“My favorite literary characters are endearing and flawed,” says novelist Lucky Ringwood, listing Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Sister Carrie as some of her top picks, while she considers Nurse Ratched “the most compelling villain ever created.” Why do they appeal to her? “That’s how people are,” she says. “You kind of like them, but you kind of hate them too.”

Ringwood’s characters in her debut novel, Desert Prophets, are all endearing and have plenty of imperfections. Kirkus Reviews agrees, noting that “many of the characters are flawed, and not all are likable; some are notably hateful or self-centered. Nevertheless, their shared journeys are consistently engaging.”

A historical epic spanning decades and the American continent, Desert Prophets opens in the late 1930s and tells the intertwined stories of people doing their best to get by, often in illegal or morally questionable ways but frequently with good intentions underlying their bad behavior. Lydia, one character, leaves California for Las Vegas after giving birth to a child she sells to her landlords, and as she travels across the desert, she assesses her situation:

On the long bus ride, Lydia thought about her birth name, what Father Brown said, and her future. Perhaps this was her trip to Damascus, she wondered. She mentally made some decisions about her future by assessing her strengths and problem areas. Her strengths were hard worker, physically strong, mentally alert, street smarts, good listener, and fast learner. The negatives were easily identified. First, she decided that alcohol was the cause of many problems including promiscuity, getting her teeth knocked out, and getting pregnant. Second, her manly clothes and newspaper boy hairstyle had to go. They served a purpose working in male-dominated jobs, but now she was starting a new life. Lydia vowed to dress and act like a woman and forgo heavy drinking. She also made a promise to herself to fall in love, get married, and have a normal life with a house and lots of kids. Maybe even pray and go to church at St. Joan of Arc. She never wanted to see another tuna in her life.

Ringwood, who writes under a pen name to keep her fiction separate from her day job as a gerontologist—“I used a pseudonym generator,” she says. “I needed a name that also had a domain available”—spent about 20 years working on Desert Prophets. The book started out as a screenplay, but “it just kept growing and growing,” Ringwood says. “It just morphed into a book.”

The characters evolved through the writing process, with the story’s initial protagonist moving into a minor role as other characters took center stage. Ringwood explains that she was able to bring both her gerontological expertise and her love of flawed people together as she developed one of the book’s major characters: “I have to admit, I have a hidden agenda. I want to demystify aging, and I want to interject some aging biases to reduce ageism,” she says, so she wrote the character of Granny Fay “so she would be a little repulsive but really courageous.” Ringwood adds, “She’s an older woman, and she is rather pathetic in that she is always going after younger men. But her subjective age, in her mind, is 28. She seems a little ridiculous, but at the same time, she’s a sexy older woman. Why can’t an older woman be sexy?”

Ringwood’s writing also reflects her love of travel and the more than two dozen different places around the world where she has lived. “That’s been such a great influence, because I’ve been exposed to so many diverse cultures,” she says. “I bring that to my readers.” She particularly loved Germany, where she has lived two different times, because of its easy access to other parts of Europe, but her favorite city overall is Paris, which makes an appearance in Desert Prophets. “I hope that my readers will want to go there after reading the book,” she says. 

Ringwood continues to write, and she recently published Guardians of the White Oaks, a genre departure. Unlike the historical drama of Desert Prophets, Guardians is an urban fantasy partly inspired by Ringwood’s fascination with the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Ringwood discovered her in a music appreciation class. “Here is this most amazing woman, and I didn’t know anything about her. I came to really appreciate her as a role model.”

Her current project is a fictionalized memoir called The Pepper Mill. “I started writing the book as a memoir, and I became bored,” she explains, leading her to embrace fiction as a way to build a coherent and engaging narrative. “I had kind of an unusual upbringing,” Ringwood says, and the book, which covers her “formative years,” introduces readers to a wide and varied cast of characters based on her extensive collection of relatives.

Although her writing spans time periods, themes, and genres, Ringwood sees her characters as the uniting factor across all her works, and she hopes that readers of Desert Prophets will connect with the complex individuals she has written. “I hope that they appreciate the characters, their good and bad traits, and that they have empathy for them,” she says. She also hopes they forgive her for authorial cruelty. “I have been notified by my readers that there is one character that, when he died, they cried,” she says, “so I think I have achieved my goal.” No spoilers here, though, because Ringwood doesn’t want to ruin the surprise for those who haven’t yet picked up the book. “It is a shock,” she admits.

Sarah Rettger is a writer and bookseller in Massachusetts.