Join us for an afternoon with Alexis Schaitkin, who will read from her new novel, Two Lives. A conversation with Bruce Holsinger will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: From the author of Saint X and Elsewhere, a stunning novel about the fate of two children sent from Europe to the English countryside to escape the onset of World War II and the aftermath of the decisions they made there.
Evelyn Lieberman has always been good at carrying her grief while carrying on. A widow in a Florida retirement community, she keeps busy with regular visits to her grandchildren and a full social calendar with her friends, the Girls. She speaks little about her past and is proud of the life she has built in the present.
When Evelyn’s friend recommends a book by a prominent British author, Simon Glaser, Evelyn is startled to find that the novel tells a hauntingly familiar story. She decides to seek out the book’s writer, the only other person who could have known the details of what happened all those decades ago.
Spanning prewar Vienna, the Yorkshire moors, postwar New York, a Florida retirement community, and the London literary world, Two Lives is a sweeping and masterful exploration of heritage, memory, and the human yearning to reconcile our pasts with our present and take the measure of our lives.
About the Author: Alexis Schaitkin is the author of Elsewhere, a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize, and Saint X, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and has been translated into seven languages. Her short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
About the Moderator: Bruce Holsinger is the author of Culpability, the 116th selection of Oprah’s Book Club and hailed by Oprah Winfrey as a “must read for all generations.” His previous books have been recognized with the Colorado Book Award, the John Hurt Fisher Prize, the Philip Brett Award, and the John Nicholas Brown Prize, among others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and he has been profiled on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Two Lives will be released on October 27. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Alexis Schaitkin has accomplished something brilliant and rare in this novel that bridges two eras while feeling wholly alive in the present. Written with grace, humor, and a fierce intelligence, Two Lives interrogates memory and the uneasy work of reconciling the lives we remember with the lives others remember for us. I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about this marvel of a book."
—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
New Dominion Bookshop Book Order Form
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