Paul Elwork ’04M was featured among “10 of this season’s promising fictional debuts, each with the potential to thrill” as noted by Natalie Danford of Publishers Weekly in the Jan. 24 article, “Novel Undertakings: First Fiction 2011.”

The Girl Who Would Speak for the Dead, which will be published by Amy Einhorn Books and Putmam in April, was 13 years in the making.

“Elwork began the novel in 1997, while still an undergraduate. (He holds a bachelor’s degree from Temple University and a master’s in English from Arcadia University.) He worked on it ‘in starts and stops,’ he says, and published a novella focused on the same story with Casperian Books in Sacramento, Calif.” Eventually, writer M.J. Rose introduced Elwork to Dan Lazar, who became his agent and showed the novella to Amy Einhorn, publisher of her eponymous imprint at Putnam.

“Einhorn recalls, ‘It was a novella. But it was also damn good.’ She and Elwork worked together to expand the story, and the resulting work has earned blurbs from the likes of Scott Smith.”

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