Contributed by Joseph A. Boone, PhD, author of Furnace Creek and Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California.

Great Expectations crossed with the American South of the 1960s? Pip as a proto-queer youth, caught pleasuring himself on a Civil War relic by a black woman recently escaped from the local penitentiary?

How I came to conceive the novel Furnace Creek, debuting this month from Black Springs Press Group, is a story in itself that I’d like to share with you.

I was born in a small town in western Virginia where, not coincidentally, as a small boy (much younger than my onanastically-minded protagonist Newt, I must say!) I would explore with my friends a creek running through the woods where an old Civil War era “furnace” or bullet-refining kiln loomed. Out of that memory the conception for this novel found its roots. Unlike my Pip character, Newt, however, I was in need of no great expectations to thrust me into a larger world; my parents provided the books that fed my imagination as I came of age in North Carolina and led me to becoming an English major at Duke University, where I studied creative writing with Reynolds Price and Helen Bevington. Earning my PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I was lucky enough to land my first job at Harvard University, which forms the backdrop for the second stage of Newt’s realization of his mysterious expectations, once he graduates from a mythic “Phipps” Academy culled from many friends’ stories of their years at Phillips Andover.

It was only years later, teaching Great Expectations to one of my English classes at University of Southern California while reading Howards End in tandem with Zadie Smith’s marvelous invocation of Forster ‘s novel in On Beauty, that I had my “eureka moment”: namely, that the Furnace Creek of my childhood might provide the perfect equivalent for the graveyard where Pip has his traumatic encounter with Magwitch in a contemporary retelling of Dickens’s tale. With this realization, the rest of the novel took off, and, while wildly swerving away from Dickens to become its own beast, it never ceased to intrigue me until I reached an ending which I hope is worthy of Dickens’s two attempts to bring his haunting tale of coming of age to a close.

The novel will be available for purchase 28 February in the UK and 25 March in the US. For further information on the novel, including its advance reviews, please check out the Black Springs Press Group webpage.

The Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London will be celebrating the novel’s debut on 24 February at 12.30-2pm in the IAS Forum, Ground Floor, Wilkins Building on the UCL campus. Event details can be found here.