The Morristown Festival of Books is back!
Although the seventh annual edition of this popular festival was canceled last fall by the pandemic, organizers are optimistic for October 2021. To whet the public’s appetite, they are streaming talks with four top authors next month.
On Feb. 20-21, 2021, the Morristown Festival of Books at Home roster features Kristin Hannah (The Four Winds, The Nightingale), Nadia Owusu (Aftershocks), David Michaels (Eleanor) and V.E. Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue).
Separate registrations are required for each Zoom session; all are free except for the Hannah talk, which is $35 and includes a signed copy of her latest book.
More details are below.
From the Morristown Festival of Books:
The Festival is thrilled to announce our new Morristown Festival of Books @Home initiative!
We’re kicking off in February 2021 with best-selling authors Kristin Hannah, V.E. Schwab, David Michaelis, and debut memoirist Nadia Owusu.
This two-day event, February 20th & 21st, enables us to continue our tradition of connecting our community through the power of the written word, while we simultaneously look forward to days ahead when we can safely resume our treasured in-person Festival.
The sessions will be held through Zoom. Upon completion of your registration (separate registration for each speaker required), you will receive an email with the log-in details. Each session will feature an engaging dialogue between the author and moderator, and questions from the audience will be taken through the chat feature during the last portion of the interview.
We are grateful for the contributions of our sponsors who have supported this event.
Authors and Registration
Saturday, February 20th
2pm – 3pm (EST)
Kristin Hannah in discussion with Carol Fitzgerald
Ticketed event: $35 event fee includes a signed copy of The Four Winds, shipped by priority mail to your home, and entry to the online author appearance.
Kristin Hannah is an award-winning and bestselling author of more than 21 novels. In addition to her newest book, The Four Winds, she has written the international blockbusters The Nightingale and The Great Alone, as well as Winter Garden, Night Road, and Firefly Lane.
The film of Hannah’s much-loved novel The Nightingale (published in 43 languages), starring Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning, is slated for December 2021, and Netflix is releasing a 10-part series based on Firefly Lane in early February 2021. The Great Alone has also been optioned for the screen.
Kristin’s work touches millions of people. Firefly Lane became a runaway bestseller in 2009, a touchstone novel that brought women together, and The Nightingale, in 2015, was voted a best book of the year by Amazon, Buzzfeed, iTunes, Library Journal, Paste, the Wall Street Journal and The Week. Additionally, the novel won the coveted Goodreads and People’s Choice Awards. The audiobook of The Nightingale won the Audiobook of the Year Award in the fiction category. The Great Alone won the 2018 Goodreads Best Historical Novel of the Year and appeared on numerous “best of” lists. Renowned for her strong women characters, Hannah’s books are read, discussed, and revered by book clubs all over the country.
Kristin is a former-lawyer-turned writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.
The Four Winds: About the Book
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes an epic novel of love and heroism and hope, set against the backdrop of one of America’s most defining eras—the Great Depression.
Texas, 1934. Millions are out of work and drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance.
In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli—like so many of her neighbors—must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. The Four Winds is an indelible portrait of America and the American Dream, as seen through the eyes of one indomitable woman whose courage and sacrifice will come to define a generation
REGISTER FOR KRISTIN HANNAH EVENT HERE »
Saturday, February 20th
3:30pm – 4:30 pm (EST)
Nadia Owusu in discussion with Carol Fitzgerald
Free event: There is no fee for this presentation but registration is required to attend.
Nadia Owusu is a Brooklyn-based writer and urban planner. She is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her lyric essay “So Devilish a Fire” won the Atlas Review chapbook contest. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, the Washington Post’s The Lily, Literary Review, Electric Literature, Epiphany, and Catapult. Aftershocks is her first book.
Aftershocks: About the Book
In the tradition of The Glass Castle, Aftershocks is a deeply felt memoir about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.
Young Nadia followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian-American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was 13.
After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo. With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless, and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together. Aftershocks is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand.
The best way to thank our generous authors for their time is to purchase their books. We have arranged for bookplate-signed copies of Aftershocks through our partner bookseller Bookends: click here. Your purchase also helps support the Festival, for which we are tremendously grateful!
REGISTER FOR NADIA OWUSU EVENT HERE »
Sunday, February 21st
2pm – 3pm (EST)
David Michaelis in discussion with Bill Goldstein
Free event: There is no fee for this presentation but registration is required to attend.
David Michaelis is the New York Times bestselling author of Schulz and Peanuts and N. C. Wyeth, which won the Ambassador Book Award for Biography. His writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, American Heritage, LIFE, Reader’s Digest, American Scholar, and Best American Essays. His newest book is the New York Times bestseller Eleanor. David lives in New York with his extended family.
Eleanor: About the Book
When David Michaelis met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, he was four years old and couldn’t have known that he’d later devote 11 years to studying the great “white-haired lady.” Backstage at the WGBH-TV studio where his mother produced Eleanor’s show, Prospects of Mankind, he simply asked her for a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. Now with Eleanor, prize-winning biographer David Michaelis pulls back the curtain and delves into Roosevelt’s inner life as never before with this revelatory, intimate, and bold new cradle-to-grave look at one of the 20th century’s greatest figures.
Eleanor Roosevelt spent most of her life in the spotlight, rising from a shy, self-conscious girl from a well-known wealthy family to an iconic First Lady and activist, yet few really knew her. Featuring new interviews and resources that no biographer has previously referenced, Michaelis recounts Eleanor’s troubled childhood with an alcoholic father and affectless mother, her complicated marriage, and her partnership with the great President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her trailblazing 12 years as First Lady, and her humanitarian accomplishments.
Eleanor chronicles not only the timeline of her life and achievements, such as guiding the drafting of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but gives us a universally relatable story of a great woman’s lifelong search for love. Michaelis has a lively cinematic style and the lengthy odyssey flies by, as many of the best biographies do, and reaffirms her as an epic perennial figure of democracy whom the world treasures.
The best way to thank our generous authors for their time is to purchase their books. We have arranged for bookplate-signed copies of Eleanor through our partner bookseller Bookends: click here. Your purchase also helps support the Festival, for which we are tremendously grateful!
REGISTER FOR DAVID MICHAELIS EVENT HERE »
Sunday, February 21st
3:30 – 4:30 pm (EST)
V.E. Schwab in discussion with moderator (to be announced)
Free event: There is no fee for this presentation but registration is required to attend.
Victoria “V. E.” Schwab is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 20 books, including the acclaimed Shades of Magic series, Villains series, Monster of Verity duology, Cassidy Blake series, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Her work has received critical acclaim and been featured in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Washington Post and more, translated into more than two dozen languages, and has been optioned for television and film. When she’s not haunting Paris streets or trudging up English hillsides, she lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and is usually tucked in the corner of a coffee shop, dreaming up monsters.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue: About the Book
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is a genre-defying and New York Times bestselling breakout novel from author Victoria “V.E.” Schwab.
France, 1714: In a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever—and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave her mark on the world. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore and he remembers her name.
Addie is a stunning, sweeping story along the lines of The Time Traveler’s Wife or Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life. This is Schwab’s tour de force—a gorgeous, next-level book about the defiant joy that takes readers across centuries exposing them to history and art through Addie’s eyes.
The best way to thank our generous authors for their time is to purchase their books. We have arranged for bookplate-signed copies of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue through our partner bookseller Bookends: click here. Your purchase also helps support the Festival, for which we are tremendously grateful!
REGISTER FOR V.E. SCHWAB EVENT HERE »
Our Moderators
Carol Fitzgerald
Carol Fitzgerald is the president and founder of The Book Report Network (TBRN)—a group of websites about books and authors, including Bookreporter.com and ReadingGroupGuides.com, that have become the gathering places for a large and devoted community of booklovers since 1996.
Carol is known for her in-depth author interviews. In 2019, the company launched the “Bookreporter Talks To” video/podcast series, which she hosts. In 2020, “Bookaccino Live: A Lively Talk About Books” and “Bookaccino Live: A Live Book Group Event” were added to the company’s video programming.
In addition, the company’s Authors on the Web division provides website design and development, newsletter design and strategy, as well as marketing consultation for authors and publishers. To date, the company has built websites for more than 350 authors and continues to maintain more than 100 websites.
Bill Goldstein
Bill Goldstein reviews books and interviews authors for NBC’s “Weekend Today” in New York, and was the founding editor of the New York Times books website. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Goldstein received a PhD in English from the City University of New York Graduate Center.
He is writing a biography of Larry Kramer, to be published by Crown, and worked on the book as a 2019-2020 fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library. From 2010-19, Goldstein was the curator of public programming at Roosevelt House, the public policy institute of Hunter College, which is located in the townhouse on East 65th Street where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt lived from 1908 into their White House years.
His book, The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year that Changed Literature, was published in 2017.
FAQs
Q: If I can’t attend the session I registered for, will they be recorded and made available to see at a later date?
A: Yes. The sessions will be recorded and all registrants will receive an email with a link to view the recorded session online.
Q: If I order from Bookends, when will I receive my book?
A: Your book will be shipped within 48 hours of your order placement. Please note that Kristin Hannah’s book releases on February 2nd so will begin shipping on that date.
Q: What is the status of the Morristown Festival of Books weekend, usually held in October?
A: We are planning for a Festival on Oct. 8 & 9, 2021, though its scope and format are yet to be determined as we keep a careful eye on public health guidelines. We will have updates in the coming months. Be sure to stay apprised by signing up for our Newsletter at the bottom of this page.
Q: Can I still support the Festival even if I can’t attend one of these virtual events?
A: Yes! We welcome and greatly appreciate a donation of any size to support the Morristown Festival of Books. Click here to visit our Sponsorship page on the Community Foundation of New Jersey Web site. Thank you!
