John Thorndike grew up in New England, graduated from Harvard, took an MA from Columbia, then lit out for Latin America. He spent two years in the Peace Corps in El Salvador, then married Clarisa Rubio and moved to a backcountry farm in Chile, living beyond the reach of cars, telephones and electricity. After several years in Chile and Central America, he returned to the U.S. with his son and settled in Athens, Ohio. For ten years his day job was farming. Then it was construction. His first novel was Anna Delaney’s Child, and his second The Potato Baron. His third book was a memoir, Another Way Home, about raising his son after his wife was overtaken by schizophrenia. A second memoir followed: The Last of His Mind, about his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. A Hundred Fires in Cuba is his latest novel, and he’s at work on the next one, a half-fictional evocation of his mother’s life.