Joshua Ferris Writes a Work of Hope

This was always going to be about Joshua Ferris’s dad. “You catch me pretty fresh,” the author deadpans over Zoom. “I haven’t talked about it.” The “it” refers to his long-awaited new novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, which publishes in September. And to talk about it, he discovers over the course of this conversation, is indistinguishable from talking about his grief after the loss of his father, who died in 2014. It’s an experience that led Ferris down a long, winding road toward a book that he calls “a culmination of all of the other books that I’ve written.”

Quite a statement for the 46-year-old literary star. Ferris hadn’t hit 35 before, received a National Book Award nomination. His celebrated 2010 sophomore novel, , was followed by 2014’s , which was a Booker Prize finalist. Days after the latter was published, Ferris got to work on his next novel—sort of.