"The Journal to Eliza" is a fictionalized account of Laurence Sterne's relationship with Eliza Draper, based on letters Sterne wrote to her. Laurence Sterne, a vicar of Coxwold, and celebrity author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy met, at a London gathering, Eliza Draper, who was visiting England from her home in India. Eliza was 23 and had married – at the age of 14 – Daniel Draper, an East India Company employee, a man 30 years her senior. The house where Sterne and Eliza met was in Gerrard Street, Soho, and was owned by William James, ex-Commander-in-chief of the East India Company. The house had become a meeting place for East India employees. Sterne was 54, and a married vicar. When Eliza had to sail back to India three months later, Sterne wrote to her every day. The letters were developed into The Journal to Eliza, a fictionalized chronicle of their relationship, which shows a different side of Sterne from the witty high-spirited author of Tristram Shandy. The Brahmin caste is the priestly class of India. Given the Brahmin Hindu priestly caste is renowned for austerity and wisdom, Sterne thereby draws attention to his real-life role as a priest.

Finalist for the 2018 Minnesota Book Award A graphic designer’s search for inspiration leads to a cache of letters and the mystery of one man’s fate during World War II. Seeking inspiration for a new font design in an antique store in small-town Stillwater, Minnesota, graphic designer Carolyn Porter stumbled across a bundle of letters and was immediately drawn to their beautifully expressive pen-and-ink handwriting. She could not read the letters—they were in French—but she noticed all of them had been signed by a man named Marcel and mailed from Berlin to his family in France during the middle of World War II. As Carolyn grappled with designing the font, she decided to have one of Marcel’s letters translated. Reading it opened a portal to a different time, and what began as mere curiosity quickly became an obsession with finding out why the letter writer, Marcel Heuzé, had been in Berlin, how his letters came to be on sale in a store halfway around the world, and, most importantly, whether he ever returned to his beloved wife and daughters after the war. Marcel’s Letters is the incredible story of Carolyn’s increasingly desperate search to uncover the mystery of one man’s fate during WWII, seeking answers across Germany, France, and the United States. Simultaneously, she continues to work on what would become the acclaimed P22 Marcel font, immortalizing the man and his letters that waited almost seventy years to be reunited with his family.