“I leapt on her lap and said: ‘Miss Angelou, why does the caged bird sing?’ My parents were probably so embarrassed.”īond’s father wandered the house reciting Shakespeare and she peeked into books like The Valley of the Dolls and Lolita, but it was Bond’s mother who fed her the beginnings of Ruby.

“I was the most precocious child,” Bond groans. Her cousin was the late civil rights leader Julian Bond, Maya Angelou dropped by “to sing the blues, and eat rice and beans”. The picture she paints of Liberty – dirt poor, but rich in belief and sanctimony – is a believable one the horrors she portrays there even more so.īorn in Texas, Bond grew up surrounded by books and what she calls “black literati” with two academic parents, their home was a hub of cultural and political discourse. Even the ugliest characters talk with a sonorous charm: “You sound like you been batter-dipped and fried in wrongfulness,” says one. A melting pot of Creole culture, southern twang, voodoo and even some Jewish mythology, Ruby feels rich, even magical, at times. Ruby does not read like a debut there is a lyricism to Bond’s writing comparable to Gabriel García Márquez or perhaps Isabel Allende. Then in the UK, Bond landed a spot on the shortlist for the Baileys prize for women’s fiction. It was the first one she had chosen personally for her book club in a year and a half.” When it was announced that Ruby would be part of Oprah’s 2.0 book club, the novel landed on the New York Times bestseller list, and film and TV rights were optioned by Winfrey’s production company Harpo Films. “I just screamed! She told me she loved my book. “‘Hello, Cynthia, this is Oprah Winfrey’,” says Bond, in a spot-on Oprah impersonation. The book arrived quietly in US bookstores in 2014, with good reviews but muted sales – until a few months later, when Bond got the phone call that turned sales around. Soon after her reluctant return to Liberty, Texas – “Not only do her shit not stink, way she act, she ready to sell it by the ounce”, one character gripes – the town is gripped by schadenfreude when she descends into a raging madness, brought on by memories of her harrowing childhood. Ruby is the first volume, and follows a preternaturally beautiful woman who escapes a small-town life to the vapid glamour of upper-class New York. Fifteen years in the making, and originally 900 pages long, Bond divided it into a trilogy on her first agent’s advice. At 53, Cynthia Bond is not an average first-time author, but Ruby is not an average debut.

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