Christine Mangan is a relatively new author of historical psychological thrillers. Tangerine by Christine Mangan is her debut novel, and a very successful one at that. The book is published by Harper Collins, and it took the world by storm since March 2018 when it was first released in a hardcover edition.
In fact, the book came right away so popular that it was optioned for film by George Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures, with none other than Scarlett Johansson to play the leading role.
Here are the Christine Mangan books in order for her historical standalone novels.
New Christine Mangan Books
The Continental Affair, 2023
Standalone Novels in Publication Order
- Tangerine, 2018
- Palace of the Drowned, 2021
- The Continental Affair, 2023
Christine Mangan Biography
The American debut author Christine Mangan was born in Detroit, Michigan, she led a nomadic life for quite a long time. She lived on Long Island and in North Carolina, following which he attended Bennington College for a year.
Next, she moved back to the Midwest to Chicago where she attended the Columbia College Chicago to graduate with her Batchelor’s degree. She continued living in Chicago while she got her MFA in fiction writing from the University of Southern Maine. She also worked as a Gazette Chicago reporter from 2005 to 2007.
After that, she moved to Dublin in Ireland to get her PhD in English from the University College Dublin with a thesis focusing on 18th-century Gothic literature.
During her stay in Europe, she traveled to several countries. One of her long-time dreams was to go to Morocco, which she did during those years. She first went to Marrakech, and then she took a train to Tangier. While she didn’t stay long there, after a few years, in 2015, she returned to Tangier once again.
This is the very place that sparked the creation of the book with the same name, which would become Christine Mangan’s debut novel.
When Christine Mangan sent her manuscript to publishers, she had just started working in Dubai as a teacher at a university. In the next four months, the original manuscript, which was told from three points of view (Alice, Lucy, and a policeman), transformed its final draft to be merely told from Alice and Lucy’s POV.
The book sparked the start of a bid war in the US with 20 publishers fighting for it. The book went to auction, which Harper Collins won.
In an interview, the author herself admits that gothic literature was on her mind when she created Tangerine. She only submitted the manuscript for Tangerine a few months after she got her Ph.D., and her focus on the Gothic genre was still there.
While Gothic has huge and dark haunted castles, the author replaced those with Tangier’s streets and buildings.
Of course, the fact that Christine Mangan loves reading Gothic crime fiction and psychological thrillers also seeped into her debut novel.
The book has strong Gothic influences and you can feel them while reading the story.
In the US, Tangerine, Christine Mangan’s debut novel, is published by Harper Collins, and in the UK by Little, Brown.
Tangerine features two female friends, Alice Shipley and Lucy Mason, who are both ex-college roommates from Bennington (the same college the author also attended). They have a strong and complicated common past, so when they are reunited, everything comes back up to the surface.
Alice has been recently married and soon after the couple move to Tangier. In is in the late 1950s, specifically 1956, and this is a place that she doesn’t like at all, so she is very unhappy in the city.
She is, however, wary of telling her problems to her husband. She feels alone and isolated. She is a shy English girl, and it takes her meeting Lucy again to learn to stand on her two feet.
Lucy is pretty much everything Alice is not but wants to be: outgoing, confident, and self-assured.
Yet, their friendship turns out to be highly dysfunctional, even claustrophobic.
Currently, the book has been selected for the American Booksellers Association “Indies Introduce.”
By now, Christine Mangan left her Dubaj job and returned to the US, this time going last October to Brooklyn to the Winter Institute.
Besides the US and UK, the book’s rights have been sold to 18 additional countries, including Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Sweden, Israel, Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Serbia, Simplified Chinese, Complex Chinese, Korea, and Japan.
Currently, the author Christine Mangan is living in Brooklyn where she is working on her next book. Currently there are three Christine Mangan books published, however, the author is working on her second novel.
Praise for Christine Mangan
Tangerine is one of the best debut novels I’ve read in a long time (Erika VanDam)
A dark tale of twisted love in a foreign land. (Lulu Garcia-Navarro)
Morocco in the 1950s is a captivating setting for this uneven but admirably sinister novel (The Irish Times)
In This Debut Novel, ‘Tangerine’ is No Fruit (Publishers Weekly)
As if Donna Tartt, Gillian Flynn and Patricia Highsmith had collaborated in a screenplay to be filmed by Hitchcock – suspenseful and atmospheric (Joyce Carol Oates)
The perfect read for fans of Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith, set in 1950s Morocco, Tangerine is a gripping psychological literary thriller. (Little, Brown)
“Tangerine” is over the top, but it is also endearing and even impressive in the force of its determination to conjure a life more exciting than most lives are. (The NewYorker)
A dark tale of twisted love. (NPR)
The lying, the cunning, and the duplicity is so very mannered that it’s chilling. Rich in dread, the foreboding positively drips from every page. (Washington Post)
A searing, propulsive story about female friendship gone awry. (Bustle)
References
Books Reading Order » Crime Mystery Authors »
I’m a librarian from Romania doing a Calendar of authors’ birthdays and I couln’t find any information about the date of birth of Christine Mangan. I need just that. Can anyone help me?
Could not put “Tangerine” down and look forward to Christine Mangan’s next book! While I saw a flawed character in Lucy much like Patricia Highsmith’s “Mr. Ripley” this new author has captured my mind, Ms. Mangan is uniquely talented!