Press Information

Miller Pond Announces New Shaw Novel

Saranac Lake, July 5, 2024: Today Miller Pond Editions announced it would publish  The Manager, a new novel by Christopher Shaw, in December, 2024.

In Lake Placid, February 1982, backwoods editor Walter Loving, of Peak Experience magazine, picks up a mysterious hitchhiker in the snow. It turns out to be a high level KGB agent traveling with Soviet teams visiting town two years after their shocking loss to the U.S. in the "Miracle On Ice" Olympic Silver Medal game. Curious, Walter hires a reporter to investigate why the agent was hitchhiking, meets the stunning Akhmatova quoting Soviet figure skater, Olga Kurylenka, and begins a series of bad decisions that alters and jeopardizes the lives of numerous people, and international diplomacy.

The Manager is very much grounded in an Adirondacks drawn from life in the early 1980s. At times satirical, funny, irreverent, earthy it offers a counter narrative to received myths of Adirondack identity, history, culture. In moving the story to Canada and Europe and back to Lake Placid again, it waves toward the conventions of spy and noir fiction without really satisfying them. And it all rests on an underlying exploration of the varieties of commitment, and of love.

According to Miller Pond Editions publisher Katie Wilson: "The Manager breaks new ground in Adirondack fiction, showing how our insular regional upheavals have ramifications abroad and across history. It includes environmental activists, gay characters, Soviet characters, and sweeps forward in time to the peaceful and successful Native American protests against the KXL Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota in 2015."

This will be Shaw's third book and second novel since 2020's The Power Line, called by the Lake George Mirror, "the best Adirondacks book," and by journalist Jeff Sharlet "one of the books that gave him the most pleasure" that year. Shaw's memoir, The Crazy Wisdom followed in 2021, which Kirkus deemed "a wonderfully written and inspiring exploration of a beautiful friendship." All of which makes Shaw's new novel, The Manager, according to publisher Wilson, "a major event in Adirondack publishing."

cshaw.net

cshaw@middlebury.edu

(802) 349-9303