Spotlight and Giveaway: The Other Typist

**Giveaway is now closed**

In the New York City of 1923, two young women meet while working as typists for the police department, recording the confessions of thieves and murderers. At first glance, they couldn’t seem more different from one another. Rose Baker, raised in an orphanage by Catholic nuns, is plain, rule-bound, and prudish. Odalie Lazare, on the other hand – with her unflappable poise, musical laugh, and golden beauty capped by a stylish black bob – exudes all the glamour and excitement of the Jazz Age. Yet these two will be drawn inextricably together by mutual need into a dizzying vortex of obsession, deception, and murder in Suzanne Rindell’s stunning first novel, The Other Typist.

“They said the typewriter would unsex us” begins the tale, told in Rose’s spellbinding voice. Rose lives in a tumultuous time for women, torn between the staid verities of the Victorian era and the new opportunities, entertainments, and mores of the Roaring Twenties. Rose, who holds to old-fashioned notions of sisterhood and sexual restraint, knows firmly which side of the divide she stands on – until the day she meets Odalie, who has stepped unreservedly into the new age.

Rose is not quite sure why Odalie chooses her as a bosom friend, but she is dazzled by the world of speakeasies, cocktails, cigarettes, and easy interactions with men into which Odalie leads her. After official word comes down that their precinct on the Lower East Side has been tasked with a mission to close down the speakeasies, the highly observant Rose notices that Odalie’s reports begin to include small mistakes that eventually lead to bigger ones, and ultimately the exoneration of bootleggers Rose has come to know.

“I am there to transcribe what will eventually come to be known as the truth,” Ruth says. But as both she and the reader come to discover, truth can be a slippery concept, particularly when it comes to Odalie. As roommates in an elegant apartment on which Odalie pays the rent, the two women share the intimate stories of their pasts, although Odalie never tells the same one twice. Rose, intoxicated by her release from lifelong loneliness and her closeness to such an exotic and fascinating creature, repeatedly bites her tongue and stifles her doubts.

But when, at an elegant house party on Long Island, Rose and Odalie run into an earnest young college student who suggests that he has knowledge of Odalie’s involvement in a deadly crime, those doubts can no longer be contained. Steeling her resolve, Rose determines to confront Odalie with her contradictions, and demand that she stop her scheming and risky behavior. As Rose woefully finds out, however, Odalie’s most terrible power lies not in her own actions but in what she is capable of driving others – including Rose – to do.

Photo by Emily Kate Roemer

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Suzanne Rindell is a doctoral student in American modernist literature at Rice University. The Other Typist is her first novel. Born in New Mexico and raised in northern California, she lives in New York City and is currently working on a second novel. Visit her online at her website.




Thanks to Penguin, we have one copy of The Other Typist for a lucky US reader!

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US only. Giveaway ends April 8th at midnight EST.