Novels
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Appel wrote a half-dozen genre novels, but all six went unpublished. He finally scored with Time After Time, published in 1985 by Carroll & Graf. The story follows New School history professor Alex Balfour as he is tossed back and forth between present-day New York City and the Russian Revolution of 1917. While seeking an explanation for his unusual situation, Alex attempts to save Czar Nicholas and his family. In the course of the novel, he encounters Ivan Pavlov, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Grigory Rasputin.
Along with favorable reviews, the novel received recognition from the American Library Association as one of the Best Young Adult Novels of the Year. The novel gained more readers in a Dell Laurel Edition with cover art by renowned illustrator Fred Marcellino, and it was reprinted again as a Dell mass-market paperback in 1990.
Time After Time is the first of what became known as the Alex Balfour series, although the author usually refers to it as the "Pastmaster" series. The appearance of real-life historical figures became an expected device in the series. Mark Twain and George Armstrong Custer are featured prominently in Twice Upon a Time (1988), an American Library Association nominee in the Best Young Adult Novels of the Year category. Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth and Franklin D. Roosevelt are characters in Till the End of Time (1990), another ALA nominee. In Time of War (2003) takes place during the American Civil War, and Ambrose Bierce is a major character. Sea of Time, set aboard the Titanic, was written in 1987 but never published.
Read more about this topic: Allen Appel
Famous quotes containing the word novels:
“Of all my novels this bright brute is the gayest.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that character’s—absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist’s dummy of the socialistic type.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“I have just opened Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning” for the first time, which I read with great delight. It is more like what Scott’s novels were than anything.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)