Jayne Anne Phillips

One of America’s most beloved writers, Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of the huge bestseller, Machine Dreams. Her latest novel, Lark & Termite, was a New York Times bestseller, and a nominee for the National Book Award in Fiction. In Lark & Termite, Phillips has created a rich, wonderfully ... (more)moving story of loss and love. Lark, a teenage girl, spends her days caring for her younger brother, Termite, a child unable to walk and talk, but who seems blessed with the gifts of sight and feeling. The novel links past, present and future, as the characters’ stories reveal family secrets and dreams, and the love that unites them. Phillips is currently Professor of English and Director of the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. Tickets are $18 in advance, $20 at the door, with discounts for students and seniors. Call (614) 464-1032 or visit www.thurberhouse.org to order.

The acclaimed author of bestsellers Motherkind, Machine Dreams and Shelter, and 2009 National Book Award Finalist, visits us to begin the new year of author lectures with a long-awaited and and wonderful coming-of-age tale of grief and survival, Lark and Termite. It's a novel ... (more)The New Yorker is calling "a moving exploration of familial love." The story focuses on a week in 1959 when 17-year-old Lark and her mute brother Termite, all struggling with despair and hopelessness, confront some painful truths about their past. It's a "wrenching and suspenseful" portrait of devotion you won't soon forget.

We are thrilled to host Jayne Anne Phillips (Motherkind, Shelter) for the release of her brilliant new novel. Set in the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, and based, in part, on actual events, Lark and Termite tells of the power of love and loss, the echoing ramifications of war, the slow revelation ... (more)of family secrets, and the unseen, almost magical bonds that unite and sustain us. Junot Diaz raves, “Lark and Termite is extraordinary and it is luminous… It is an astounding feat of the imagination.” Tim O’Brien hails it, “…By far the best new novel I’ve read in the last five years or so.” And Alice Munro says “This novel is cut like a diamond, with such sharp authenticity and bursts of light.” Don’t miss this opportunity to meet the author of the book fiction lovers will be talking about for years to come.

Bookshop welcomes Jayne Anne Phillips who will read from her rich and layered new novel, Lark and Termite. Set in the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea, it is a story of the power of loss and love, the echoing ramifications of war, family secrets, dreams and ghosts, and the unseen, almost magical bonds ... (more)that unite and sustain us.

Thirty years after her acclaimed, classic first book, the story collection Black Tickets was published, Jayne Anne Phillips makes this welcome Elliott Bay return for her new, much-anticipated fourth novel, Lark & Termite (Knopf).