Stuart Blackburn's Blog: new novel

My new novel, 'Luck of the Draw', is out on 28th January 2025. It begins in in 1969 with the infamous Draft Lottery, which decided who would be sent to fight in Vietnam and who wouldn't. The novel is partly based on my own life.
The idea for the story did not come to me in a flash or from a single event. Instead, it had been brewing in my head for some years. On one level, a story of love between father and daughter, but even their relationship is shaped by the Vietnam war.
As an American living in the US during the 1960s and 1970s, the war in Vietnam was the single most important historical event in my life, and that of many, many others. But, unlike those many others, I got lucky. I was not sent to Vietnam and I did not flee to Canda, as thousands and thousands did.
My good fortune was to join the Peace Corps in 1970, which was considered ‘national service’ and became my escape from the draft lottery of December 1969, a televised event that decided the fate of so many who were sent to Vietnam, some to die.
I wanted to write a story about someone who, like me, had a promising future (accepted at Harvard Law School) but got unlucky in the draft lottery and drew a low number in the draft number, which meant being sent to fight in Vietnam. My character, again like me, underwent a humiliating and frightening physical exam at an army recruiting center. Then our paths diverge, and he is again unfortunate in his choices, the consequences of which are dramatised in the novel.
As for me, I was lucky in that the Vietnam war and the draft lottery resulted in me having a successful career and happy life. What happened was this. Instead of being sent to Southeast Asia in the army, I was sent to South India in the Peace Corps. Living there for two plus years, in a village surrounded by rice fields (very similar to Vietnam), I learned the local language, Tamil. That led to a PhD and many decades of university life, teaching, doing research and publishing books on local oral storytelling traditions. My years in India also led me to my wife, who I spotted on the Berkeley campus wearing a sari. I thought she must be from south India and found a way to approach her. It turned out she was from LA.
That is the supreme irony of the Vietnam war and the draft lottery of 1969. Without them, I would not have gone to India and learned a language, would not have enjoyed so many years doing fascinating research on oral traditions, not only in south India but also in tribal northeast India. All because of a terrible war that I was able to escape.
The irony of it all is that the Vietnam war shaped my life precisely because I did not participate in it.

My new novel (All the Way to the Sea) comes out in February 2023. It is the story of an English war-bride who follows her American husband and settles in rural Rhode Island. When a long-held secret is revealed, and her husband dies an unexplained death, her life takes a new direction. Based in part on true events, the story tries to capture both the frenzy of love affairs during the hectic days in the build up to D-Day in southern England and the difficulty of a young English woman adjusting to life in rural New England.

My latest novel, just published in the UK and to be released later in 2021 in India, is based on a true story of a political assassination in 1911. 'The Boy from Shenkottai' tries to capture the inner life of a boy turned murderer.