Tom Grace is the internationally bestselling author of Undeniable, The Liberty Intrigue, The Secret Cardinal, Fatal Orbit, Dark Ice, Quantum and Spyder Web. His books have been translated into eight languages and sold in over twenty-five countries. They have collectively appeared for one hundred weeks on USA Today and Associated Press bestseller lists, primarily in the top ten.
Undeniable, the sixth Nolan Kilkenny thriller from international bestselling author Tom Grace, takes Nolan into the brave new world of reproductive technology, where the building blocks of life are manipulated in a Petri dish, women lease their wombs like rental properties, and money trumps morality. In an age of rapid advances in human genetics, cloning and stem cell research, what seemed impossible just a few years ago is now a reality. DNA has been reduced from a miraculous molecule into a data storage device, and the information it contains is as easy to hack as any computer file. Undeniable is a novel that steps beyond the traditional parent-child relationship into a chilling new reproductive reality.
“Jessica Shattuck In Conversation with U of M RC Creative Writing Director Laura Thomas”
Women in the Castle
Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold. Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined--an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Hazards of Good Breeding. Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband's ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944, plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband's brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. First Marianne rescues six-year-old Martin, the son of her dearest childhood friend, from a Nazi reeducation home. Together, they make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to Berlin, where Martin's mother, the beautiful and naive Benita, has fallen into the hands of occupying Red Army soldiers. Then she locates Ania, another resister's wife, and her two boys, now refugees languishing in one of the many camps that house the millions displaced by the war. As Marianne assembles this makeshift family from the ruins of her husband's resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart. Eventually, all three women must come to terms with the choices that have defined their lives before, during, and after the war--each with their own unique share of challenges.
Newton's Laws of Motion describe the relationship between a body and its response to the forces acting upon it. For the men and women in States of Motion, imbalance is a way of life. Set in Michigan small towns both real and fictional, the stories in Laura Hulthen Thomas's collection take place against a backdrop of economic turmoil and the domestic cost of the war on terror. As familiar places, privilege, and faith disappear, what remains leaves these broken characters wondering what hope is left for them. These stories follow blue collars and white, cops and immigrants, and mothers and sons as they defend a world that is quickly vanishing.
The eight stories in States of Motion follow tough, quixotic characters struggling to reinvent themselves even as they cling to what they've lost. A grieving father embraces his town's suspicions of him as the sole suspect in his daughter's disappearance. A driving instructor struggles to care for his abusive mother between training lessons with two flirtatious teens. A behavioral researcher studying the fear response must face her own fears when her childhood attacker returns to ask for her forgiveness. Conditioned by their traumatic pasts to be both sympathetic and numb to suffering, the characters in these stories clutch at a chance to find peace on the other side of terror. From the isolated roadways of Michigan's countryside to the research labs of a major university, the way forward is both one last hope and a deep-seated fear.
The profoundly emotional stories in States of Motion will interest any reader of contemporary literary fiction.
Come and learn about volunteer options with Washtenaw Literacy! You can help change the world, one word at a time. Please register if you plan to attend. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at info@washtenawliteracy.org.
Come and learn about volunteer options with Washtenaw Literacy! You can help change the world, one word at a time. Please register if you plan to attend. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at info@washtenawliteracy.org.
Big time Hollywood adventure will benefit Michigan’s smallest patients as Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle premieres at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater in support of Jo Elyn Nyman Anchors Programs for Children at Hospice of Michigan (HOM) and Arbor Hospice.
2-TIERED TICKETED EVENT
Nicola’s Books presents author Chris VanAllsburg, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Please join us for this special author signing of Jumanji! The appearance of the renowned author of Jumanji, The Polar Express and Zathura, precedes the Ann Arbor premiere of the new Sony movie Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, a fundraiser for JoElyn Nyman Anchors Programs for Children at Hospice of Michigan and Arbor Hospice.
Tuesday, December 5th at 7:00 pm
John U. Bacon
The Great Halifax Explosion
About the Author:
John U. Bacon is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including Three and Out; Fourth and Long; and Endzone. He appears often on NPR and national television, and teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and the University of Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and son.
Saturday, December 2nd 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
A Merry Mitten Holiday Event with the SCBWI
Looking for that perfect gift for a youngster or new parent? Join us for a signing event with six local authors who are members of the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators. Join us and meet and talk with this wonderful array of authors. For more information regarding SCBWI - Michigan go to https://michigan.scbwi.org
Authors Participating:
Join us for an evening of discussing literature in both the novel and short story format with University of Michigan Zell Writers’ professors Douglas Trevor and Claire Vaye Watkins as they discuss Trevor’s new collection of short stories, The Book of Wonders. Both authors have a published novel and collection of short stories.
A lonely female accountant falls for a man who seems to have stepped out of a Greek myth; a scholar uncovers a lost Shakespearean couplet and decides to quit academia; a celebrated author experiments with downloading a story from her brain and uploading it to another. In these and other stories, Douglas Trevor explores situations--both unsettling and comic--in which people lose their bearings, reinvent themselves, and resolve, sometimes haplessly, to make sense of their lives. Characters are kidnapped by teenagers; they are bitten by raccoons. Some of them go on Prozac; while others rely on bowling to persevere. Running through these nine stories is the ghostly, and at times material, presence of books themselves. What does it mean to turn to books for comfort? Or to uncover the ways in which the stories we absorb and revisit not only open up worlds but also close them off? In a variety of moods and settings, The Book of Wonders reminds us not only of the struggle to connect, but also of what the most unlikely of people may realize they share.
