Northshire Manchester: Heather Abel - The Emilys - with Ruth Ozeki

This is an in person event at our Manchester, VT store!

Abel will discuss her latest novel with award-winning and bestselling novelist Ruth Ozeki.

A mother becomes obsessed with finding the cure to a mysterious ailment that is spreading throughout her New England town in this kaleidoscopic novel about love's capacities in a changing world.

Eve is at a breaking point. Alone with her two children in Massachusetts while her husband pursues his music career in New York City, she’s frustrated, bored, and above all, lonely when she runs into Demeter, a childhood friend with whom she shared one transformative summer. Demeter is as beautiful and charismatic as Eve remembers, but she’s also distraught. Demeter’s daughter, like a growing number of others, young and old, cannot go outside during the day. No one knows why, and doctors are skeptical that these people—soon dubbed Emilys, after a famously reclusive local poet—are telling the truth. But Eve believes her friend, whose company revives her and gives her purpose. She will help Demeter—if she can just figure out how.

Eve’s search for answers brings her into the fold of an unlikely band of detectives—the local librarian and the town’s most prolific writer of letters to the editor, who both loved the same woman and now hate each other; an actor hoping to make amends for past mistakes; a hermit botanist whose seed collection might hold a clue if she’d only open her door. They meet in playdates and potlucks, the Elks Lodge and the food co-op, the botanical garden and the riverbank, venturing deep into the town’s past and finding their way towards a future wilder and more wondrous than they had ever expected. But for Eve, this future will require a price: She is keeping secrets from her husband, fighting with Demeter, distracted from her children. What is she willing to risk to find a cure?

“Gorgeous and compelling.”—Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

HEATHER ABEL is the author of the novel The Optimistic Decade. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with her husband and teenagers and teaches creative writing at Smith College.

RUTH OZEKI is a novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest. She is the bestselling author of four novels: The Book of Form and Emptiness, winner of the UK’s 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction; My Year of Meats; All Over Creation; and A Tale for the Time Being, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

If you have questions about this or any other Northshire event, please write us at events@northshire.com.