Boston Book Festival

SPARK: Reading Series. In this session, you’ll hear three authors whose work takes us to far-flung locales: from the Scottish Highlands to the wilds of Calabria to surreal interplanetary worlds—all of them peopled with richly depicted characters who blaze with life. Juliet Grames’s The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a wild ride through the crime-ridden cliffs of Southern Italy, where an American woman tries to solve a murder—and find meaning in her life at the same time, described by The Boston Globe as a “deeply compelling, well-crafted mystery.” In NY Times bestselling author Margot Livesey’s historical novel, The Road From Belhaven, a young girl with the gift of second sight sets out to forge her own future at a time when women’s options were limited by circumstance. “Margot Livesey is an incandescent writer…always imbuing her characters with astonishing humanity and grace” (NY Times). The stories in Ruben Reyes Jr.’s There is a Rio Grande in Heaven range widely across time and place, creating dreamlike worlds that help us to make sense of our own. "Tethered to historical fact and enlivened by speculative elements, Reyes' fiction brings into focus the troubling legacies that stalk so many Central American nations." (Kirkus) This session will be moderated by Whitney Scharer, founder of the Arlington Author Salon and author of The Age of Light.