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My new book is about Lila Soto, who finds herself in a new city with a young daughter, a brand new baby and a husband who is taking his job much too seriously for her taste. She never expected to settle down in the first place, and since they moved to Philadelphia where Sam is the restaurant critic, her family life starts to feel more like a prison every day. Sam wants Lila to stay out of the spotlight so he can remain unknown to the restaurant community – in his defense he sees it as a chance he will have only once – but it means no work and few friends for Lila. That leads her down a path where she questions everything and works to figure out what it means to really be happy.

If you could invent anything, what would it be?

The first things that come to my mind are a machine that cures cancer or a saying that would make everyone in the world get along. But most people would want to invent those things, so I’ll choose something that will tell you a little more about me. I would invent a worry machine. It would be something that could take my worries away, and anyone’s worries, by absorbing them into the machine and then turning them into some sort of usable power.

Which books would we be surprised to find on your shelves?

I have all our favorite board and picture books from when my kids were tiny. More More More Said The Baby and Skippyjon Jones are among them. I still quote some of them when I talk to my now teenage kids (This is little guy…).

How do you like to spend a rainy day?

With my family, having lunch at our favorite
Vietnamese pho place in South Philadelphia and then seeing a movie at The Riverview movie theater, also in South Philadelphia. The last rainy day we saw Creed – it was so good!

Where's your favorite place to eat?

That is an impossible question to answer, since I have so many favorite places to eat. At the way top, if it is on our own dime and not a work meal for my husband, I would say Villa di Roma in the Italian Market. I can’t find better meatballs (except the ones my friend Dawn makes!).

What's something you're truly terrible at doing?

Singing. I am a terrible singer. The rest of my family is very musical and they can all sing quite well. It’s too bad for all of us because, despite my lack of ability, I still love to sing. The other day we went to the Comcast Center to see their holiday spectacular. This year they added a short singalong at the end. I can’t resist that kind of thing. My kids pretended they didn’t know me.

What's your favorite quote or scene from The Restaurant Critic's Wife?

There is a moment in the book when Lila, who used to be an executive at a big hotel and resort chain, enters a hotel in Philadelphia. She misses her old life and craves how working used to make her feel, and being back in a hotel reminds her of all that. When she walks in to the lobby she stops and takes in the hotel smell the way someone else might breathe in the sea air. For some reason I just love that moment.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

Yes. When my husband and I first started journalism school we went to an orientation. We didn’t know each other yet, but we both happened to hear an alumna give a speech, and it stuck with both us. We quote what she said regularly, and have unofficially adopted it as our rules to live by. Keep in mind we are both writers. They are: good quotes up top, show don’t tell, and go to the bathroom when you can!

Elizabeth LaBan is the author of the new book The Restaurant Critic's Wife.

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In Fallen Land, two teenaged orphans flee a band of Confederate marauders down out of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the fall of 1864 and across Georgia in the wake of Sherman’s March to the Sea, traveling on the back of a miraculous stolen horse. The story was originally inspired by an old frontier ballad, “When First Unto This Country,” and the male character, Callum, is an Irish immigrant. The female character, Ava, is slightly older than him and pregnant, and the book is a tale of love and survival and the savagery of war. I really tried to infuse a musicality into the novel, to honor the old Irish and Appalachian ballads that helped inspire it.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?

Well, if resurrection is involved, I’d have to go with William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Lord Byron. Byron had a club foot, and I have two, so I’ve always felt a little kinship there. Now, putting Faulkner and Byron and a couple bottles of whiskey together at the same table could be dangerous, but I can’t imagine anyone would misbehave too badly before Miss Eudora, and she was likely smarter than the two of them put together.

What's rocking your world this month?

I’m currently reading Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children, and it’s just incredible. The man is a god. He was at writers’ week at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, here where I live, and he read with my friend Matthew Neill Null, whose novel Honey from the Lion was another recent world-rocker for me.

What's on your top 5 list for the best books you've ever read?

Well, there are the best books I’ve ever read, and my favorite books. I’d rather go with some of my favorites, if that’s okay. In no particular order:

• Where the Wild Things Are
• The Call of the Wild
• Absalom, Absalom!
• The Dog Stars
• The Hunters

What will your next adventure be?

Believe it or not, my friend Blaine Capone (Hoof & Claw) and I are planning to ride horseback from Atlanta to Savannah in the fall of 2016, roughly following the path of Sherman’s March across Georgia. Blaine, who’s a horsemanship instructor, taught me horses when I was writing Fallen Land, and we’ve long had the idea of planning our own endurance ride. The purchase of the novel gave us the extra momentum we needed, and we’re hoping to raise funds and awareness for an equine therapy program that works with wounded warriors.

What's your favorite quote from Fallen Land?

The season is very important to the book, and I think this little passage captures that:

“[Callum] looked through the slatted trees to the golden ridges beyond. Here and there a spurt of the brightest otherworldly red marked the hillside. The color explosive, lifting, like a hemorrhage from the earth. Callum looked hard for these sights, and they made him ache. He knew the falling land was telling him something, and the message yearned in his throat to be spoken. But he would not speak it. Could not. When Ava fell asleep on the back of the horse, he took her cool white hand in his own for a long moment. Her palm was calloused like a boy’s, her finger bones delicate. He placed her hand back in the pocket of his coat, where she kept it warm.”

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

Well, I was always small for my age growing up, so I took this one to heart:

“It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” –Bear Bryant

And this one is like an old friend:

“Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” –Calvin Coolidge

Taylor Brown is the author of the new book Fallen Land

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