I’m so pleased to be moderating a discussion with Melanie McCabe and Karen Olson at this year’s Fall for the Book Festival at George Mason University. Here’s a write-up on our event—taking place on Mason’s Fairfax Campus on Thursday, October 8, at 1:30 p.m.
Guilt-ridden and haunted by trauma, the women in both Melanie McCabe’s and Karen Olson’s novels return to crime scenes from their past only to discover the truth has not been buried as they believed. In McCabe’s Road Longer Than Memory, Sara Barlow takes a teaching position at her alma mater, where a classmate was murdered and her sister was killed in a car accident. Art Taylor describes the novel as an “unforgettable debut, showing how past tragedies impact fresh troubles―and exploring how loss and regret might somehow lead toward redemption.” In Olson’s A Defiant Woman, Nan Tudor learns that the daughter she abandoned has been kidnapped, and she is lured back to Martha’s Vineyard where she once left a dead body. Heather Webb describes the thriller as “Compulsively readable [and a] gripping retelling of one of history’s most obsessively researched topics: Henry VIII and the fall of his six wives.” Art Taylor will moderate this event.
Location: Wilkins Plaza Tent, between the Johnson Center and Horizon Hall, George Mason University
The event is free and open to the public. For more information about Fall for the Book, visit the website here.