John Thorndike

Awards for A Hundred Fires in Cuba: \n\nKirkus Reviews: Best Indie Fiction of 2018 \nEric Hoffer Award, 2019 Winner in Historical Fiction\nIndependent Publisher Book Awards, 2019 Gold Medal Winner in Historical Fiction\nReader Views, 2018-19 Literary Awards Winner, Second Place in Historical Fiction\n\n\nI grew up in Connecticut, read a thousand novels as a child and always wanted to write one. My mother was an anesthesiologist, my father an editor and writer, and our house was filled with books. After four desperate years at a New England prep school I went to Harvard, wrote some fiction, studied night and day. Then a master's degree from Columbia, two years in the Peace Corps and a year of doctoral studies at NYU, brought to an end by marriage, parenthood and the delirious Sixties. In 1970 my wife and I moved to an isolated farm in Chile, where we lived for two years, raising chickens, growing potatoes and pursuing the complete back-to-the-land experience. When we divorced in 1974, I wound up with custody of our son and settled with him in Athens, Ohio.\n\nI farmed for ten years and did construction for ten years, building several houses and remodeling others.\n\nMy first two books were novels. Anna Delaney’s Child (Macmillan, 1986) is about a woman whose nine-year-old son dies in a car crash. The New York Times called the book \