The Further Tales Of Father Tim

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Novelist Jan Karon feels comfortable with Father Tim as her new protagonist. “I just can’t imagine being like Agatha Christie,” she says. “Her main character in more than 40 stories was Hercule Poirot, and she said she didn’t even like him!”

 Jan Karon felt that she had wrung just about everything out of her wildly popular Mitford series. After nine books set in a fictional small town in the North Carolina mountains, she admitted, “I just didn’t have anything else to say about Mitford.” But that didn’t mean she was ready to stop writing; instead, she started another series.

She not only had a ready-made audience for her new project – more than 25 million copies of the Mitford novels have been sold – but she also had a ready-made protagonist, Father Timothy Kavanaugh. Giving “Father Tim” his own series was a natural for the author. “I already had a fully developed character,” she explains. “He’s comfortable to be with and at times he can be fun.”

More importantly, she genuinely likes Father Tim, as do her readers. “I just can’t imagine being like Agatha Christie,” Karon says. “Her main character in over 40 stories was Hercule Poirot, and she said she didn’t even like him!”

Read the entire article in the December 2010 issue

 

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