Sue Halpern (Summer Hours at the Robbers Library) visits Gibson's Bookstore to share her new novel, What We Leave Behind, a tenderhearted story of two very different women grappling with the messy emotional legacies passed down by their parents—for fans of Dani Shapiro, Ann Napolitano, and Jody Picoult.
It’s the perennial question: are we a product of how we were raised, or is our identity hardwired by our genetic inheritance? When her adoptive mother dies in a freak accident, high school senior Melody Marcus doubles down on her refusal to learn anything about her birth parents. In this age of 23&me, though, that may not be possible, and the secrets hidden in her DNA threaten to upend everything she knows about herself and her family.
For Candace Milton, a successful woman in her forties, the collateral damage from her parents’ tortured marriage has led to a life of intentional unattachment. She is happy—enough. But a chance encounter with a friend of Melody’s father will challenge this assumption and force her to reimagine who she is and who she might become.
Big-hearted evocative, and achingly relatable, What We Leave Behind grapples with destiny, belonging, and love, and makes us question our own idea of family: the kind we’re born into and the kind we create.
About the author: Sue Halpern is the author of seven previous books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, Rolling Stone, and Condé Nast Traveler, and she has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Today Show. A beloved college professor, and a former New Yorker staff writer, she lives in Vermont with her husband, the writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben, and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College. Learn more at:
https://suehalpern.com/
Can't make this event? Order the book through the Gibson's Bookstore website and we'll get it signed for you at the event! Put your signing/personalization requests in your order comments at checkout.
You may also like the following events from Gibson's Bookstore:
- Next Monday, 5th May, 05:30 pm, Gibson's Book Club reads The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride in Concord
- Next Tuesday, 6th May, 06:30 pm, Christopher Golden - The Night Birds, in conversation with Nat Cassidy in Concord
- Next Saturday, 10th May, 12:30 pm, Bedrock: The Making of a Public Garden, with Jill Nooney in Concord
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