Robert Goolrick, author of the upcoming book A Reliable Wife, has this to say about Jane Austen:

If anything, I was inspired by earlier writers. I’m always inspired by Jane Austen, curiously enough. She has a great thing that she does, which is her novels are about complicated, romantic situations in which all the happiness comes at the very end—like a magic trick. I love that about her, and I wanted to write a novel in which people seemingly unable to be happy suddenly find redemption and happiness all in a second.

[Quoted from Publisher’s Weekly]

Goolrick’s new work, following his memoir The End of the World as We Know It, will be released on March 31, 2009….

Synopsis:

Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for “a reliable wife.” But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she’s not the “simple, honest woman” that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man’s devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt — a passionate man with his own dark secrets —has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways.

With echoes of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, Robert Goolrick’s intoxicating debut novel delivers a classic tale of suspenseful seduction, set in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis.

[from the Barnes & Noble website]

[BTW, the book has already been optioned for a movie and is hitting various favorite lists, so this is not the first you will hear about this book…]