southern California in 2007. She writes for both the general and the Christian market, has won the Christy and Carol awards and been a RITA finalist. A Fall of Marigolds (2014) braids two griefs: Clara Wood, a nurse posted to Ellis Island in 1911 after the man she loved died in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and Taryn, a New York mother widowed in the North Tower, ten years on. An orange marigold scarf passes between the two stories. Booklist named it to its top ten women's fiction titles for 2014.