In his second novel, Hamburger, award-winning author of The View from Stalin's Head and Faith for Beginners, looks back over several decades of social change through the experience of Ari Silverman, a medieval historian. The story opens in the #MeToo era, with Silverman worried about his ex-husband, who’s been accused of sexually harassing a student. Perhaps as a coping mechanism, Silverman focuses instead on an earlier love interest, one that coincided with the rise of Nirvana. The man is now married to a woman and runs a dating website, but as Silverman’s past and present converge, he confronts old decisions, makes new ones, and comes to terms with elusive aspect of his identity.
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In her warm-hearted and engaging fourth novel, Kane, author of the Barnes & Noble Discover selection, The Report, follows May Attaway, a forty-year-old university gardener who, over time, has found so much satisfaction in botany and the classics that she’s cultivated a fairly reclusive existence. But when she suddenly has unexpected leave, she decides to reconnect with people from her past and embarks on a kind of odyssey. As she visits four old friends one by one, May revels in ordinary, everyday pleasures and through her experiences Kane reconfirms the values of a pre-digital age, when people bonded face-to-face and knew each other free of screens and algorithms. Hamburger and Kane will be in conversation with Carolyn Parkhurst, author most recently of the novel Harmony.
