‘California’ dreaming: Author Edan Lepucki to visit Iowa City

Edan Lepucki has had a pretty wild summer.

Her first novel, 'California,” was released in July.

'I was really excited for my book to come out. I was going on a three city book tour and it made some best of summer reading lists. And then everything shifted,” she says.

That shift was thanks to Stephen Colbert, who on the advice of author Sherman Alexi, encouraged the Colbert Nation to pre-order 'California” in an effort to show bookselling giant Amazon.com that their dispute with Hachette - in which pre-orders of books were being purposefully delayed and denied - was not going to bring down first time authors.

Soon Lepucki was appearing on TV to tell millions of people about her new book. She said she feels extremely lucky and totally surprised by the whole thing. 'It's unfortunate it happened because of the dispute, but I am glad Colbert brought this issue to the public because most readers don't ever see that side of the publishing world.”

Thanks to the Colbert boost, 'California” made its debut at No. 3 on the New York Times best-seller list. Lepucki also was named 'Faces to Watch” by the Los Angeles Times and was selected for the Fall 2014 Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program.

Lepucki said it was like hitting the literary lottery.

While 'California” has been labeled post-apocalyptic fiction, Lepucki said she considers it to be more mid-apocalyptic.

The book follows the lives of Frida and Cal as they navigate a future world outside crumbling Los Angeles. They take shelter in a shack in the wilderness, enduring the hardship and isolation of a deteriorating world. Then Frida discovers she is pregnant. The couple seeks shelter in a settlement and learns lessons about security and trust.

'Readers tell me the future (in this book) feels very familiar, like it's not too far off,” she says. 'And it really isn't. The book is set just 40 years in the future.”

Lepucki said her goal was to portray 'exactly the kind of future I thought of right away,” which involved a series of things happening in our world such as a California earthquake, climate change, rising gas prices and growing gap between rich and poor.

'That all leads to the future of this book,” she says. 'Readers say it's scary to them, that is feels more realistic than most speculative fiction.”

Lepucki said she also strove to create very realistic characters.

'They act like regular people,” she says.

Frida, for example, is always longing for a latte in a world where that is always out of reach.

While discussions of the book focus on the societal changes of a crumbling world, the book is very much about the marriage of her two main characters.

'It's really about this couple and intimacy and the secrets we keep from each other.”

'All the street lights were out on this one section of road and it was eerie,” she says. 'I started to think about a city with no real services and what would lead to that and then the story idea started to burrow into my brain.”

Shortly after this experience, Lepucki was working on a writing exercise with her writing students - she is the founder and director of Writing Workshops Los Angeles - when she hit on further inspiration.

'We wrote about a character with an object that no one else knew they had and I started to write about Frida with a turkey baster,” Lepucki says. 'I knew she was from this story that had been marinating in my mind.”

The scene became the beginning of the novel, which she began writing in earnest in the fall of 2009.

'I always write in order,” she says. 'I do a lot of daydreaming before I put it down but then once I start I have to go from a to b to c.”

'California” was written over three years before being sold for publication to Little Brown and Company in 2012.

Lepucki's visit to Iowa City is the last in a 22 city tour. It also is a return to her alma mater. The visit, the Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate said, feels like a triumph.

'I was back in Iowa in the fall for a friend's wedding, which is funny because I always said that I didn't want to come back until I was doing a reading,” she jokes.

Lepucki is considering writing a companion novel set in the same time as 'California.” Currently, though, she is working on a contemporary novel.

'‘California' was an interesting departure for me actually,” she says.

Book reading

'What: Edan Lepucki will read from her debut novel, 'California”

'When: 7 p.m. Thursday

'Where: Prairie Lights Books, 15 S. Dubuque St., Iowa City

'Cost: Free