ALIX CHRISTIE

“An exceptional novel. . . . Intimate and expansive, tender and violent, The Shining Mountains is both a gripping family saga and a profound requiem for the lives lost and displaced by American westward expansion. This is storytelling at its finest.”
– Zack Bean, author of Man on Fire
“An impressively original, truly epic, and memorable saga.”
– Midwest Book Review
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“Enthralling. . . . Christie demonstrates a printer’s precision . . . in her account of quattrocentro innovation, technology, politics, art and commerce.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In Christie’s stellar debut, we become observers to the birth of one of the greatest inventions of man—the printing press. . . . Masterful. . . . A highly recommended novel.”
– Historical Novel Society
“Christie masterfully depicts the time and energy required to print the first Bibles, a years-long process of trial and error, tinkering with ink and type, lines and paper, guilder after guilder spent without return, all against a catastrophic backdrop of plague, the fall of Constantinople, the violent superstitions of the peasantry, and a vested intelligentsia. . . . A bravura debut.
– Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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Alix Christie grew up in California, Montana and British Columbia. She is a prize-winning journalist and author of novels, reportage and short stories. Her debut novel, “Gutenberg’s Apprentice,” the story of the making of the Gutenberg Bible, was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Prize. Her story “Everychild” won a Pushcart Prize and the 2021 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in fiction from The Missouri Review. In 2024, the opening chapters of a new novel, “Rubble Women,” won the Gold Medal in the 20th century history category from the Historical Novel Society. As a longtime European foreign correspondent, she has written many articles and stories set in other places and times, including “The Dacha,” a finalist for the 2016 Sunday Times (UK) Short Story Award. She currently divides her time between Berlin and San Francisco, writing fiction and reviews and swimming in any available lake or ocean.