A Novel Written Together After Four Decades

Joanne Furio interviews Richard and Phyllis Kluger for Berkeleyside about their third jointly written novel, "The Swiss Account." The Berkeley couple have been married for sixty-nine years and have written together for more than forty. The new book comes out August 11 from Rare Bird Books. Richard Kluger is a well-known author. His "Simple Justice" is regarded as the definitive account of the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed racial segregation in American schools, and "Ashes to Ashes," his critical history of the cigarette industry and its cost in lives, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. Phyllis Kluger is a fiber artist and the author of two books on needlework design. "The Swiss Account" is a literary thriller about a woman who learns after her father's death that he left her a hidden fortune in a Zurich bank. At its center is a moral problem: she and her husband must decide whether to declare the money and lose much of it to decades of unpaid taxes, or say nothing and become part of the deception themselves. The novel, the Klugers say, is about the justifications people construct for themselves when sudden wealth arrives. The two met when Phyllis was sixteen, through Richard's Princeton roommate, still a close friend and one of the writers who blurbed this book. Richard says "The Swiss Account" is most likely their swan song as co-authors, though he has just finished a new novel of his own, "Next of Kin."

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