Elizabeth Loupas

[Here’s another guest post for another fabulous book to pre-order, this time from my friend and crit partner Lisa Brackmann. Book pre-orders do make great last-minute gifts, you know.]

Howdy! I’m thrilled to be Elizabeth’s latest guest for her Twenty-Four Days of Christmas Book Shopping Marathon blog series! Before we get into my book, can I just say I’ve read The Second Duchess, and it is awesome? I’d tell you all to pre-order it too, but I think it’s still too soon. So, just, pre-pre-order it! You’re in for a treat. [Thanks, Lisa! And may I just add that as one of your crit partners I’ve also read Rock Paper Tiger, and it’s absorbing, suspenseful, and simply crammed with fascinating time-and-place atmosphere.]

Okay, back to me. My debut novel Rock Paper Tiger is coming from Soho Press in June 2010. Which is a ways off, but that means your recipient will have a nice, shiny new book just in time for summer vacation.

Rock Paper Tiger is mainly set in China, a country where I’ve spent a considerable amount of time (in fact, I just got back and am trying to write this post while slightly jet-lagged). One of the reasons I wrote the book was that I felt today’s China was underrepresented as a setting in contemporary fiction. I’m not sure why, because if ever there were a place with the sorts of complexities, contradictions and global importance that make for a rich and relevant setting, that would be China. If I’ve managed to capture a tiny fraction of any of that, I’ll feel like I’ve done my job.

Your guide through this territory is one Ellie Cooper, an American and former National Guard medic who has plenty of reasons to get lost on the other side of the planet from her native country. Estranged from her husband, she’s tending bar in a Beijing dive and hanging out with video gamers and performance artists – one artist in particular, Lao Zhang, who has a few secrets of his own. When a chance encounter with a Uighur fugitive drops her down a rabbit hole of conspiracies, Ellie must decide who to trust among the artists, dealers, collectors and operatives claiming to be on her side – in particular, a mysterious organization operating within a popular online game.

Rock Paper Tiger has some suspense and thriller elements, but for me it is more of a journey story and a meditation on global communities, in both the positive and negative sense. What does it mean to live in a surveillance society? How do we live creative and free lives in a world that is dominated by huge, impersonal organizations that are largely indifferent to “ordinary” people’s individual concerns? What will Ellie do when she runs out of the Percocet she uses to self-medicate, and will her failure to forward her mother’s prayer chain emails to ten people she wants to bless really result in disastrous consequences?

You can find out more about Rock Paper Tiger at my website, and in the Spring 2010 Soho Catalog (hey, that’s my book on the cover!). Rock Paper Tiger is available for pre-order at Amazon.com, Borders, and IndieBound. (Hey, Barnes and Noble! Where’s the pre-order? Get with the program already!).