Miss Marple rides again in Lucy Foley’s new novel, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel.” This time, the beloved spinster sleuth finds herself on holiday, at a glamorous and isolated hotel nestled high in the Swiss Alps — where a body is quickly discovered on the first gondola ride of the day.

Thankfully for the hotel guests — and mystery readers — Miss Marple is there, observing from the sidelines and taking it all in.

As Foley told Kerri Miller at Talking Volumes, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel” is the first full-length, commissioned novel featuring Agatha Christie’s beloved Miss Marple in fifty years. The challenge was translating her into a more modern sensibility.

Min Jin Lee was disappointed she didn’t get to come to Talking Volumes in 2017 to talk about her novel “Pachinko.” She says that’s probably because it struggled initially. Her editor quit just three months before the book was published. Her husband lost his job the day “Pachinko” was released. And besides The New York Times and USA Today, no media companies would review her book.

But that slow burn eventually ignited into a blazing inferno. The New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of 2017 and, by 2022, it had been made into a TV series by Apple — which propelled another waves of global sales.

So it was with great pleasure that Lee came to Talking Volumes this year, to talk about her new novel, “American Hagwon.”

During her time on stage at The O'Shaughnessy with host Kerri Miller, Lee talked about her years of researching hagwons — a type of cram school, common in Korea — and how they change education. In particular, she sees an intense global competitiveness in Korean students, which stands in sharp contrast to students in American falling further and further behind.

But Lee and Miller also talked about Lee’s path to becoming a well-known author and how Lee’s own childhood of being an exceptional student who struggled socially influences her work. For one thing: she’s learned to hold her own and fight back, if necessary.

“Asian American women are not considered strong,” she told Miller, “but they're wrong. I mean, if you really just like look at the data, it's like: are you kidding me? Do you know any Asian American women? But I think we're perceived to be weak, and they clearly don't know any history. This doesn’t happen in Asia. But here in the U.S., I've had I've had some people do some very stupid things, and I will do what I need to do.”

It was a dazzling evening, highlighted by musical guest Sophie Hiroko.

There are only two more Talking Volumes shows of the 2026 season: Emily St. John Mandel on Nov. 4, and Colson Whitehead with special guest host Catharine Richert on Nov. 11. Get your tickets online.

Marlon James new novel, “The Disappearers,” was published just 18 days ago, and already, this deeply personal novel about gay men in Jamaica has been declared “the novel of the decade, if not the century” by the New York Times. It has also been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize National Book Award.

James, a part-time Macalester College professor and full-time literary phenomenon, kicked off the 2026 season of Talking Volumes last week.

He joined Kerri Miller on the stage of the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine University in St. Paul on Sept. 12. James told Miller, many of the themes in the book — violence, survival, shame, perseverance, masculinity — are culled from his own life.

Minneapolis singer-songwriter Annie Mack rounded out this moving and intimate evening.

Tickets for the rest of the 2026 season of Talking Volumes are still on sale. Up next: Lucy Foley joins Miller on Sept. 25, to talk about her new novel, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel,” the brand-new Miss Marple mystery that brings Agatha Christie’s iconic sleuth to a glamorous, snowbound resort in the Swiss Alps.

In December of 2017, Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat was a mall in south Florida when a loud gunshot broke through the holiday shopping chatter. Believing that a mass shooting was underway, Danticat ran with her fellow shoppers in utter terror. Eventually, she learned the shooting was a hoax. But the trauma that experience provoked was very real.

She works some of that trauma out in her new novel, "Dèy." Taken from the Creole word for “mourning,” the story follows a young mother, Magnolia, who survives an actual mass shooting. But the story is more about what happens next. How do you carry on when your life is marked by a before and an after? How can trauma be contained when life, inextricably, goes on?

“Surviving isn’t the end of the story,” Danticat writes. “It’s where a different one begins.”

Danticat returns to Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk with Kerri Miller about why she wanted to weave joy into a book about grief and how trauma is processed best with those you love.

Guest:

• Edwidge Danticat is the author of many books, including “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “Claire of the Sea Light.” Her new novel is “Dèy.”

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If you remember the first time you left your family to go to summer camp, you probably remember how that time marked you. You leave as a child, but after spending a week or two away from home and all that’s familiar, you return changed.

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel, “A Tender Age,” follows a young boy, almost 11, as he begins the shift toward adolescence. A few tumultuous events make Jeon-Gi very aware of his new and growing personhood — and then he leaves for summer camp, where he experiments with different wants to be seen and to act in his suddenly widening world.

Told through the now-adult Jeon-Gi’s memories, the story asks questions who how we become who we are.

“We’re not just formed by the world,” Lee tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “There’s part of us that’s ready to be forming on its own. So the world doesn’t only form us, it reveals us. There’s an interplay between those things, that sometimes can go in a direction we didn’t expect.”

Guest:

• Chang-rae Lee is the author of many books, including “Native Speaker,” which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction. His new book is “A Tender Age.” When he’s not writing his own work, Lee teaches writing to students at Stanford University.

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