Our beloved Nashville treasure Amy Grant needs no introduction. She constantly gives back in our community, with a loving spirit, radiant energy, and great good cheer.
Sean Kinch doesn’t need an introduction either, in bookish Nashville. An admired high school English teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy, he is also known for his jump shot and dazzling smile. My funniest friend fondly calls him a sesquipedalian (does that make her one too?).
Amy Grant and Sean Kinch will host conversations with terrific authors on Sunday, October 18th, and I thought you’d want to know the details!
On Sunday morning at 11, Sean Kinch will talk with three authors about their otherworldly novels:
Westward Women, by Alice Martin
From the publisher:
It starts with an itch.
In homes across the country, women ages eighteen to thirty-five begin to slow down.
Tired. Blank. Restless.
Drawn to the Pacific Ocean like it’s calling them home. They abandon their lives – jobs, families, their very selves. And once they reach the West, they vanish forever.
At the center of the story are three young women caught in the pull of something unstoppable.
Aimee follows the trail of her missing best friend to a man called the Piper – known for leading infected women West.
Teenie, afflicted and unraveling, clings to a single memory as she looks out the window of the Piper’s van.
And Eve, a former journalist, is chasing the story that might just consume her.
Each on the edge of transformation. Drawn toward the unknown. In search of a way forward.
***
Earth 7, by Deb Olin Unferth
From Publisher’s Weekly, Starred review:
Unferth’s remarkable third novel… takes place in a distant future where a severely depopulated Earth has turned mostly to sand. At the outset, protagonist Dylan is being raised by her mother, Rosemary, in an underwater pod. Rosemary is a researcher, part of a team from a lab back on Earth’s surface who are working to preserve the DNA of the planet’s many species in an effort to eventually recreate Earth as it once was. The original collection, known as Earth 2, and its copies, 3 through 5, have been lost to looters, and the team is now compiling Earth 6. Though Dylan finds the work of the lab “irritating and absurd, all this so-called Earth-saving,” it offers her an escape from the suffocation of her mother and the depths of the ocean when she lands an internship on the surface. Tasked with sweeping sand, she makes a miraculous discovery of “micro-animals” that appear lifeless and can be used to hide DNA. Over the course of the satisfying narrative, Dylan, as an adult, carries on Rosemary’s work. Unferth shines in her ability to craft relatable characters in extraordinary circumstances, and the novel remains accessible even as it explores deep ontological questions about the nature of life. This is profound.
***
Underlake, by Erin McCoy
From Booklist, Starred review:
Otta is a professional scuba diver driven back home to her small town after the death of a colleague, forced once again to live under the shadow of a tragedy in her town. Years ago, 240 people died after a newly constructed dam flooded the plains. But those people had chosen to stay, certain they were chosen by God to start new lives under the water. Otta, driven back to take care of an ailing mother, soon meets May, a woman from the Underlake who says her daughter, living in the community under the water, must be rescued. Despite her misgivings, Otta agrees to help and is drawn ever deeper, both into the water and into the web that still ensnares the town in the wake of a communal loss. In the vein of Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel, McCoy’s novel is a thoughtful, ethereal story that sometimes feels as though it came from the eerie depths it describes. With flowing prose and an unflinching style, McCoy takes on the mystical ideas of the book as well as the harsh realities behind them, and the reader is given a gorgeously written novel on the power of religious fanaticism, familial love, and the responsibilities we carry in the face of tragedies we cannot control.
***
In the early afternoon – at 2 pm – Amy Grant will talk with Varina Buntin Willse about Varina’s book, Beneath and Between: And Other Overlooked Words That Illuminate God.
From Southern Festival of Books:
What if God is not just above us but also beneath and between, alongside and among? What if God comes into us, and is thus within and throughout and around – all while yet beyond? In lush and literary prose, writer Varina Buntin Willse invites us to encounter the omnipresence of God through the lens of the lowliest of all parts of speech: the preposition. Willse will be joined in the conversation by multiple Grammy award-winning singer/songwriter Amy Grant.
From Margaret Renkl:
If you have let the world lock God into a dark box, this is a book for you. If you have let the world lock you – your faith, your wonderings, your soaring love – into a dark box, this radiant book is also for you. It will lead you straight to a wild, uncontained God whose lavish love can be found not just beneath and between but within, among, beyond, and in every other place love can reach. Which is to say, everywhere.
***
