Third Place Books: virtual event with three debut novelists

Thursday, July 9, 2020 - 7:00pm

Virtual Event

Join Third Place Books and Algonquin Books for a virtual panel with three much-anticipated debut novelists!

This is a Virtual Event! Register for this event here!

Gabriel Bump: Everywhere You Don't Belong

In an alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn't dangerous or brilliant-- he's an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don't Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.

Crissy Van Meter: Winter Island

On the eve of Evangeline's wedding, on the shore of Winter Island, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie's mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. 

From there, in Crissy Van Meter's mesmerizing, provocative debut, the narrative flows back and forth through time as Evie reckons with her complicated upbringing in this lush, wild land off the coast of Southern California. Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island's world-famous strain of weed, Winter Wonderland. Although her father raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself. With wit, love, and bracing flashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of love and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief-- and the ways in which our childhoods can threaten our ability to love if we are not brave enough to conquer the past.

Kimi Eisele: The Lightest Object in the Universe

Carson is on the East Coast when the electrical grid goes down. Desperate to find Beatrix, a woman on the West Coast who holds his heart, he sets off along a cross-country railroad line, where he encounters lost souls, clever opportunists, and those seeking salvation. 

Meanwhile, Beatrix and her neighbors begin to construct a cooperative community, working to turn the end of the world into the possibility of a bright beginning. Without modern means of communication, will Beatrix and Carson be able to find their way to each other? The answer may lie with one fifteen-year-old girl, whose actions could ultimately decide the fate of the lovers. The Lightest Object in the Universe by Kimi Eisele is a moving story about adaptation and the power of community, imagining a world where our best traits, born of necessity, can begin to emerge.