Sunday, August 25, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Poetry Reading with Lisa Higgs, John McCarthy, and Tracy Zeman

Join us for an evening of poetry with three writers!

Lisa Higgs' third chapbook, Earthen Bound, was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2019. She is poetry editor for Quiddity International Literary Journal and her book reviews and interviews can be found at the Poetry Foundation, Kenyon Review Online and the Adroit Journal.

John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses, which won the Jake Adam York prize and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2019. He is also the author of Ghost County, which was named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by the Chicago Review of Books. His work has appeared in the American Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden's Ferry Review, TriQuarterly, and Zone 3. John's work has been featured in anthologies such as Best New Poets 2015 and New Poetry From the Midwest 2017. He edits RHINO Magazine and Quiddity. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

Tracy Zeman’s first book, Empire, recently won the 2018 New Measure Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Review, jubilat, TYPO and other journals. She has received a number of residencies, most notably six weeks at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the central Oregon coast. Currently, Zeman is a freelance writer and editor for a number of conservation organizations in the Midwest. She lives outside Detroit, Michigan with her husband and daughter.

Thursday, September 5, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Heidi Arneson presents The Chalk Canoe, with Jenna Zark and Tessa Bridal

In the lakeside town of White Rock, fish heads are nailed to the trees, a killer lurks under the muck, and the bare lips of one girl must never touch the bare lips of another. But Cat McCloud falls dangerously in love with the new girl and is sucked into a maelstrom of witchcraft, time-travel, and adolescent passion. Heidi Arneson’s darkly comic follow-up to Interlocking Monsters propels Cat into the enchanted underbelly of suburbia, where death waits round every corner.

Heidi Arneson’s stories have been called “Visionary-both haunting and hilarious,” and “unexpected and glorious.” She trail-blazed solo performance with her series of one-woman shows, created spoken word with male inmates, and plumbed small-town secrecy with her gripping first novel, Interlocking Monsters. She is a recipient of the Bush Artist Fellowship, Loft / Jerome Minnesota Writer’s Grant, and Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. Her autobiographical workshops have fostered many solo performers, and her newest book, The Chalk Canoe (fiction, Invisible Ink, illustrated by Alberta Mirais) released in May of 2019.

The Beat on Ruby's Street - Book 1 in the Beat Street Series
The last thing eleven-year-old Ruby Tabeata expected to happen on her way to a Jack Kerouac reading was to be hauled to the police station. It’s 1958 and Ruby is the opposite of a 1950s stereotype: fierce, funny and strong willed, she is only just starting to chart her course in a family of Beat Generation artists in Greenwich Village. Ruby dreams of meeting famous poets while becoming one herself; instead, she’s accused of trying to steal fruit from a local vendor and is forced to live in a children’s home. As Ruby struggles to return to family and friends, she learns her only choice is to follow her heart. 

Fool's Errand- Book 2 in the Beat Street Series
When her best friend Sophie goes missing, 12-year-old Ruby Tabeata has a choice: wait for her friend to come home or defy her parents and find Sophie. Set during the 1950s Blacklist era when writers like Sophie’s mom were being jailed or fired, Fool’s Errand sends Ruby out of her city and her comfort zone. With nothing to rely on but her grit and determination, Ruby has to outsmart the men chasing Sophie and her mom—discovering that whether or not you succeed, trying to save a friend is never a fool’s errand.

Jenna Zark is a columnist, lyricist, playwright, and novelist. Her play A Body of Water was published by Dramatists Play Service and produced at Circle Repertory Company in New York. Other plays were produced in the Twin Cities, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and elsewhere. As a former staff writer at Scholastic Choices magazine, Zark wrote extensively for middle school and junior high students. Zark is currently working on a musical and figuring out where Ruby is going in the third and final Beat Street novel. To learn more, please visit jennazark.com.

About River of Painted Birds: Married at fifteen, “in loneliness and lust” Isabel Keating accidentally kills her abusive husband and is forced to flee 18th century Ireland disguised as a man.  She boards the Bonaventure, a ship bound for America, only to discover she is not on her way north to Boston, as she had intended, but south to the Spanish colonies.

Tessa Bridal was born and raised in Uruguay. Her first novel The Tree of Red Stars (Milkweed) won the Milkweed Prize for Fiction, the Friends of American Writers Fiction Prize, and was translated into several languages. River of Painted Birds (Río de los pájaros pintados) has been released both in English and Spanish.

Thursday, September 5, 7:00pm Wooden Hill Brewing Company, 7421 Bush Lake Road, Edina, Minnesota 55439

Doug Hoverson presents The Drink That Made Wisconsin Famous

Join Doug Hoverson at Wooden Hill Brewing on Thursday, September 5 at 7:00 p.m. for the Minnesota launch of his new book, The Drink That Made Wisconsin Famous: Beer and Brewing in the Badger State.

From the global breweries that developed in Milwaukee in the 1870s to the “wildcat” breweries of Prohibition and the upstart craft brewers of today, Doug Hoverson tells the stories of Wisconsin’s rich brewing history. Going beyond the giants like Miller, Schlitz, and Pabst that loom large in the state’s brewing renown, Hoverson delves into the stories of the hundreds of small breweries started by immigrants and entrepreneurs that delivered Wisconsin’s beer from grain to glass.

Doug Hoverson is author of Land of Amber Waters: The History of Brewing in Minnesota (Minnesota, 2007). He has written about beer and brewing history for publications ranging from American Breweriana Journal to The Growler to The Onion. He has been a consultant on documentaries about beer or related businesses and is a popular speaker on the history of beer.

Friday, September 6, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Sarah Elaine Smith presents Marilou is Everywhere

Marilou is Everywhere takes the “missing girl in a small town” premise and turns it on its head, bringing depth and social nuance to the familiar trope. A fourteen-year-old girl lives with her two older brothers and absent mother in impoverished rural Pennsylvania. When a popular teenage girl from a more affluent home nearby goes missing, the young narrator escapes her family and slips into the missing teen’s life, hoarding the love of a confused and sick mother and seduced by the idea of living the life of someone else. Grappling with a complicated relationship to maternal love and an untenable web of lies, the vulnerable but fierce girl must confront her own self-hatred and its connection to greater pain within her family and community. Set in a class-divided Appalachia, Smith explores both the charming idiosyncrasies and the injustices of suffering small town America.

Packed with poignant, breath-taking sentences, Marilou is Everywhere is a tantalizing mystery that is compulsively readable. It harkens the peculiar quirk of Twin Peaks and the hypnotic prose of Emma Cline’s The Girls that brilliantly captures the ineffable strangeness of being a teenage girl in an often dangerous world. And yet, Sarah Elaine Smith occupies a space as a writer and storyteller that is all her own—weird and wonderful, darkly comic yet tender and soulful.


Sarah Elaine Smith holds MFAs in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. She is also a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Wallace fellowship.

Sunday, September 8, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Jerry Schumm presents Pass the Paddle: Mississippi Dreamin’ Come Hell or High Water

One man, one canoe, 19 friends, one majestic river. Authors Gerald “Jerry” E. Schumm, Jr., John Maybin DeFraites, Jr., and Jeanne Shay Schumm invite readers to a one-of-a-kind reading experience with PASS THE PADDLE: Mississippi Dreamin’ Come Hell or High Water.

The book is Jerry’s (aka The Paddlin’ Pastor) memoir of his journey down the Mississippi River. It is the story of how his life-long dream to canoe the length of the river became a reality. It was an excursion like no other. Jerry never paddled alone. Friends and family members signed up to journey sections of the river. A ceremonial paddle was passed from one canoeist to the next – a giant relay.

For fellow adventurers, the book provides a day-by-day documentation of the Mississippi River voyage from the headwaters at Lake Itasca to New Orleans. It also is the story of family, friendship, spirituality, and the goodness of folks met along the way. More importantly, it is the tale of a man who has the qualities needed to actualize a life-long dream: Jerry Schumm has a positive attitude, is persistent, and is patient.

“I was not particularly concerned about how my trip might be exceptional. Some have paddled to break a record of distance or time. Some have paddled for a spiritual awakening, to transition from a traumatic life experience such as the death of a loved one or divorce, or to raise awareness for a particular cause or issue. My motivation was simple – having the chance to fulfill a life-long dream,” Jerry shares.

The book is relevant for outdoor adventurers, young and old, planning an extended excursion. Through this memoir of a “Paddlin’ Pastor,” readers will learn the importance of building relationships, dreaming big and planning meticulously, and having the personal persistence and support from community to overcome inevitable hurdles.


Rev. Dr. Gerald E. Schumm, Jr. – Jerry – is a retired United Church of Christ minister and Dade County Public School social studies teacher. Jerry and his wife Jeanne (now married 50 years) have always had the bug for travel adventures. This has included many trips abroad and setting foot in all 50 states. Jerry is most comfortable in the out-of -doors, e.g., canoeing, sailing, boating fishing, camping, golfing, or simply working in the yard.

Monday, September 9, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Bassey Ikpi presents I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying, in conversation with Ana Marie Cox

"A part of me was writing non-fiction short stories about things I remembered, while another part was preserving the lies I tell myself to ensure the truth doesn’t kill me. This book is about those truths and the ways in which we parcel fact in order to survive."

From her early childhood in Nigeria through her adolescence in Oklahoma, Bassey Ikpi lived with a tumult of emotions, cycling between extreme euphoria and deep depression—sometimes within the course of a single day. By the time she was in her early twenties, Bassey was a spoken word artist and traveling with HBO's Def Poetry Jam, channeling her life into art. But beneath the façade of the confident performer, Bassey's mental health was in a precipitous decline, culminating in a breakdown that resulted in hospitalization and a diagnosis of Bipolar II.

In I'm Telling the Truth, But I'm Lying, Bassey Ikpi breaks open our understanding of mental health by giving us intimate access to her own. Exploring shame, confusion, medication, and family in the process, Bassey looks at how mental health impacts every aspect of our lives—how we appear to others, and more importantly to ourselves—and challenges our preconception about what it means to be "normal." Viscerally raw and honest, the result is an exploration of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of who we are—and the ways, as honest as we try to be, each of these stories can also be a lie.

Bassey Ikpi is a Nigerian-born American spoken-word poet, writer, and mental health advocate. She has appeared on HBO's Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam five times and her poetry has opened shows for Grammy Award-winning artists.

Ana Marie Cox is a political columnist and culture critic whose writing has appeared in The New Republic, Sports Illustrated, the Washington Post, and Esquire. She hosts "With Friends Like These," a podcast from Crooked Media, conducted the "Talk" interviews featured in the New York Times Magazine from 2015-17, and was the senior political correspondent for MTV News. You may have read that she's a Christian now, too. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with her husband, John Ramonas, and their two cats, Luke and Leia (The Jedi Twins). Also, a puppy. You can follow her Instagram and she is still way too active on Twitter.

Thursday, September 12, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Christopher Ingraham presents If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now, in conversation with Tom Weber

In 2015, Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham wrote a sentence that would change his life: “The absolute worst place to live in America is (drumroll please) … Red Lake County, Minn.” This statement was based on a U.S. Department of Agriculture study, that anchored his column. The report ranked more than 3,000 of America’s counties from ugliest to most scenic. By the next morning, Ingraham had received hundreds of responses from angry but polite residents of Red Lake County (pop. 4,000), including one from a local businessman challenging Ingraham to look beyond the spreadsheet and actually visit their community. If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now is about Ingraham’s life-altering trip to Red Lake County – and his family’s eventual decision to move there.

If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now is a testament to how statistics and numbers do not tell a complete story, whether in politics—witness the 2016 election results—or in life. It also offers a portrait of a rural America that rarely gets its due in the contemporary press, a place somewhere in between the all-too-familiar narratives of country idyll and hardscrabble despair. This contemporary everyman’s story embodies today’s frustrations with raising a family, earning a living, and finding some escape.


Christopher Ingraham writes about all things data, with a particular interest in wealth, happiness and inequality. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.

Tom Weber is a journalist in Minnesota. Most recently Tom worked with MPR News, as host of MPR News with Tom Weber. Weber also hosted several MPR news live events, including the Broadcast Journalist Series at the University of St. Thomas. Before moving to Minnesota, the Chicago native was a morning news anchor and reporter for KWMU St. Louis Public Radio for more than five years. He moderates the Policy On Tap event series for The Citizens League, and is the author of the travel book 100 Things to do in the Twin Cities Before You Die.

Thursday, September 19, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Dan Hill presents Two Cheers for Democracy:How Emotions Drive Leadership Style

Not only in America, but around the globe democracy is under siege. In an era personified by Donald Trump, illiberal—increasingly hollow—democracies, and “strongman” dictatorships, it’s time to take a closer look at the nature of the leaders who shape our world. The policies or positions that leaders adopt may change, but rarely their personalities. All of us have signature facial expressions that reveal the emotions we gravitate to most often over time. The difference is that in leading a country, the head of state’s feelings can hold sway over events likely to impact every citizen’s life and well-being.

In Two Cheers for Democracy, the focus is on identifying emotional patterns that help to predict three key things about leaders: will they prove to be competent, compelling, and compassionate in executing their official duties? This book analyzes all 44 U.S. presidents to date and every U.S. presidential debate ever held, from 1960 to 2016, in addition to 79 foreign leaders. With results from the American Political Science Association’s presidential greatness rankings, Gallup polls, and Freedom House’s annual survey of countries’ commitment to democracy as benchmarks, Two Cheers for Democracy takes seriously—in a unique way—the central question of today: what’s the personality of the people leading us, and can we trust them to look out for the public good?

Two Cheers for Democracy comes richly illustrated with photographs and charts, and includes an epilogue with a look at the likely 2020 Democratic front-runners for The White House.


Dan Hill, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized expert on the role of emotions in politics, business, sports, and popular culture. His wide-ranging media coverage and appearances have included: The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC.

Thursday, September 26, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Kalisha Buckhanon presents Speaking of Summer, in conversation with Lissa Jones of Black Market Reads LIVE podcast recording!

On a cold December evening, Autumn Spencer’s twin sister Summer walks to the roof of their shared Harlem brownstone and is never seen again—the door to the roof is locked, and no footsteps are found. Faced with authorities indifferent to another missing woman, Autumn must pursue answers on her own, all while grieving her mother’s recent death. With her friends and neighbors, Autumn pretends to hold up through the crisis. She falls into an affair with Summer’s boyfriend to cope with the disappearance of a woman they both loved. But the loss becomes too great, the mystery too inexplicable, and Autumn starts to unravel, all the while becoming obsessed with murdered women and the men who kill them.

In Speaking of Summer, critically acclaimed author Kalisha Buckhanon has created a postmodern, fast-paced story of urban peril and victim invisibility, and the fight to discover truth at any cost.

This event is co-presented by Magers & Quinn Booksellers and The Givens Foundation for African American Literature, and will be recorded for an episode of the Black Market Reads podcast, hosted by Lissa Jones. For more information on the podcast, visit BlackMarketReads.com. The Givens Foundation is supported in part by Target and individual donors.

Kalisha Buckhanon is the author of the novels Solemn, Conception, and Upstate, which was selected as an inaugural National Book Foundation Literature for Justice title. Her other honors include an American Library Association Alex Award, an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, Pushcart Prize and Hurston/Wright Awards nominations, and a Terry McMillan Young Author Award. She also appears on Investigation Discovery, BET, and TV One as a true crime expert in cases involving women. She lives in Chicago. More information can be found on her website.

Lissa Jones is a highly sought after speaker, facilitator, and mistress of ceremonies. Dubbed a ‘public intellectual’ by Chair Emeritus of American History at Macalester College, Mahmoud El-Kati, Lissa reluctantly takes on the moniker, but readily embraces the opportunity to bring thoughtful examination of African American life and culture into the public discourse on radio, through podcasting, and for a time, through a newspaper column. Lissa is the creator of ‘Urban Agenda’,a weekly program she has hosted on KMOJ Radio, Minnesota’s oldest black radio station, for the last eleven years. Lissa is also the Host of ‘Black Market Reads’, a podcast of the Givens Foundation for African American Literature, amplifying the black literary canon. Lissa is a member of the Twin Cities chapter of Black Journalists, and is co-chair of the ‘Women in the NAACP’ committee for the Minneapolis NAACP.

Thursday, September 26, 7:30pm Grace Trinity Community Church (1430 West 28th Street, Minneapolis)

Rain Taxi presents Amitav Ghosh

Join Rain Taxi and Magers & Quinn as the award-winning author of the bestselling Ibis trilogy presents Gun Island (FSG), a globetrotting, folkloric adventure novel about family and heritage. This event is free and open to the public, but RSVP here and you’ll be entered in our prize raffle at the event!

Gun Island and other Amitav Ghosh books will be available for purchase at the event courtesy of Magers & Quinn Booksellers, and the author will sign books; pre-purchase your copy HERE and we’ll have it waiting for you at the event along with reserved seating!

About Gun Island: On a visit to his birthplace, Kolkata, a Brooklyn-based dealer in rare books finds his life becoming entangled with an ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. While visiting a temple, deep within the vast mangrove forests of Bengal, he has a disturbing encounter with the most feared, and revered, of Indian snakes, a King Cobra. This is followed by a series of increasingly uncanny episodes that seem to dissolve the borders of the human and non-human.

Peopled with a diverse cast of characters, and set in places that range from the Sundarbans to Los Angeles and Venice, Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island is a beautifully realized novel that effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

Amitav Ghosh is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire, all published by FSG. His other books include the novels The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace, as well as the 2016 nonfiction book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Ghosh was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2007, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009, and received the Jnanpith Award in 2019.

Sunday, September 29, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Dr. Amy Blackstone presents Childfree by Choice: The Movement Redefining Family and Creating a New Age of Independence

When she was growing up, Dr. Amy Blackstone always assumed that her life would eventually include having children. As the years passed, though, the urge to become a mother never arrived. Blackstone, a sociology professor at the University of Maine, now confidently and happily identifies as childfree by choice. She and her husband, Lance, created their blog we're {not} having a baby to share their experiences and connect with other adults who were choosing to forgo parenthood, and what they found was a diverse, fascinating, welcoming community that consistently defied stereotypes about adults who choose not to have children.

Motivated by her own experiences and those of the childfree community she has connected with, Blackstone has become a nationally recognized expert of the childfree choice who has conducted research on the subject since 2008. She shares her expertise and trail-blazing research with the world in her first book, CHILDFREE BY CHOICE: The Movement Redefining Family and Creating a New Age of Independence, a definitive investigation into the childfree choice and movement. Blackstone compellingly explores the childfree movement from its conception to today, revealing how it intersects with and has been shaped by our cultural and personal understandings of gender, race, sexual orientation, politics, environmentalism, and feminism.

Readers of Rebecca Traister, Megan Daum, Rebecca Solnit, and Kat Bolick will find much to love in Blackstone’s sharp, witty writing and thorough, incisive analysis. More than just a call for acceptance of childfree adults, CHILDFREE BY CHOICE reveals how accepting and supporting all types of families can lead to positive outcomes for parents, non-parents, and children alike.

Dr. Amy Blackstone is a professor in Sociology and the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine, where she studies childlessness and the childfree choice, workplace harassment, and civic engagement. Her work has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals including American Sociological Review, Law & Society Review, Sociology Compass, and Gender & Society. Professor Blackstone’s research has been featured by various media outlets including the Katie show, public radio, New York Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed, USA Today, Huffington Post, and other local and national venues. Childfree by Choice is her first book.

Wednesday, October 2, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Seth Berkman presents A Team of their Own, in conversation with Marissa Brandt

Weeks before the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, North and South Korea merged their women’s ice hockey teams into one, scraping together teammates of Korean descent from all over the world and various backgrounds including a concert pianist, actress, high school student, and even a convenience store worker. Suddenly thrust into the international spotlight, the score of the games became inconsequential compared to the leaps made as the first ever Korean team overcame language, cultural, and political barriers to write history.

Korean-American journalist Seth Berkman was covering the women’s team for the New York Times during the Olympic games. In A Team of Their Own, Berkman describes the unlikely and inspiring story of these young, fierce women, showing how they gained worldwide acceptance amidst immense political pressure, revealing the players' personal stories, providing rare insight into North Korean life, and demonstrating what a unified Korea could resemble.

Born in Seoul and raised in New Jersey, Seth Berkman made his first trip back to South Korea during the 2018 Winter Olympics when Korea's first women's Olympic hockey team made their historic debut. Berkman first met the team while on assignment for the New York Times, where he has worked as a regular contributor since 2012. He has also had work published by The New Yorker, SPIN, ESPN, the Forward and dozens of other local and national media outlets. After graduating with honors from Columbia University Journalism School, he gained reporting experience throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

Tuesday, October 8, 7:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Mental Illness Awareness Week Panel Discussion with NAMI Minnesota

Magers & Quinn and the Minnesota chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness present a panel discussion on topics relating to mental illness, featuring speakers from the mental health field. Books by each speaker will be available for sale.

A psychologist and life coach with over 30 years of experience, Tom Glaser, MS, practices at Partners in Resilience near Loring Park and is now working on a second book and video project on Resilience Following Trauma. Whether counseling individuals or groups, writing, hosting a radio show, or teaching, his passion for helping people live their best lives flows through.

About Full Heart Living: With its unique combination of storytelling interviews, memoir, and activities, Full Heart Living: Conversations with the Happiest People I Know is as fun and engaging as it is relatable and practical. Pulling himself out of darker times, the author’s vulnerability touches the soul, and the lessons learned make complex ideas simple and doable.

Andy Steiner is a free-lance writer and editor. She is mental health and addiction reporter for MinnPost.

About How To Survive: In this elegantly reported book, journalist Andy Steiner introduces us to dozens of people who have lived through excruciating times. This is a book for anyone who has gone through something hard, such as a mental health challenge, and wants to see a way out. It’s a book for all of us.

N.G. Young is a native of Chicago’s south side and is also an underground Hip-hop artist and singer/songwriter. Her passion is both music and social activism. Illegal is her first novel that expounds on her deep love for storytelling and Hip-hop Kulture. She seeks to both enlighten and inspire change while utilizing various mediums to foster growth and intellectual development in both readers and the Hip-hop community as a whole.

About Illegal: A Hip-Hop Tale: A young-adult fiction novel which explores the narrative of how the last emcee on earth lives in a world that was once saturated with rap music and Hip hop culture the world suddenly deems this genre as terrorism is outlawed, and the practice or engagement of such is punishable by death. He must find a way to use the very thing the world now hates to save the remnants of the Hip hop Holocaust and ultimately the world itself.

Sunday, October 13, 5:00pm Magers And Quinn Booksellers (map)

Lynn Cullen presents The Sisters of Summit Avenue

Award-winning author Lynn Cullen has brought to life literary icons in her bestselling novels Mrs. Poe and Twain’s End. Now, she returns with a heartfelt love letter to mothers, daughters, and sisters everywhere in The Sisters of Summit Avenue, a powerful novel set in the Midwest during the Great Depression about two sisters bound together by love, duty, and pain.

With her husband in a comatose state, infected by the infamous “sleeping sickness” devastating families across the country, Ruth has been single-handedly raising four young daughters and running her family’s Indiana farm for eight long years. Consumed with envy of her pretty older sister, Ruth is nearing the end of her rope.

Her sister, June, is blonde and beautiful, married to a wealthy doctor, and living in a mansion. She also has a coveted job as one of “the Bettys,” the perky recipe developers who populate General Mills’ famous Betty Crocker test kitchens. But these gilded trappings hide sorrows: she has borne no children. And the man she used to love more than anything belongs to her sister Ruth.

When the two sisters reluctantly reunite after a long estrangement, June’s bitterness about her sister’s betrayal sets into motion a confrontation that’s been years in the making. And their mother, Dorothy, who’s brought the two of them together, has her own dark secrets, which might blow up the fragile peace she hopes to restore between her daughters.

Taking place in the throes of the Great Depression when jobs were scarce, farms were failing, and families suffered privation, hunger, and worse, Lynn Cullen creates an emotional journey of inner strength, redemption, and the ties that bind families together under the best, and worst, of situations.

Lynn Cullen grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and is the bestselling author of The Sisters of Summit Avenue, Twain’s End, and Mrs. Poe, which was named an NPR 2013 Great Read and an Indie Next List selection. She lives in Atlanta.