Boston Book Festival 2018

The three accomplished novelists in this session have crafted remarkable portraits of characters struggling with how to reconcile the damage of the past with the promise of a new future. In Gone So Long, Andre Dubus III sets up a provocative situation--a woman in her 40s is about to meet the father she can’t remember, the man who murdered her mother and now wants to make amends--in a novel that, according to Booklist, “asks what it means to atone for the unforgivable.” In Jenna Blum’s The Lost Family, an Auschwitz survivor who blames himself for the deaths of his family tries to start anew as a chef in America, with mixed results. And in Aminatta Forna’s Happiness, two lonely people--a Ghanaian trauma specialist and an American wildlife biologist--meet by chance on Waterloo Bridge, and their hopes for personal redemption send them on an odyssey that illustrates the interconnectedness of both humans and the natural world. Please join these three masterful writers for a wide-ranging conversation about empathy, resilience, and the craft of fiction, moderated by novelist Henriette Lazaridis, author of The Clover House.