Chris Bohjalian

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chris Bohjalian is an American novelist.

A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College (where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society), he was living in Brooklyn, New York when, in 1986, he and his wife were taken on a bizarre 45-minute cab ride during which the driver ignored all red lights and stop signs before abandoning them in the midst of a police raid on a crack house. The terrifying experience was unnerving enough to convince the couple to move to Vermont, where Bohjalian began chronicling his life in a small New England town in a weekly newspaper column entitled Idyll Banter.

His first novel, A Killing in the Real World, was published in 1988. It wasn't until 1997, however, when Oprah Winfrey selected Midwives - a Publisher's Weekly "Best Book" - for her popular book club, that he reached a wide audience. Her focus on the book, which centers on a small town midwife who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after performing a Caesarean section on a patient, propelled it to Number One on the New York Times bestseller list. It later was filmed by the Lifetime Movie Network with Sissy Spacek in the lead role.

Bohjalian's novels tend to center on ordinary people who find themselves trapped in extraordinarily difficult situations due to unforeseen circumstances often triggered by other parties. His latest, The Double Bind, will be released by Random House in February 2007.

Bohajalian continues to write a weekly column for the Burlington Free Press. He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Vermont, where he teaches Sunday school in the local church.