Brooks Tigner is a career journalist and editor born in Texas but based in Brussels where he has reported on the EU and NATO for the past 30 years.

His writing got a truly early start when, at age nine, he and neighborhood kids produced a (somewhat) weekly newspaper for several summers, flogging it to parents and whatever luckless stranger would pay a nickel for it. It was better than selling lemonade on a blazing hot sidewalk.

Though Pick-up Sticks is his first novel, its deadly serious themes gestated for many years in his imagination, awaiting a convergence of America’s woes – economic, racial and sexual (#MeToo, #HeToo) – for readers to more readily ingest this retroactive story set in America's Great Society era.

That convergence is now upon us.

By contrast, his next book will be a social comedy set set among czar-nostalgic White Russians in 1980s New York.

Readers can send comments, reviews or feedback to outreach@brookstigner.com or -- to get a free sample chapter from Pick-up Sticks -- visit the author's website at www.brookstigner.com