Hybrid Event: Boy from the North Country, Sam Sussman

East City Bookshop welcomes Sam Sussman to discuss his book, Boy from the North Country, in conversation with Aminatta Forna.

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar, which will be audio-only. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT BOY FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY

A son returns home to his dying mother to discover the astonishing truth of his origins and the secrets of a woman whose life and wisdom he is only beginning to understand

When Evan, twenty-six, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn’t know his mother is dying. He still doesn’t know the identity of his biological father or the elusive story of his mother’s creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. He doesn’t know the secrets of his mother’s life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.

In this deeply moving debut novel, Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and intimate mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.

Inspired by the author’s own uncertain celebrity paternity, Boy from the North Country is an emotionally searing meditation on the most essential human themes: loss, healing, memory, and the redemptive power of love.

Sam Sussman grew up in the Hudson Valley. He graduated with a BA from Swarthmore College and an MPhil from the University of Oxford and has lived in Berlin and Jerusalem. His writing has been recognized by BAFTA and published in Harper’s Magazine. Sam has taught writing seminars in India, Chile, and England and participated in the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. He lives in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan and his native Hudson Valley.

Aminatta Forna is a novelist, memoirist and essayist. Her novels are Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones. In 2002 she published a memoir of her dissident father and Sierra Leone, The Devil that Danced on the Water. The Window Seat, an essay collection, was published by Grove Press in 2021. She is the winner of a Windham Campbell Award from Yale University and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been a finalist for, among others, the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, the IMPAC Award and Ondaatje Prize. Aminatta is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was made OBE in the Queen’s 2017 New Year’s Honours list.  Aminatta Forna is Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University. 

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