About this Event
About the Book:
It’s 1953, and for Nick Taylor, WWII veteran turned company lawyer, oil is the key to the future. He takes the train into the city for work and returns to the peaceful streets of the suburbs and to his wife, Bet, former codebreaker now housewife, and their two children, Katherine and Harry. Nick comes from humble origins but thanks to his work for American Oil, he can provide every comfort for his family, including Last House, a secluded country escape. Deep in the Vermont mountains, the Taylors are free from the stresses of modern life. Bet doesn’t have to worry about the Russian H-bombs that haunt her dreams, and the children roam free in the woods. Last House is a place that could survive the end of the world.
It’s 1968, and America is on the brink of change. Protestors fill the streets to challenge everything from the Vietnam War to racism in the wake of MLK’s shooting—to the country's reliance on Big Oil. As Katherine makes her first forays into adult life, she’s caught up in the current of the time and struggles to reconcile her ideals with the stable and privileged childhood her Greatest Generation parents worked so hard to provide. But when the Movement shifts in a more radical direction, each member of the Taylor family will be forced to reckon with the consequences of the choices they’ve made for the causes they believed in.
About the Author:
Jessica Shattuck is the author of the novels Last House, , a New York Times Bestseller and winner of The New England Book Award; ; and , which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Boston Globe best book of the year, and a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Winship Award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Glamour, Open City, and The Tampa Review among other publications. Her other writing has appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Wired, The Believer Magazine, and The Boston Globe.
About the Moderator:
Rebecca Donner’s third book is the New York Times bestseller ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, and the Chautauqua Prize, and was shortlisted for the Plutarch Award. She was a 2023-2024 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and a 2023 Visiting Scholar at Oxford. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London, and in 2022, she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Her next book is a biography of Sophie Scholl, to be published by Random House in 2026.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Beacon Hill Books & Cafe, 71 Charles Street, Boston, United States
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