First Time Novelist Spends Over a Year on NYT Bestseller List

Newswise — As of July 1, 2007, The Memory Keeper's Daughter by University of Kentucky writing instructor Kim Edwards had spent 52 weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list.

Published by Penguin in May 2006, the book has held steady in the top 10 of the list for a year. The July 1 New York Times list shows Edwards in 7th place, just ahead of books by bestselling authors Dean Koontz and Clive Cussler. The Memory Keeper's Daughter has been on the paperback bestseller list longer than any book in the top ten except for Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner.

Edwards's book was previously released in hardcover, but achieved greater acclaim in the paperback edition. She is also the author of a published collection of short stories, The Secrets of a Fire King, re-released in 2007 by Penguin.

Set partly in Lexington, Ky., the home of the University of Kentucky, The Memory Keeper's Daughter includes scenes familiar to Lexingtonians. A section of the book is set against the backdrop of Lexington during the Vietnam conflict, including the burning of the armory on the University of Kentucky campus. The book revolves around the decision of a doctor, upon delivering his own fraternal twin children, to tell his wife that the daughter (who shows sings of Down Syndrome) is dead. He asks his nurse to institutionalize the child, but she escapes with the baby and raises her as her own. A full plot summary can be found at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/memory_keeper.html.