What's going on? Boswell edition - Samira Shackle, Lori Rader-Day, Viola Shipman and Susan Mallery, Myriam J.A. Chancy, Frances Wilson

What's going on? Boswell edition - it's a packed week!

Samira Shackle, author of Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City
in Conversation with Audrey Nowakowski for a Virtual Event
Monday, October 25, 2 pm
Register for this event here.

This event has been a bit of a labor of love, meaning I love this book and I am laboring to convince you to attend. I'm sure you're thinking, how does what's going on in Karachi affect me? But it does! Megacities with disparate groups of people living together due to political turmoil and environmental change are part of today's world. Tribal loyalties are a thing, as are attempts to overcome them.

Karachi - Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of twenty million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, who to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites whose individual experiences tell the bigger story of Karachi over the past decade as it has endured a terrifying crime wave: a period in which the Taliban arrive in Pakistan, adding to the daily perils for its residents and pushing their city into the international spotlight.

The Economist calls Karachi Vice “A moving account of the struggles of everyday heroes - and of the unhappy metropolis that needs them.” And from Rabeea Saleem, writing for the Times Literary Supplement: “Sobering and gripping… meticulously constructs a vibrant mosaic of a city’s underbelly, while disentangling the ways in which Karachi is enmeshed with crime lords, gangs, political interests and militants.”

Samira Shackle is Editor of New Humanist magazine and a regular contributor to the Guardian Long Read. She frequently reports from Pakistan, where she has family, and spent extensive time there working on this book. She has twice been a media fellow at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, and in 2019 she was made a MacDowell fellow. Audrey Nowakowski is a Lake Effect Host and Producer and has also worked at WMSE. She is a graduate of Cardinal Stritch University.

Lori Rader-Day, author of Death at Greenway
in Conversation with Rachel Piper at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts
Wednesday, October 27, 1 pm
Tickets for this event are $25. Purchase here.

The Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts, Books and Company, and Boswell present Anthony and Mary Higgins Clark award–winning thriller author Lori Rader-Day chats about her brand new novel of historical intrigue set at Agatha Christie’s holiday estate. In conversation with Rachel Piper, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Senior Director of Digital Strategy (not to mention huge Agatha Christie fan!).

Books & Company will have Lori Rader-Day's other books for sale, as well as a selection of Agatha Christie titles.

Death at Greenway is a captivating suspense novel. During World War II, ten displaced children stayed at Agatha Christie's country home, while London was bombed by the Germans. Inspired by this fascinating, little-known fact, Death at Greenway re-imagines what it would have been like to hide away from the war in a murder novelist's house. The result is a dark, twisting novel about nurses who come to Greenway to care for evacuated children. But when a body is discovered nearby, the idyllic setting becomes host to a deadly mystery.

Ann Cleeves calls Rader-Day’s latest, “A wonderfully atmospheric, beautifully written and entirely credible evocation of wartime Britain.” And from The New York Times Book Review, "Irresistible... a Golden Age homage, an elegantly constructed mystery that on every page reinforces the message that everyone counts.”

 
Lori Rader-Day is the Edgar Award–nominated author of The Lucky One, Under a Dark Sky, and The Day I Died. She is co-chair of the mystery readers’ conference Murder and Mayhem in Chicago and served as the national president of Sisters in Crime. The Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts is located at 3270 Mitchell Park Dr in Brookfield, between Brookfield and Barker Roads.

Rachel Piper a massive Agatha Christie fan, an award-winning editor, writer and digital strategist, and a former bookseller in Salt Lake City.

Viola Shipman (Wade Rouse), author of The Secret of Snow and Susan Mallery, author of The Christmas Wedding Guest
A conversation with Viola Shipman and Susan Mallery
Wednesday, October 27, 6 pm
Register for this event here.

Authors Viola Shipman (pen name of Wade Rouse) and Susan Mallery join us for a special evening of conversation about their new, Christmas-season inspired novels.This event is cohosted by Books and Company of Oconomowoc, McLean and Eakin of of Petoskey, MI, and Boswell Book Company.

Shipman's latest is The Secret of Snow, a heartwarming story about starting over, family traditions, and the enduring power of love and friendship. A 50-year-old meteorologist returns to her hometown in Northern Michigan after being replaced with AI at her station in Palm Springs. Publishers Weekly called it "a beautifully written story... Fans of women’s fiction won’t be able to put this down."

Mallery's book, The Christmas Wedding Guest, is set in the small mountain town of Wishing Tree, Washington, where the town's life blood is the celebration of Christmas. Sisters Reggie and Dena Somerville, who, guilted into being bridesmaids at their parents' vow renewal ceremony, find love in the most unexpected of places - their small hometown.

Viola Shipman is the pen of memoirist Wade Rouse. Writing as Shipman, he is author of The Summer Cottage, The Charm Bracelet, and The Hope Chest. Susan Mallery is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of novels about the relationships that define women's lives, including titles such as The Stepsisters, The Summer of Sunshine and Margot, and Before Summer Ends.

Thursday, October 28, 7 pm
Myriam JA Chancy, author of What Storm, What Thunder
in conversation with Mike Gauyo for a Virtual Event
Register for this event here.

Boswell Book Company, Youthaiti, and Alliance Française de Milwaukee present an evening with Haitian-Canadian-American writer Myriam JA Chancy, author of What Storm, What Thunder, the first work in English to present a gripping recollection of the devastating 2010 Haiti earthquake, one of the worst natural disasters in history. In conversation with Mike Gauyo, founder of Black Boy Writes. This event is cohosted by Youthaiti, a Milwaukee-based nonprofit that promotes sustainable sanitation and agriculture in rural Haiti, and Alliance Française de Milwaukee, part of the largest network of French language and cultural centers in the world.

At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. The story follows the inner lives of folks affected by the disaster - a wealthy expat, his architect daughter, a drug trafficker, emigrant musician and taxi driver, and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them and others.

Artfully weaving together these lives, witness is given to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man. What Storm, What Thunder is a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit. Edwidge Danticat calls Chancy’s novel, “Sublime. A striking and formidable novel by one of our most brilliant writers and storytellers.”

Myriam JA Chancy is HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California and a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mike Gauyo is currently an Executive Story Editor on Netflix’s Ginny and Georgia and was previously a Story Editor on HBO's Insecure.

Friday, October 29, Noon
Frances Wilson, author of Burning Man: The Trials of DH Lawrence
in Conversation with Bill Goldstein for a Virtual Event
Register for this event here.

Boswell Book Company once again reaches across the Atlantic to team up with Scotland’s Boswell Book Festival to present a joint event featuring critic and journalist Frances Wilson, author of Burning Man, in conversation with critic Bill Goldstein, author of The World Broke in Two. This event is part of the Boswell Book Festival, the world’s only festival of biography and memoir, normally set in the spectacular grounds of Dumfries House, inaugurated and staged by the Boswell Trust.

Everyone who knew him told stories about Lawrence, and Lawrence told stories about everyone he knew. He also, again and again, told stories about himself: the pioneer of autofiction. In a distinctly Lawrentian biography, Wilson pursues Lawrence around the globe and reflects his life of wild allegory. Eschewing the confines of a full-length biography, Burning Man is a triptych of lesser-known episodes drawn from lesser-known sources, and from the tales of Lawrence told by his friends in letters, memoirs, and diaries. Focusing on three critical turning points in Lawrence’s pilgrimage (his crises in Cornwall, Italy, and New Mexico) Wilson uncovers a lesser-known Lawrence, both as a writer and as a man.

Dizzyingly original, exhaustively researched, and always revelatory, Burning Man is a marvel of biography. With flair and focus, Wilson, Lawrence’s first female biographer, unleashes a distinct perspective on one of history’s most beloved and infamous writers.

Frances Wilson is author of several works of nonfiction, including The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, which won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, How to Survive the Titanic, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and received a fellowship from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center in 2018. Bill Goldstein is author of The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, EM Forster and the Year that Changed Literature and a forthcoming biography of Larry Kramer. He was a New York Public Library Dorothy and Lewis B Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellow for 2019-2020.

More upcoming events on the Boswell Book Company website.

Photo credits

Lori Rader-Day by Justin Barber

Myriam JA Chancy by N Alfonso

Bill Goldstein by Bill Hayes