(Readers who feel inconvenienced by cloth masks may feel differently after spending time with characters who wear gas masks in their homes.) She is unmoved by brochures promising milk and honey in the “Land of Opportunity.” She needs steady work and fresh air for her son, who is recovering from “dust pneumonia,” a then-common ailment on the Great Plains.

The protagonist of “The Four Winds” is Elsa Martinelli, a single mother of two who, in 1935, leaves a parched family farm in Lonesome Tree, Texas, for California. “The Dust Bowl was the greatest ecological disaster in American history and that, combined with the partisan divide of the Great Depression, really spoke to me.” “I wanted to tell a quintessentially American story,” Hannah said. Martin’s Press, is planning an initial printing of 1 million copies. We’ve been in dire straits before we will be again. Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. Her 24th book, “The Four Winds,” which comes out on Tuesday, seems eerily prescient in 2021, with its Depression-era tale of blighted land, xenophobia, fear of contagion - and determination to join forces and rebuild. “It helps to be disciplined, but I also believe creativity follows discipline.” “I can write in my backyard, by the fire, on the beach, on an airplane,” Hannah said. most days, writing drafts in longhand on yellow legal pads. Gone are the days when she had to squeeze in bursts of writing around naps and school hours. Hannah, 60, lives with her husband her son is now grown. There, before her mother died, Hannah, then 24, had a chance to whisper, “I started.” In 1985, the day she wrote the first nine pages - her inaugural foray into fiction - she received a call from her father, telling her she needed to get to the hospital. The two decided to write a romance novel set in 18th-century Scotland. One afternoon, my mother said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re going to be a writer.’”

Every day I would visit her and complain about my classes. “Until I was in my third year of law school and my mother was dying of breast cancer. “I just wasn’t that person,” she said in a video interview from her home outside Seattle. It was a career for dreamers, she thought, kids who took creative writing classes and scribbled stories from the time they were 6. Growing up in California and the Pacific Northwest, Kristin Hannah never wanted to become a novelist.

Kristin hannah the four winds