Join us for a special lunch with Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink. Ann Patchett calls the collection of essays “Relentlessly funny, self-effacing and charming.” Your $44 ticket includes lunch from Altra Strada Restaurant and a copy of I Miss You When I Blink. Buy tickets in-store or by phone at 781-431-1160, or online through Eventbrite (fees apply).
Come celebrate the release of Sheila Cordner’s new children’s book, Who’s Hiding in This Book? Meet Ten Famous Authors, at Belmont Books on Sunday, Nov. 17th 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. Sheila will be signing copies, and there will be fun author trivia questions as well as a “Become An Author” activity for children.
Adrienne Brodeur presents Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, a daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity. Wild Game has been named a Best of Fall book by NPR, People, Entertainment Weekly, Kirkus, and more.
This is a free event, however we ask that you RSVP. You can do so in-store, by phone at 781-431-1160, or online at store.wellesleybooks.com/event/adrienne-brodeur. All RSVP methods are free.
Please note that you must buy your copy of Wild Game from Wellesley Books in order to meet Adrienne at the event and have her it.
About Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
A daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.
On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me.
Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.
Wild Game is a brilliant, timeless memoir about how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. It’s a remarkable story of resilience, a reminder that we need not be the parents our parents were to us.
About the Author
ADRIENNE BRODEUR began her career in publishing as the co-founder, along with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, of the fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, which won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction three times and launched the careers of many writers. She was a book editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for many years and, currently, she is the Executive Director of Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. She has published essays in the New York Times. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod with her husband and children.
“In this novel, author Guerin beautifully captures the powerful contradictions of the relationship between father and son, which combines elements of friendship and antagonism. The author only gradually discloses Walker’s epiphanies about his dad, which not only transform the protagonist’s personal opinion of him, but also the future arc of his own life. The prose is confident and confessional throughout, and Guerin draws the reader into the compelling story by having Walker unflinchingly reveal his sense of disappointment in himself. Like the journalist he is, Walker clamors for the truth, whether it’s consoling or not. A poignantly told story of ruminative remembrance.”– Kirkus Reviews
In 2004, when middle-aged Walker Maguire is called to the deathbed of his estranged father, his thoughts return to 1974. He’d worked that summer at the auto factory where his dad, an unhappily retired Air Force colonel, was employed as plant physician. Witness to a bloody fight falsely blamed on a Mexican immigrant, Walker kept quiet, fearing his white co-workers and tyrannical father. His secret snowballs into lies, betrayals and eventually the disappearance of the Mexican’s family, leading to a life-long rift between father and son that can only be mended by bringing 1974 back to life in 2004 to reveals its long-hidden truths.
Mark Guerin is a 2014 graduate of Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program in Boston. He also has an MFA from Brandeis University and is a winner of an Illinois Arts Council Grant, the Mimi Steinberg Award for Playwriting and Sigma Tau Delta’s Eleanor B. North Poetry Award. A contributor to the novelist’s blog, Dead Darlings, he is also a playwright, copywriter and journalist. He currently resides in Harpswell, Maine, with his wife, Carol, and two Brittany Spaniels. YOU CAN SEE MORE FROM UP HERE will be his first published novel.
Jennifer Donnelly, bestselling author of A Northern Light and Lost in a Book, presents Stepsister, a startling, fiercely feminist YA re-imagining of Cinderella.
Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning writer DAPHNE KALOTAY—author of Russian Winter and Sight Reading— for a discussion of her latest novel, Blue Hours. She will be joined in conversation by acclaimed writer and environmental attorney RISHI REDDI.
A mystery linking Manhattan circa 1991 to eastern Afghanistan in 2012, Blue Hours tells of a life-changing friendship between two memorable heroines. When we first meet Mim, she is a recent college graduate who has disavowed her lower-middle-class roots to befriend Kyra, a dancer and daughter of privilege, until calamity causes their estrangement. Twenty years later, Kyra has gone missing from her NGO’s headquarters in Jalalabad, and Mim—now a recluse in rural New England—embarks on a journey to find her.
Anchored by an uninvited voyage into an extraordinary place, with a love story at its core, Blue Hours combines the adventure and moral complexity of Lillian Hellman’s Julia and Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder to tell a global story at an intimate level. In its ethical provocations, Blue Hours becomes an unexpected page-turner, confronting America’s role in the conflicted, interconnected world.
Christine Lynn Herman presents The Devouring Gray, a YA novel that follows seventeen-year-old Violet Saunders as she moves to a new town where stone bells hang above every doorway and danger lurks in the depths of the woods.
“Fans of The Raven Boys and Stranger Things rejoice: This is your new obsession.” —Claire Legrand, bestselling author of Furyborn
Read the novel New York Times bestselling author of The Alice Network Kate Quinn called “easily one of the best novels I have read all year!” A sweeping, multi-layered romance set in the perilous days of World Wars I and II, where gods hold the fates–and the hearts–of four mortals in their hands.
They are Hazel, James, Aubrey, and Colette. A classical pianist from London, a British would-be architect-turned-soldier, a Harlem-born ragtime genius in the U.S. Army, and a Belgian orphan with a gorgeous voice and a devastating past. Their story, as told by goddess Aphrodite, who must spin the tale or face judgment on Mount Olympus, is filled with hope and heartbreak, prejudice and passion, and reveals that, though War is a formidable force, it’s no match for the transcendent power of Love.
Author Julie Berry’s critically-acclaimed writing has been called “haunting and unforgettable” by New York Times bestselling author of Salt to the Sea Ruta Sepetys and “utterly original and instantly engrossing” by Publishers Weekly.
About the Author
Julie Berry is the author of the 2017 Printz Honor and Los Angeles Times Book Prize shortlisted novel The Passion of Dolssa, the Carnegie and Edgar shortlisted All the Truth That’s in Me, and many other acclaimed middle grade novels and picture books. She holds a BS from Rensselaer in communication and an MFA from Vermont College. She lives in Southern California with her family.
A politically driven graffiti artist. A transgender Christian convert. A blind girl who loves to dance. A queer daughter of a hijabi union leader. These are some of the young women who live in a Bangalore slum known as Heaven, young women whom readers will come to love in the moving, atmospheric, and deeply inspiring debut, A People’s History of Heaven.
Welcome to Heaven, a thirty‑year‑old slum hidden between brand‑new high‑rise apartment buildings and technology incubators in contemporary Bangalore, one of India’s fastest‑growing cities. In Heaven, you will come to know a community made up almost entirely of women, mothers and daughters who have been abandoned by their men when no male heir was produced. Living hand‑to‑mouth and constantly struggling against the city government who wants to bulldoze their homes and build yet more glass high‑rises, these women, young and old, gladly support one another, sharing whatever they can.
A People’s History of Heaven centers on five best friends, girls who go to school together, a diverse group who love and accept one another unconditionally, pulling one another through crises and providing emotional, physical, and financial support. Together they wage war on the bulldozers that would bury their homes, and, ultimately, on the city that does not care what happens to them.
This is a story about geography, history, and strength, about love and friendship, about fighting for the people and places we love‑‑even if no one else knows they exist. Elegant, poetic, bursting with color, Mathangi Subramanian’s novel is a moving and celebratory story of girls on the cusp of adulthood who find joy just in the basic act of living.
Subramanian is an award-winning Indian American writer, author, and educator. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Teachers College of Columbia University, and the recipient of a Fulbright as well as other fellowships. Her writing has previously appeared in the Washington Post, Quartz, Al Jazeera America, and elsewhere. This is her first work of literary fiction.
Fresh out of college, with no prospects of love or work on the horizon, Amanda moved back home. Living with her parents, in a suburb of Boston, was meant to be a temporary arrangement. Until she met an unexpected reason to stay: Luke, the cute, attentive, young minister at her family’s church. And before she knew it, she’d fallen into love. And divinity school.
By thirty, Amanda was married to Luke, in a house of their own, with a promising career as a minister in a small-town New England church. From outside everything looked perfect. But inside? She felt like she’d lost herself. Marriage felt like a burden; her career, a mismatch. This wasn’t how she wanted to live.
As she began shedding the “shoulds” and following her inner compass, it took Amanda on an unexpected journey through divorce, out of the ministry, over the Italian Alps, and onto a small farm.
The Do-Over is an inspirational story about waiting for clarity, trusting your inner wisdom, and the surprising turns life takes when you let go and believe in possibility. A refreshing reminder that you can always begin again.