Publisher, Recorded Books (October 20, 2009)

NOTE: Retail Editions from Recorded Books are attractive, compact cardboard boxes shrink-wrapped, with full-color art.

Diana Gabaldon’s brilliant storytelling has captivated millions of readers in her bestselling and award-winning Outlander saga. Now, in An Echo in the Bone, the enormously anticipated seventh volume, Gabaldon continues the extraordinary story of the eighteenth-century Scotsman Jamie Fraser and his twentieth-century time-traveling wife, Claire Randall.

Jamie Fraser, former Jacobite and reluctant rebel, is already certain of three things about the American rebellion: The Americans will win, fighting on the side of victory is no guarantee of survival, and he’d rather die than have to face his illegitimate son–a young lieutenant in the British army–across the barrel of a gun.

Claire Randall knows that the Americans will win, too, but not what the ultimate price may be. That price won’t include Jamie’s life or his happiness, though–not if she has anything to say about it.

Meanwhile, in the relative safety of the twentieth century, Jamie and Claire’s daughter, Brianna, and her husband, Roger MacKenzie, have resettled in a historic Scottish home where, across a chasm of two centuries, the unfolding drama of Brianna’s parents’ story comes to life through Claire’s letters. The fragile pages reveal Claire’s love for battle-scarred Jamie Fraser and their flight from North Carolina to the high seas, where they encounter privateers and ocean battles–as Brianna and Roger search for clues not only to Claire’s fate but to their own. Because the future of the MacKenzie family in the Highlands is mysteriously, irrevocably, and intimately entwined with life and death in war-torn colonial America.

With stunning cameos of historical characters from Benedict Arnold to Benjamin Franklin, An Echo in the Bone is a soaring masterpiece of imagination, insight, character, and adventure–a novel that echoes in the mind long after the last page is turned.

About the Author: As a rule, someone with a Masters degree in marine biology, a PhD in quantitative ecology, a university teaching position, and free-lance work for computer magazines and for publications like Disney comics isn’t looking for more to do.

Diana Gabaldon has not gotten to where she is in life by following the rules. A New York Times-bestselling author, she writes books that fit into existing categories about as neatly as she does.

Which is to say, not at all.

Outlander is part romance and part science fiction time-travel adventure, part fantasy and part sweeping historical epic. It was purchased by a publisher even before Gabaldon had finished the manuscript in her “spare time” between teaching, writing, and family duties. The novel introduced readers to Claire Randall, a woman with a husband in one century, and a lover in another.

“I merely wanted to write a novel to learn how,” Gabaldon explains of the series’ genesis. “So I said, ‘All right, what’s the easiest kind of novel you could write, since this is just for practice?’ And it seemed to me that the easiest sort of novel might be a historical novel.” With her strong background in educational research and an extensive college library at her disposal, Gabaldon found the historical period she would use in a way that once again defied expectations: through a very old re-run of the campy British science fiction series, Dr. Who. “This character [on the show] wore a kilt,” Gabaldon says. “And I thought that rather fetching.”

Though she has had to endure some muttering from second-guessers about everything from her first-person point of view to having a female protagonist older than her lover, Gabaldon’s success backs up her assertion that “‘the rules’ are whatever works.” She notes that “there is nothing stopping a book that uses the assorted conventions of one or more of the genres from being both original and of high literary merit.” She adds that popular classics such as Moby Dick and Gone with the Wind tend to occur “when the elements of good story-telling combine with originality and good writing.”

As unconventional as her career has been in so many ways, Gabaldon attributes much of her success to a very conventional “rule”: “I work like a dog. How the heck would anybody else do it?” She offers some rules of her own to aspiring novelists, which she’ll expound upon in detail in a nonfiction book of essays she’s compiling: “1) Read, 2) Write, 3) Don’t Stop!”

Her legions of readers and listeners are hoping Diana Gabaldon will never stop revisiting the characters and situations she has created in her Outlander series. And Recorded Books listeners have been particularly impressed with Davina Porter’s readings of the books. A reviewer in Kliatt commented, “I’ve previously read [Outlander], but Porter’s reading made the story more exciting and atmospheric. Her English narrative voice, her Scottish burr, and her English regional accents are phenomenal ... This is an outstanding matching of story and reader; long but accessible to any reader.”