About this Event
Harvard Book Store welcomes CLAIRE MESSUD—award-winning author of The Woman Upstairs and The Emperor's Children, and Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University—for a discussion of her new novel This Strange Eventful History.
Ticketing
There are two ticket options for this event. Books will be pre-signed by the author.
Book Included: Admission for one and one hardcover copy of This Strange Eventful History pre-signed by the author.
Admission Only: Admission for one.
About This Strange Eventful History
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family’s strangeness; of François’s union with Barbara, a woman so culturally different they can barely comprehend one another; of Chloe, the result of that union, who believes that telling these buried stories will bring them all peace.
Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family’s history, Claire Messud animates her characters’ rich interior lives amid the social and political upheaval of the recent past. As profoundly intimate as it is expansive, This Strange Eventful History is “a tour de force . . . one of those rare novels that a reader doesn’t merely read but lives through with the characters” (Yiyun Li).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Cambridge, United States
USD 12.00 to USD 38.00
