The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to welcome award-winning author Michael Farris Smith to the Midtown Scholar Bookstore for a signing on his new novel, Lay Your Armor Down. Smith will be available for a meet & greet, book signing, and photos.
Purchasing the author’s new book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line. This event will take place on Verbeke Street at the Outdoor Tent Sale by the Midtown Scholar Bookstore.
About the Book:
An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, one young and one old, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose. The two men have a job to do. They are hunting something precious but have only been told: you’ll know it when you see it. When they arrive at the place, an abandoned church cellar in the burned-out countryside, they find an answer they never could have predicted. Now, the job feels dubious, one that’ll surely bring them to ruin. Yet if they’re to go against orders, no step can be undone, and nothing can be taken back.
In spare, imagistic prose, Lay Your Armor Down reduces the epic to its most elemental. It charts the course of several broken people, all outrunning danger’s dark fingers, and all brought together for one last chance at redemption.
About the Author:
Michael Farris Smith is an award-winning writer whose novels have appeared on Best of the Year lists with Esquire, NPR, Southern Living, Garden & Gun, Oprah Magazine, and numerous other outlets. In 2021, he released the novel Nick, a prequel to The Great Gatsby, bringing Nick Carraway to life with his own story in the years before meeting Gatsby, with The Washington Post declaring "creating a worthy home to Fitzgerald's finest novel is a remarkable accomplishment."As a screenwriter, he scripted the feature-film adaptation of his novel Desperation Road which was a Top 10 global hit on Netflix. His latest novel, Lay Your Armor Down, released in 2025, which reviewers describe as "brutally brilliant" (Orlando-Sentinel) and "a bracing fever dream of a novel" (Publisher's Weekly).
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