I’m delighted to announce that my debut novel, The Rites of Man, will be published on Dec. 3 by Ten16 Press and is now available for pre-order in the United States.

The Rites of Man, set in 1996, tells the story of a creative woman, Sherry McManus, whose entanglement with an author upends both their lives and sparks a national conversation about artistic legitimacy and the rights of women. An important detail: The name of the author is Tom Paine, who built his National Book Award-winning career by writing contemporary novels under the titles of his revolutionary namesake, Thomas Paine: Common Sense, The American Crisis. And there the trouble begins…

I’ll be presenting The Rites of Man in Paris on Jan. 13; in Washington, D.C., on March 7; in Milwaukee on March 12; and at Pegasus Books in Berkeley on March 19.

Click here for a sneak peak inside the novel, and here to pre-order.

Happy reading!

Previously by Meg Bortin …

Meet Mona Venture — my alter ego, who leaves America in the Vietnam era, moves to Paris, becomes a reporter, and goes on to Fleet Street and Gorbachev’s Russia. She’s the heroine of my independently published memoir, Desperate to Be a Housewife.

Mona’s misadventures with men unfold against a backdrop of historic events. She’s young, she’s modern and she’s desperate to solve a problem: how to reconcile her life as an independent woman with her dreams of happily-ever-after.

Before writing Desperate, I was a journalist for many years with postings in Paris, London, Moscow and Manila. To check out some of the articles I’ve written, click here.

My first literary work was Dear Djeneba, an essay in an anthology on adoption published by Granta in 2005 and Random House in 2006. As a blogger, I write regularly on French cuisine as The Everyday French Chef.