Novelist Julie Orringer and her husband were looking for a dog several years ago, when they came across a listing for a forlorn-looking, injured pit bull mix at a local shelter. “I felt terrible for her and couldn’t understand why someone had posted that tortured photo instead of waiting until the dog had been cleaned up and treated by a vet,” Orringer explains. “But apparently the shelter knew what it was doing: Two days later, the dog was adopted.” That indelible animal was the genesis for Luna, Phoenix, Queen (Knopf, Oct. 13),  about a group of characters linked by love, art, illness, and a mysterious pet; our starred review lauds it as “heart-stoppingly good.” Orringer is the author of three previous books; she answered our questions by email.

So the dog in the novel was inspired by this real dog?

I couldn’t stop thinking about her and how she’d arrived at that abject state, and about the person or people who had seen her on the site and come to her aid. That was the beginning of the novel, or at least of what is now the novel’s first section: What kind of person might see a dog like that and be drawn to her? Might a person see in her a fellow injured creature? The dog in my novel is certainly a character in her own right; she started out a mystery, but acquired a will, a personality, a history, desires, relationships: all the things that drive characters in fiction and that animate us in our own lives.

What inspired you during the writing of the book? What were you reading, listening to, watching?

I started the novel just before the pandemic, when work was near impossible amid teaching responsibilities and care of my kids. During late-night hours of dishwashing and meal prep, I listened to the audiobook of George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: a master class in fiction writing in the form of a careful examination of writers’ choices in seven great Russian short stories. Maybe it was coincidence, but one of the characters in my novel became a scholar of Russian literature. Graham Greene’s long story “Under the Garden,” from his collection A Sense of Reality, was also of help—he blurs the line, deftly and inarguably, between subjective experience and the fantastical. Susie Boyt’s exquisite Loved and Missed was in itself a master class on loss and emotional honesty. Claire Keegan’s novellas showed me how a book might accrue power in a brief span of pages, as did the brilliant short novels of Steven Dunn, Water and Power and Potted Meat.

What was most challenging about writing it? And most rewarding?

Most challenging was the novel’s multipart and multivoiced form. I’d always wanted to write a book that had multiple narrators; I loved, for example, Frederick Reiken’s masterful Day for Night, in which a string of narrators sequentially weave the complicated fabric of the novel. But the approach I’d taken in my previous two novels was just the opposite: a long, sustained narrative with a single point of view. It was a thrill to take on a chorus of voices—or, rather, a sextet, each singing solo in sequence. In the end, that was most rewarding too.

What fall release(s) are you most eager to get your hands on?

I’m especially excited to read Yiyun Li’s novel Music Against the Night, about pianist and composer John Field, whose nocturnes influenced Chopin, Samuel Barber, and countless later musicians; and Adelaide Percheron, also a brilliant pianist and composer, whose relationship with Field was full of inspiration and complication.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.