MacKenzie Scott is releasing her third novel, “Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds),” for free on Substack throughout August, marking her return to fiction after a 13-year gap and a departure from traditional publishing, per vanityfair.com.
The philanthropist and author announced the project on August 8, publishing the book’s title page, table of contents, character list and epigraphs, though she has revealed little about the storyline. The novel, expected to run to roughly 80,000 words, is being released serially: the prologue followed on Sunday and the first chapter, titled “Monday,” on Monday.
The book follows Traps, a neo-noir novel published by Knopf in 2013 that traced the intersecting lives of four women near Las Vegas. Scott’s debut, The Testing of Luther Albright (2005), centred on a civil engineer whose controlled life unravels amid family and professional strain. It won the American Book Award in 2006 and was named to the Los Angeles Times’ best books of the year.
Scott studied creative writing at Princeton University, where she was mentored by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who supervised her senior thesis, “The Fathering Water.” Morrison later described Scott as one of the best students in her creative-writing classes. Scott has said the debut novel took around a decade to complete, a period during which she was also helping build Amazon alongside then-husband Jeff Bezos and raising their family.
Scott, once the world’s 22nd-richest person, has given away $26 billion over the past seven years. Her decision to self-publish the new novel free of charge, bypassing traditional publishers and retail platforms such as Amazon, echoes the direct-giving approach that has defined her philanthropic work.
•Featured image: Getty Images; Illustrator Khoa Tran