Novels about the cost of
becoming someone.

Justin Cronk is an American novelist and military veteran. He grew up in a house where his parents always had their noses in a book. His father wrote prose and poetry in the Sahara Desert, working on oil rigs and reading Hemingway in the margins of the day. Stories were not entertainment in that house. They were how you made sense of being alive.

In 2004 he was overseas with the military. He walked through palaces in Baghdad. Real palaces, built for real kings. Something about the silence inside them, the way power leaves a residue on stone, stayed with him. It is in the bones of his first novel.

He has worked for a uranium exploration company in Colorado and Utah, finding chip piles in the desert where someone had knapped an arrowhead hundreds of years ago. He spent a season at a remote camp in Nunavut, where an Inuit man whistled and called in the northern lights. He still cannot explain it. He will say to this day that it was magic.

A good portion of his first novel was written in a canvas hot tent in the woods outside Boonville, New York. In winter. The company he was working for paid for hotels. He turned them down. He needed the weather on the other side of the canvas to write about people who lived close to the world.

He lives in Minnesota with his family. The next book is already on the desk.