Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum with Tara Conklin and Kristen Millares Young

Unfolding during the moody Pacific Northwest winter of 1951, follows Bernadette Baston, scholar of child development and language acquisition, as she travels to a penitentiary on the remote island Elita in the Puget Sound to consult on a curious case: two guards have discovered an animal-like adolescent girl living alone in the cold woods beyond the Pr*son’s walls. There are few answers, but many people who know more than they are saying. According to official reports, the girl, dubbed Atalanta, does not speak. Is her silence protecting someone? The Pr*son warden, court-appointed guardian, and police detective embroil Bernadette in resolving a secret that the tight-knit island community has long held, and her investment in the girl’s case soon becomes more personal than professional. As a mother, wife, and woman bound by mid-twentieth-century expectations, Bernadette strategizes to retain the fragile control she has over her own freedom, identity, and future, which becomes inextricably tied to solving Atalanta’s case.

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum's most recent collection of fiction, What We Do with the Wreckage, won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her two previous collections are Swimming with Strangers and This Life She’s Chosen, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick of the Month. Elita is her first novel. She lives near Seattle.

Tara Conklin was born on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands and raised in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Community Board, The Last Romantics, and The House Girl.

Kristen Millares Young is a journalist, essayist, and author of the novel Subduction, named a staff pick by The Paris Review. Winner of Nautilus and IPPY awards, Subduction was a finalist for two International Latino Book Awards and Foreword Indies Book of the Year. Her work appears in the Washington Post, Guardian, Literary Hub, and the anthologies Advanced Creative Nonfiction, Latina Outsiders, and Alone Together. A former Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence, she is the editor of Seismic, a Washington State Book Award finalist. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She was the 2023 Distinguished Visiting Writer for Seattle University and UW Bothell.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States