Nov
9
12:00am
Brian Hall with Margot Livesey, The Stone Loves The World
By Porter Square Books
Join us for a virtual reading with Brian Hall, featuring his latest novel, The Stone Loves the World! Brian will be joined in conversation by Margot Livesey (The Boy in the Field). This event is free and open to all, via Crowdcast.
A warm, inventive, and multilayered novel about two families - one made up largely of scientists, and the other of artists and mystics - whose worlds collide in pursuit of a lost daughter
Mette, a twenty-year old programmer of visual effects for video games, lives with her mother, Saskia, an aspiring playwright, in Brooklyn. Mette is a private and socially awkward young woman, who finds something consoling in repetitive mathematical calculations. But she has been recently rejected in love, and feels stuck in an endless loop, no longer certain of her place in the world.
As Brian Hall's new novel opens, Mette has gone missing. Her disappearance forces Saskia to reunite with Mette's father, Mark, an emotionally distant astronomy professor in Ithaca, to embark on a journey together to find her. Mette's path will take her across America and then to a fateful visit with her charismatic grandfather, Thomas, who formerly ran the commune north of Ithaca where Saskia was raised, and who now lives as a hermit in a windmill on a remote Danish island.
Playing out over nine decades and three generations, and stitching together a dazzling array of subjects—from cosmology and classical music to number theory and medieval mystery plays—The Stone Loves the World is a story of love, longing, and scientific wonder. It offers a moving reflection on the human search for truth, meaning, and connection in an often incomprehensible universe, and on the genuine surprises that the real world, and human society, can offer.
Brian Hall is the author of the novels The Dreamers, The Saskiad, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company and Fall of Frost, in addition to three works of nonfiction, including The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia and Madeleine's World. His journalism has appeared in publications such as Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
Margot Livesey is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. The House on Fortune Street won the 2009 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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