


There's no earthly reason to assume that "Northern Lights," named for the celestial display in the sky over Alaska, won't be Roberts's 116th New York Times best seller. (Avid readers will be reassured to know that "Northern Lights" comes stamped with the official Nora Roberts seal, guaranteeing it's brand new.) All this is enough to make Anthony Trollope, with a paltry 47 novels, and Joyce Carol Oates, still plugging away with over 50 works of fiction, seem like mere plodders. And then there are all the reprints, all the collections and anthologies. In 2004 alone, this one-woman romantic-suspense-novel mill will crank out half a dozen.

MORE than 150 novels by Nora Roberts have been published in the last 23 years.
