More book news today… and for once, it’s actually about my book!

While we were in Miami airport waiting for our flight to England – only four days later than planned, due to snow – I got an email from my editor and publisher, Amy Einhorn, with her comments on the rewrite to the book that I had been working on for the past six months.  Nervous times, as you might imagine.  Over the summer we had spent several hours on the telephone discussing what changes needed to be made, but there’s a world of difference between agreeing to changes in principle and liking the end result in practice, especially when some of the changes we talked about were pretty fundamental to the entire book.

The good news is that she liked what I’d done.  She had made various comments and suggestions throughout the book and I have spent the past few weeks working through those.  This morning I pressed send on the revised manuscript, and it is now winging its way back to New York.  There will be of course be further polishing to do, but I believe that the lion’s share of work on the book is probably done.  That is an extraordinary sentence to write after six years.  As I type it I am filled with deep satisfaction, but also a certain melancholy.  I have lived with my characters for so long, and have gone through so much with them (including killing a fair few of the poor sods off) that I am very sad to finally bid them goodbye.

Twitter followers and Facebook friends will also already know that we appear (thanks to Amy) to have resolved the on-going saga of the title.  She has suggested this: A GOOD AMERICAN.

This is, as my friend Louise remarked, a “big” title, but I think that’s OK.  I’d love to know what you think.  Without having read a word of the novel, is it a title that would grab your attention?  Does it intrigue you?  Put you off?  Please drop me a line and let me know your thoughts.