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The Last Grand Tour‘s entrance into the world came on January 28, and its first two weeks have been far more successful than I or my publisher hoped.

On launch day, I returned to Portland State University for the first time since retiring (in 2017) from 17 years of teaching in the creative writing program there. The reason for my return was a panel discussion with my publisher (Mike Schepps), editor (Molly Simas), and book designer (Olivia Croom Hammerman) titled “From Manuscript to Marketplace: The Last Grand Tour’s Collaborative Journey.” We had a lovely turnout, with current and former students, faculty, and community members.

That evening, I appeared at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland with documentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom interviewing me. The place was packed, with friends from many parts of my life attending, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years. A Powell’s representative told me there were 80 people there, and they sold so many books, my publisher had to run out for more.

That same day, Portland author Suzy Vitello released an interview with me about The Last Grand Tour on her Substack, “Let’s Talk About Writing.” You can read it here.

Two days later, on January 30, I was back in the Seattle area at the Edmonds Bookshop, where 50 people showed up to hear my good friend and fellow European guide Gene Openshaw interview me.

Then, this past Thursday, Sylvia and I traveled up to snowy Bellingham, where the turnout was smaller but still filled the event space. Gene Openshaw was my partner on stage again and the conversation range even more widely, thanks to some great audience questions. We talked about everything from post-Wall European freedom to Romanticism to my development as a writer and how a fiction writer creates an imagined world.

The next event on the Last Grand Tour tour will be the book’s Seattle launch at Third Place Books in Ravenna at 7 p.m. this coming Tuesday, November 11. Click on the image below for more details.

Michael N. McGregor Talks about His New Novel

The other day, Suzy Vitello, author of the marvelous Northwest-set novel Bitterroot, interviewed me about my new novel, The Last Grand Tour, for her popular Substack newsletter, Let’s Talk About Writing.

Among the questions and answers was the following exchange:

SV: You chose to filter this story through one character: Joe. How did you navigate and pace the sprinkling of secrets that Joe (and the reader) would uncover by novel’s end?

MNM: I started by mimicking a tour guide’s experiences. When a group shows up, you know nothing about them. Over two or three weeks, however, as you spend days and nights with them, you learn more and more. You hear their stories, observe their actions, listen to their words. Along the way, you try to assemble a picture of them from pieces that emerge in somewhat random order.

A novel can’t be entirely random, though. So I took advantage of the fact that people tend to reveal themselves most at tense moments, especially when traveling. While some of those moments are shared, most are highly personal. Rudy, for example, reacts to being in the city where Hitler gained power. Felicity opens up when she visits a city she always wanted to sing in. And Tonia talks about her past when she returns to a place she went with her husband.

Because Joe is present for each of these revelations but doesn’t have the context necessary to understand them fully, he tries to make sense of them by putting them together with what he already knows. His limited knowledge forces the reader to assemble the bigger story too, deciding along the way whether Joe’s version of things is correct or not. This allows for dramatic reversals. Again and again in the book Joe begins to believe something is true, only to learn or observe something else that makes him see things differently.

The revelations and reversals cause us, as readers, to pay closer attention, challenging our own suppositions of what is true. As our views shift of the various characters, including Joe himself, we find ourselves working down through the onion layers, hoping to reach the core before the tour reaches Venice.

You can read the full interview here.