Boston Book Festival 2018

The fiction writers we’ll meet in this session all write about characters whose primary struggles transpire in the liminal spaces between places, viewpoints, or ways of life. Yang Huang’s interconnected short stories collected in My Old Faithful trace a three-decade family history in China and the United States, as personal joys and sorrows play out against the background of China’s rapid social and economic change. Family stories are also at the center of Fatima Farheen Mirza’s buzzed-about debut novel A Place for Us, as a family wedding in India reunites parents and children who have been divided by geography and generation. This session also features two Boston-centered novels. In Pushcart Prize-winning author Blair Hurley’s The Devoted, a young woman finds herself torn between a charismatic Zen master and the remnants of her rigid Catholic upbringing. And Sam Graham-Felsen’s coming-of-age novel Green takes readers back to the early 1990s, as a white boy attending a predominantly black middle school is compelled to acknowledge his own privilege for the first time. Bridging any gaps between these four talented writers is our moderator, award-winning writer and educator Adam Stumacher.