Event Detail2016-08-05T09:53:46+00:00
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Booked for Lunch with author Thrity Umrigar

July 6, 2017
12:00 pm - 2:00 pm (Expired)
Stafford’s Perry Hotel in the Rose Room
Petoskey, MI

We are excited to welcome one of our favorite fiction authors, Thrity Umrigar, back to the store this summer for her latest novel, Everybody’s Son. Thrity is the best-selling author of the novels Bombay Time, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, The Weight of Heaven, The World We Found and The Story Hour. She will join us on Thursday, July 6th from noon to 2:00 p.m. at Stafford’s Perry Hotel in the Rose Room. This is a ticketed event and reservations are required. The cost of this luncheon is $25. For more information, please contact us at 231.347.1180 or send us an email.
In Everybody’s Son, Thrity deftly explores issues of race, class, privilege, and power and asks us to consider uncomfortable moral questions in this probing, ambitious, emotionally wrenching novel of two families—one black, one white.
During a terrible heat wave in 1991—the worst in a decade—ten-year-old Anton has been locked in an apartment in the projects, alone, for seven days, without air conditioning or a fan. With no electricity, the refrigerator and lights do not work. Hot, hungry, and desperate, Anton shatters a window and climbs out. Cutting his leg on the broken glass, he is covered in blood when the police find him.
Juanita, his mother, is discovered in a crack house less than three blocks away, nearly unconscious and half-naked. When she comes to, she repeatedly asks for her baby boy. She never meant to leave Anton—she went out for a quick hit and was headed right back, until her drug dealer raped her and kept her high. Though the bond between mother and son is extremely strong, Anton is placed with child services while Juanita goes to jail.
The Harvard-educated son of a US senator, Judge David Coleman is a scion of northeastern white privilege. Desperate to have a child in the house again after the tragic death of his teenage son, David uses his power and connections to keep his new foster son, Anton, with him and his wife, Delores—actions that will have devastating consequences in the years to come.
Following in his adopted family’s footsteps, Anton, too, rises within the establishment. But when he discovers the truth about his life, his birth mother, and his adopted parents, this man of the law must come to terms with the moral complexities of crimes committed by the people he loves most.
Thrity is the Armington Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Her books have been translated into several languages and published in over fifteen countries.
The Space Between Us was a finalist for the PEN/Beyond Margins award, while her memoir was a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors award. If Today Be Sweet was a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection, while her other books have been Community Reads selections. Thrity is the winner of the Cleveland Arts Prize, a Lambda Literary award and the Seth Rosenberg prize