Words: Shweta Maruvada

“A volcano exploded in Indonesia in 1816, sent an ash cloud up into the stratosphere, deflected the sunlight, changed weather patterns around the world, so that in Europe, its very cold, and very rainy. In the eastern United States, it’s cold, and very dry. And the question is what effects did that make?”

This question is answered in William P. Klingaman and Nicholas Klingaman’s newest book, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History. The ebook was published by St. Martin’s Press on February 26th, 2013, and can be found at Barnes and Nobles and Amazon.

W. Klingaman’s ninth book, the entire writing process took between two to three years. “The editor (Danielle) came up with the idea. She’s German and Germany suffered a lot on this. They called me and I agreed to do this with my son. It’s much easier that way”, said William Klingaman.

Nicholas Klingaman, who holds a PHD in climate science, researched the scientific portions of the book. According to W. Klingaman, “Anything scientific he did it. I said ‘Nick this is you’ and I rewrote it so I can understand it. I said to write the ‘and’ [on the cover] very small so our names could be the same size.”

W. Klingaman did research in college and also worked for the state department for a few years before writing on his own. “Its really hard to do free lance writing that way. And then I decided to teach high schoolers,” said Klingaman.

Some of W. Klingaman’s best sellers are 1929, which was sold to a German publisher, The First Century, sold to a British publisher, and Der Crash. He used to get an advance of 40 thousand dollars for his books, but the prices have decreased considerably. The advance for The Year Without Summer was 20 thousand dollars.