Salon@615 welcomes Barbara Kingsolver for a discussion and signing of her new book, Unsheltered, as part of our Salon@615 speaker series. This event will take place at the Paschall Theater at Montgomery Bell Academy. Tickets are not required to attend, but you can reserve your seat for free in advance by clicking here and registering to attend the event. Approximately 100 auditorium tickets will be available on-site the day of the event.
Event Guidelines
This event is free and open to the public. In order to join the signing line and have any books signed at this event, you must purchase a copy of Unsheltered from Parnassus Books either in-store, over the phone, or online. Your purchase will include a signing line ticket that will serve as your admission into the signing line. As a Salon@615 patron, you will receive 10% off your purchase of Unsheltered.
About Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver’s books of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction are widely translated and have won numerous literary awards. She is the founder of the PEN/Bellwether Prize, and in 2000 was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Prior to her writing career she studied and worked as a biologist. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia.
About Unsheltered
The New York Times bestselling author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, and The Poisonwood Bible and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a timely novel that interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval.
Willa Knox has always prided herself on being the embodiment of responsibility for her family. Which is why it’s so unnerving that she’s arrived at middle age with nothing to show for her hard work and dedication but a stack of unpaid bills and an inherited brick home in Vineland, New Jersey, that is literally falling apart. The magazine where she worked has folded, and the college where her husband had tenure has closed. The dilapidated house is also home to her ailing and cantankerous Greek father-in-law and her two grown children: her stubborn, free-spirited daughter, Tig, and her dutiful debt-ridden, ivy educated son, Zeke, who has arrived with his unplanned baby in the wake of a life-shattering development.
In an act of desperation, Willa begins to investigate the history of her home, hoping that the local historical preservation society might take an interest and provide funding for its direly needed repairs. Through her research into Vineland’s past and its creation as a Utopian community, she discovers a kindred spirit from the 1880s, Thatcher Greenwood.
A science teacher with a lifelong passion for honest investigation, Thatcher finds himself under siege in his community for telling the truth: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting new theory recently published by Charles Darwin. Thatcher’s friendships with a brilliant woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor draw him into a vendetta with the town’s most powerful men. At home, his new wife and status-conscious mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his financial worries and the news that their elegant house is structurally unsound.
Brilliantly executed and compulsively readable, Unsheltered is the story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum, as they navigate the challenges of surviving a world in the throes of major cultural shifts. In this mesmerizing story told in alternating chapters, Willa and Thatcher come to realize that though the future is uncertain, even unnerving, shelter can be found in the bonds of kindred—whether family or friends—and in the strength of the human spirit.
Parking:
There is ample visitor parking on the west side of campus, and a campus map can be found by clicking here.
More about Salon@615
Salon@615 presents bestselling authors free to the public through a unique partnership between the Nashville Public Library, The Nashville Public Library Foundation, Humanities Tennesse, BookPage magazine, and Parnassus Books. Together, we nurture and celebrate the literary life of Nashville by presenting author events and book signings to our community. Since its inception in early 2011, Salon@615 has become a regular and vital author reading series on Nashville's cultural calendar.
