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Join us for a reading with Alexis Schaitkin, who will be reading from her debut novel, Saint X. Book sales and a signing will follow. This event will be free and open to the public.
Claire is only seven years old when her older sister, Alison, vanishes from the Caribbean island of Saint X during their family vacation. When her body is found, days later, in a remote cay, two local men—employees at the resort—are arrested, but the evidence is slim, the timeline blurry, and the men are soon released. For Claire, the quest for answers surrounding her sister’s death leads to an unlikely attachment with one of the suspects—an obsession connecting two people whose lives are forever marked by the same tragedy. While seemingly unconnected, the lives of Schaitkin’s characters are inextricably bound to each other through contingent circumstances: tourists visit Saint X, immigrants drive taxis in New York, young underpaid professionals move to Brooklyn, and so on. Written with compassion and razor-sharp precision, Saint X is an exploration of race and privilege, family and self—a haunting portrait of grief, obsession and the bond between two sisters never truly given the chance to know one another.
Alexis Schaitkin’s short stories and essays have appeared in Ecotone, Southwest Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and son. Saint X is her debut novel.