Description
Local author Rachel Beanland is launching her next novel and VCU Libraries is hosting the event. She will be talking with Kevin Powers at VCU's James Branch Cabell Library. This is a ticketed event in partnership with Fountain Bookstore.
Each ticket includes a signed copy of The Half Life
There is a separate ticket for an online-only event, since this will be broadcast live via Zoom from the library. Please see the separate event for that ticket if you cannot make it in person. In person Ticket purchase link
About the Speakers:
Rachel Beanland is the author of The House Is on Fire and Florence Adler Swims Forever, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. It was also selected as a book club pick by Barnes & Noble and named one of the best books of 2020 by USA Today.
The House Is On Fire was selected as an Indie Next pick by the American Booksellers Association, a ‘GMA Buzz Pick’ by Good Morning America, a “most anticipated” book by the Washington Post, and one of the best books of 2023 by NPR and The New Yorker.
She is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and earned her MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. Beanland lives with her family in Richmond.
Novelist Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond. Powers graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in English. Since publishing his first novel in 2012, he has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix littéraire du Monde prix étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other recognitions. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2012 and later held a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction. A U.S. Army veteran of the war in Iraq, he lives on Florida’s First Coast with his family.
About the Book:
When twenty-three-year-old Eileen O’Malley meets charismatic naval officer Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn’t expect to fall so hard, so fast. But Paul is funny and ambitious, and soon, Eileen’s got a ring on her finger and is following him to the tiny, sun-drenched Mediterranean island of La Maddalena, where Paul will be heading up Radiological Controls aboard a submarine tender.
In La Maddalena, Eileen joins a makeshift community of navy wives who are hell-bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, and as she settles into life on the island—taking Italian lessons and learning to make culurgiones—she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from.
Still, it doesn’t take long for Eileen to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. The decision to send nuclear-powered subs into the La Maddalena Archipelago was a contentious one, and the U.S. government is doing whatever it can to ensure that the island—not to mention all of Italy—doesn’t go communist in the next election.
When Italian activists and scientists begin to sound the alarm about possible nuclear contamination in the water, the island erupts in a series of protests, made worse by the ongoing mishaps of the U.S. Navy. Soon, Eileen’s marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets—and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she’s been handed.
Atmospheric, sexy, and quietly defiant, The Half Life is a story of love, complicity, and awakening—of one woman forced to choose between loyalty to her husband and country and to the Italian locals who show her the high cost of American exceptionalism.
For questions or accommodations please contact Ryan Larson, event manager at rbpander@vcu.edu.