We are thrilled to announce New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Bohjalian will be visiting the store as a part of our 2012 Author Series. Mr. Bohjalian will join us on Friday, July 20th from noon - 2 p.m. for a luncheon at Stafford's Pier Restaurant. Mr. Bohjalian will be visiting to celebrate the release of his latest novel, The Sandcastle Girls.
This is a ticketed event and reservations are required. You can reserve your space by contacting us at 231-347-1180 or via email. Tickets are $25.00.
Over the course of his career, New York Times bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian has taken readers on a spectacular array of journeys. Midwives brought us to an isolated Vermont farmhouse on an icy winter’s night and a homebirth gone tragically wrong. The Double Bind perfectly conjured the Roaring Twenties on Long Island – and a young social worker’s descent into madness. And Skeletons at the Feast
chronicled the last six months of World War Two in Poland and Germany
with nail-biting authenticity. As The Washington Post Book World has
written, Bohjalian writes “the sorts of books people stay awake all
night to finish."
In his fifteenth book, The Sandcastle Girls,
he brings us on a very different kind of journey. This spellbinding
tale travels between Aleppo, Syria in 1915 and Bronxville, New York in
2012—a sweeping historical love story steeped in the author's Armenian
heritage, making it his most personal novel to date.
When Elizabeth Endicott arrives in Syria she has a
diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only
the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is
spreading across Europe and she has volunteered on behalf of the
Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to
refugees of the Armenian Genocide. There Elizabeth becomes friendly
with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and
infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British army in
Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters, and comes to realize that
he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young American woman who is so
different from the wife he lost.
Flash forward to the present, where we meet Laura
Petrosian, a novelist living in suburban New York. Although her
grandparents' ornate Pelham home was affectionately nicknamed "The
Ottoman Annex," Laura has never really given her Armenian heritage much
thought. But when an old friend calls, claiming to have seen a
newspaper photo of Laura's grandmother promoting an exhibit at a Boston
museum, Laura embarks on a journey back through her family's history
that reveals love, loss – and a wrenching secret that has been buried
for generations.
Chris Bohjalian is the author of fifteen books, including the New York Times bestsellers, The Night Strangers,Secrets of Eden, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars, and Midwives.
Chris won the New England Society Book Award (for The Night Strangers) in 2012, as well as the New England Book Award in 2002 and the Anahid Literary Award in 2000. His novel, Midwives, was a number one New York Times
bestseller, a selection of Oprah's Book Club, a Publishers Weekly "Best
Book," and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. His
work has been translated into over 25 languages and three times become
movies ("Secrets of Eden," "Midwives," and "Past the Bleachers").
He has written for a wide variety of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and has been a Sunday columnist for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since 1992. Chris graduated from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.
Syria she has a
diploma from Mount Holyoke College, a crash course in nursing, and only
the most basic grasp of the Armenian language. The First World War is
spreading across Europe and she has volunteered on behalf of the
Boston-based Friends of Armenia to deliver food and medical aid to
refugees of the Armenian Genocide. There Elizabeth becomes friendly
with Armen, a young Armenian engineer who has already lost his wife and
infant daughter. When Armen leaves Aleppo to join the British army in
Egypt, he begins to write Elizabeth letters, and comes to realize that
he has fallen in love with the wealthy, young American woman who is so
different from the wife he lost.
