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Event
Books & Breakfast - Ann Packer
Book Clubs love to discover debut novels that are not only great reads, but are highly controversial in their subject matter. Ann Packer became a book club favorite with her novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier, a book that had people debating the morality of responsibility towards those we love. Readers discussed until late in the night the question of how much we are expected to sacrifice to keep a promise.
After a recent short story collection - Swim Back to Me - Ann Packer returns to the novel with what will surely be another best-seller, The Children's Crusade. At her best, Packer gives us the complicated, messy and fascinating relationships of a family. Told from various points of view, it is like circling round and round as the family members' memories take shape, just as their home was built in what was to become the Silicon Valley. When my kids were growing they were always running into the room trying to explain the truth of what happened and their stories never matched up. The Children's Crusade has you pondering on a larger scale who's story is the truth, and ultimately in a family where we do not operate in a vacuum is there really a truth at all, or just the emotional truth each member feels?
Literary Affairs welcomes New York Times Best Selling Author Ann Packer for an exclusive Books & Breakfast event at the beautiful Hotel Bel Air on Thursday, April 30. Please join us for a delicious continental breakfast and book club style conversation between the author and Julie Robinson.
The morning will include a Q&A with the author and book signing.Tickets are $45, and space is limited so get your tickets today!
WHEN: Thursday, April 30 - 10:30am
WHERE - Hotel Bel Air
TICKETS: $45
ABOUT THE BOOK
From the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of The Dive From Clausen's Pier, a sweeping, masterful new novel that explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family over the course of five decades.
Bill Blair finds the land by accident - three wooded acres in a rustic community south of San Francisco. The year is 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he has yet to create, Bill buys the property on a whim. In Penny Greenway he finds a suitable wife, a woman whose yearning attitude toward life seems compelling and answerable, and they marry and have four children. Yet Penny is a mercurial housewife, at a time when women chafed at the conventions imposed on them. She finds salvation in art, but the cost is high.
Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children, adults now and still living near the family home, are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose sudden presence and all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family's future. One by one the siblings take turns telling the story - Robert, a doctor like their father; Rebecca, a psychiatrist; Ryan, a schoolteacher; and James, the malcontent, the problem child, the only one who hasn't settled down - their narratives interwoven with portraits of the family at crucial points in their history.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann Packer is the critically acclaimed author of two collections of short fiction, Swim Back to Me and Mendocino and Other Stories, and two nationally bestselling novels, Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen's Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies, and her novels have been translated into a dozen languages and published around the world. She lives in San Carlos, California.
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LocationHotel Bel Air (View)
701 Stone Canyon Road
Los Angeles, CA 90077
United States
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