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Robert Gwaltney will visit City Lights on Saturday, April 11th at 3:00pm to share his new novel, SING DOWN THE MOON, in conversation with Jennifer McGaha.Memory is a ghost, and she's coming home.
Sixteen-year-old Leontyne Skye longs to escape Good Hope, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia—and the cursed birthright that binds her to it. For generations, the women of the Skye line have tended Damascus, an ancient fig tree whose siren song lures the dead across the river. The figs it bears are harvested to create Redemption, a drug that tethers the island to the dead, slowly consuming the Skye women from the inside out.
Leontyne’s mother, Eulalee, is already disappearing—memory, hair, teeth—into the salt-stung air. And Leontyne is unraveling too, since the accident known as Tribulation Day, when she lost her hand and all sense of who she was before. As her memories resurface in fractured pieces, and her childhood friends, Rebecca and Avery, twist truth to their own ends, Leontyne faces a cruel inheritance aiming to destroy her.
When Journey Wintergarden arrives, mysterious and magnetic, precarious relationships unravel, threatening to upend everything, derailing Leontyne’s plans to escape Good Hope. As desire, betrayal, and memory collide, the haints grow restless. Leontyne’s refusal to tend the tree means shattering the fragile balance between the living and the dead. Accepting her fate means becoming the Great Redeemer—and losing herself completely.
A graduate of Florida State University, Robert Gwaltney presently reside in Atlanta Georgia with his partner. By day, he serves as Vice President of Easter Seals North Georgia, Inc., a non-profit organization strengthening children and their families at the most critical times in their development. Through his non-profit work, he is a champion for early childhood literacy. In all the hours between, he writes. Robert was the 2023 Georgia Author of the Year with his debut novel, The Cicada Tree.
Jennifer McGaha is the author of three works of creative nonfiction including The Joy Document, a collection of fifty essays celebrating midlife (coming November 19!), Flat Broke with Two Goats, a 2018 OverDrive Big Library Read, and Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, a Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award finalist. An Appalachian native, Jennifer lives in a wooded North Carolina hollow with her husband, two cats, four unruly dogs, nine relatively tame dairy goats, and an ever-changing number of chickens.
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3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779
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