Upcoming Events

Saturday, May 11th @ 3 PM

ORDINARY BEAR by C.B. BERNARD:

Dark and humorous, literary but with the heart of a detective novel, Ordinary Bear weighs the burden of grief while exploring our boundless capacity for humanity, kindness, and hope.

Farley stands out among his Iñupiat neighbors in the Alaska village he calls home, both white and enormous, like the hungry polar bears that wander its streets. Jovial and a little hapless, he works as an investigator for a North Slope oil company, passing the long Arctic winters drinking whiskey with the village’s preacher and playing in the weekly poker game hosted by its matriarch and mayor.

When his young daughter visits from thousands of miles away in Portland—where she lives with her mother, who despises him—a shocking moment of violence leaves her dead and Farley injured. Crippled by his wounds and hamstrung with guilt over his inability to save her, he goes home to Oregon to try to make amends.

There he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a single mother and her daughter. With their help, he begins the slow process of healing—until the girl goes missing. Faced with the opportunity to do what he couldn’t do for his own daughter, Farley sets out on a brutal odyssey through Portland’s quirky and dangerous underworld, using his wits and his fists to try to save her life along with the shattered remains of his own.

About the Author:

C. B. Bernard is the author of the novel Small Animals Caught in Traps and Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now, a Publishers Weekly and National Geographic top pick and finalist for the Oregon Book Award in nonfiction. His fiction and essays have appeared in Catapult, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and elsewhere. Though he called Alaska and Oregon home for much of his life, he now lives on the coast of Rhode Island’s South County with his wife, Kim, a retriever named Nessie, and the ghosts of a couple of dogs.

Saturday, June 1st @ 2 PM

THE SILENCE by MARY MCGARRY MORRIS:

There was the moment eight-year-old Ruth Corrigan ran away from playing in the woods with her best friend, and then the moment after, when Ceely was gone. Murdered. Now the silence of that day lives within Ruth. Lives in the judgment she sees in the faces of so many in the small town she still calls home. Ruth may be older now, tougher, a cop by trade, but her life has been unraveling ever since that tragic day in the woods. Alcohol, sex, broken marriages--nothing can lighten the truth she knows inside.

Until the child-killer returns, free and unencumbered. A predator who will act again unless Ruth can prove him guilty. Only no one will listen to a police officer on suspended duty, a woman whose life has been one personal disaster after the next, not even Maddie Pardeau Klein, her dead playmate's older sister. It's up to Ruth alone to trap the vicious criminal before he strikes once more. No matter what it takes. Or who gets hurt.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Mary McGarry Morris grew up in Vermont and now lives on the North Shore in Massachusetts. Her first novel, Vanished, was nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Dangerous Woman was chosen by Time magazine as one of the “Five Best Novels of the Year” and was made into a major motion picture. Songs in Ordinary Time was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, which propelled it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks, in addition to being adapted for a television movie. Her most recent novel is The Silence.

Saturday, June 8th @ 1 PM

THE STANFIELD CHRONICLES by DAVID TORY:

1620, the year the Separatists arrived in America, is sometimes considered to be the year the process of English settlements began in Northern Virginia, subsequently named New England. In fact, the New England coast had been the subject of numerous surveys, expeditions and attempted settlements during the previous twenty years.

The Separatists are considered, in addition, to have travelled to an unknown country driven solely by their desire for religious freedom. In fact, many others explored and identified commercial opportunities in New England. The Separatists’ desire was fed and supported by those who wanted settlements in New England for commercial gain and to protect New England from encroachment by the French in the North and the Virginia Company in the South.

The Stanfield Chronicles is the story of the opening up of New England, prior to and after the arrival of the Separatists, seen through the eyes of a young man called Isaac Stanfield.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Retired from his careers in the computer industry and philanthropy, David Tory has spent the last few years researching the arrival of English colonists in New England. Exploration: The Stanfield Chronicles is the result of those years of research, following the fictional Isaac Stanfield through a life of adventure in the early seventeenth century. Originally from England, for 30 years David Tory has called Essex County, Massachusetts, his home with his wife, Helen.