Kicking off our 2024 literary event season is Lignum Vita Award-winning author Donna Hemans (Tea by the Sea), discussing her lyrical and layered new work, The House of Plain Truth. Inspired by Hemans’s family history, the novel follows Pearline, who returns to her childhood home in Jamaica after her father’s passing and learns her father’s puzzling deathbed wish: that she find her siblings—whom she hasn’t seen in 60 years—and discover the secret that tore her family apart. Maisy Card (author of These Ghosts Are Family, shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize) joins Hemans for a rich conversation on the novel, which Card describes as a “compelling family mystery and a moving story of generational healing and reconciliation, but also a profound portrait of the emotional aftermath of voluntary and forced migration.” After the conversation, Hemans will sign books.

Presented in partnership with the The Center for Fiction

*This event is in-person and livestreamed.