About this Event
Please join us in person on Wednesday, May 15th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Sarah Langan's new novel, A Better World. Sarah will be in conversation with Exile MVP Gillian Flynn!
About A Better World:
You'll be safe here. That's what the tour guide tells the Farmer-Bowens when they visit Plymouth Valley, a walled-off company town with clean air, pantries that never go empty, and blue-ribbon schools. On a very trial basis, the company offers to hire Linda Farmer's hus-band, Russell, a numbers genius, and relocate her whole family to this bucolic paradise for the .0001 percent. Though Linda will have to sacrifice her medical career back home, the family jumps at the opportunity. They'd be crazy not to take it. With the outside world falling apart, this might be the Farmer-Bowens' last chance.
But fitting in takes work. The pampered locals distrust outsiders, snubbing Linda, Russell, and their teen twins. And the residents fervently adhere to a group of customs and beliefs called Hollow...but what exactly is Hollow?
It's Linda who brokers acceptance, by volunteering her medical skills to the most influential people in town through their pet charity, ActHollow. In the months afterward, everything seems fine. Sure, Russell starts hyper-ventilating through a paper bag in the middle of the night, and the kids have become secretive, but living in Plymouth Valley is worth sacrificing their family's closeness, isn't it? At least they'll survive. The trouble is, the locals never say what they think. They seem scared. And Hollow's ominous culminating event, the Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, is coming.
Linda is warned by her husband and her powerful new friends to stop asking questions. But the more she learns, the more frightened she becomes. Should the Farmer-Bowens be fighting to stay, or fighting to get out?
Sarah Langan's latest novel, A Better World, is gleefully ruthless in its dissection of wealth, power, and privilege, timely in its depiction of a self-destructing world--and it is a prescient warning to us all.
About the authors:
Sarah Langan's a three-time Bram Stoker award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Her most recent novels are A BETTER WORLD (April, 2024) and GOOD NEIGHBORS (February, 2021), which Gabino Iglesias at NPR called, "One of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia I've ever read." Her previous novels are THE KEEPER, THE MISSING, and AUDREY's DOOR. She has an MFA from Columbia University, an MS in Environmental Health Science/ Toxicology from NYU, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer/director JT Petty, their two daughters, and two maniac rabbits.
Gillian Flynn is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Gone Girl, for which she wrote the Golden Globe-nominated screenplay, and the New York Times bestsellers Dark Places and Sharp Objects. She was the showrunner for Amazon's Utopia, and co-wrote Widows with director Steve McQueen. Her latest project is Gillian Flynn Books in partnership with Zando, an imprint which is committed to publishing books across genres that are propulsive, culturally incisive, and unexpected. She is also a former critic for Entertainment Weekly. She lives in Chicago with her husband and children.
About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Sarah and Gillian will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online after the event.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
