A Reading from New Novels

Jason Mott has a BFA in Fiction and an MFA in Poetry, from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He was nominated for a 2009 Pushcart Prize award and Entertainment Weekly listed him as one of their 10 “New Hollywood: Next Wave” people to watch. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Returned.  The Wonder of All Things (Mira) is his latest novel. On an ordinary day, a plane crashes into a crowd of spectators. After the dust clears, a thirteen-year-old girl named Ava is found huddled beneath a pocket of rubble with her best friend, Wash. He is injured and bleeding, and when Ava places her hands over him, his wounds disappear.  Ava has an unusual gift: she can heal others of their physical ailments. Now the whole world knows, and people begin flocking to her small town, eager to catch a glimpse of The Miracle Child. But Ava's ability comes at a cost, and as she grows weaker with each healing, she finds herself having to decide just how much she's willing to give up in order to save the ones she loves most.

Michael Golding’s first novel, Simple Prayers, was published in 1994. It has been translated into nine foreign languages and a film adaptation is in development. Benjamin's Gift, his second novel, was published in 2000. Golding’s translation of Alessandro Baricco's stage play Novecento opened the 2002 Edinburgh Festival and his screenplay adaptation of the best-selling novel Silk was released in 2007. Directed by Francois Girard and starring Keira Knightley and Alfred Molina, it was a featured selection at the Toronto Film Festival. A Poet of the Invisible World (Picador) is a spiritual tale of a boy born in thirteenth-century Persia born with four ears, and his painful journey to transcendence.

Scott Wilbanks graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oklahoma, where he garnered severed gymnastics titles. He currently lives in New Zealand. The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster (Sourcebooks Landmark) is his debut novel. Annabelle Aster doesn't bow to convention—not even that of space and time—which makes the 1890s Kansas wheat field that has appeared in her modern-day San Francisco garden easy to accept. Even more peculiar is Elsbeth, the truculent schoolmarm who sends Annie letters through the mysterious brass mailbox perched on the picket fence that now divides their two worlds. Annie and Elsbeth's search for an explanation to the hiccup in the universe linking their homes leads to an unsettling discovery—and potential disaster for both of them. Together they must solve the mystery of what connects them before one of them is convicted of a murder that has yet to happen...and yet somehow already did.