Alexander Maksik's second novel, A Marker to Measure Drift (Knopf), began as an experiment in voice. The book's central character – an aristocratic Liberian woman, left bereft and exiled on a remote Aegean island during her country's second civil war – is as different from the author as any character possibly could be. Maksik talks about how he gradually learned to "reveal" Jacqueline, the trance-like quality of his prose, the novel's nuanced sensuality.
Read an excerpt from A Marker to Measure Drift.