About the Virtual Author Event

We are pleased to join the San Pedro Regional Library (Los Angeles) for our first Book Bingo Virtual Adventure of 2021! If you are already familiar with our popular Southern California series that features NovelNetwork® authors, you will understand why we receive so many requests to expand the program nationwide. Pivoting to virtual events has made this not only possible, but offers up fun opportunities for exciting partnerships, participation by more of our over 125 book club favorite authors, and space to accommodate many more readers!

 The event features book club favorite authors, whose broad array of books are sure to offer some fascinating new reading to start your new year: Claire Fullerton, Kristina McMorris, Ellen Meeropol, Isla Morley, Marco Rafala, and Deborah Goodrich Royce, in conversation with Adventures by the Book® and NovelNetwork® founder Susan McBeth.

Join us at this free event, where we will bring you six fabulous authors, an interactive virtual game of bingo, and fun prizes, and all you have to do is show up (and why not invite your book club friends and fellow readers to join in as well) to learn about great new reads to add to your to be read list.

While this event is free, your purchase of a book(s) below (to be shipped to you within the U.S.) provides much-needed support to these authors whose book tours and events have been cancelled due to COVID-19.

Your Adventure includes a book discussion with all six authors, an interactive virtual game of Book Bingo, Q&A, prizes, and the opportunity to meet the authors via Zoom. Books may be ordered below for shipping within the U.S. and will include a signed bookplate. See below for registration information.

About the Authors

 

Claire Fullerton is the author of Mourning Dove, a multiple award-winning, Southern family saga set in the genteel side of Memphis, as well as the contemporary novel, Dancing to an Irish Reel, the story of an American outsider who moves to rural Ireland, and a paranormal mystery, A Portal in Time, set on the Monterey Peninsula. Claire’s Deep South set novel. She hails from Memphis and now lives in Malibu, California with her husband, 3 German shepherds, and one black cat.

Little Tea, her most recent book, is a story of the ties of female friendships, healing the past, and the changing times of racial relations. The novel, winner of multiple awards including the August book selection of the Pulpwood Queens Book Club, Gold Medal Winner in Southern Fiction by Readers’ Favorite, and a Finalist in the International Book Awards, and a finalist in the Kindle Book Review for Literary Fiction, three childhood friends reunite at a lake house in Arkansas, where they examine life, love, marriage, and the ties that bind. When the past arrives at the lake house door in an old boyfriend, one of the women must revisit the life she’d tried to outrun.

As her idyllic coming of age alongside her best friend, Little Tea, on her family’s ancestral grounds in bucolic Como, Mississippi unfolds, Celia realizes there is no better place to accept her own story than in this circle of friends who have remained beside her throughout the years. Theirs is a friendship that can talk any life sorrow into a comic tragedy, and now that the racial divide in the Deep South has evolved, Celia wonders if friendship can triumph over history.

To schedule a book club visit with Claire or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

 

Kristina McMorris is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the historical fiction novels Bridge of Scarlet Leaves, The Pieces We Keep, and The Edge of Lost, in addition to her novellas in the anthologies A Winter Wonderland and Grand Central.  She has garnered more than two dozen prestigious awards and nominations, including the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, RWA’s RITA® Award, and a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction.

Her most recent book, Sold on a Monday, has sold over half a million copies, was ranked by USA Today as top 100 overall bestselling books of 2019 and top 10 longest-running paperback bestsellers of 2019 by Publishers Weekly, and has celebrated more than five months on the New York Times, USA Today and Publisher’s Weekly bestseller lists. Inspired by an actual newspaper photograph that stunned the nation, Sold on a Monday is a powerful novel of love, redemption, and the unexpected paths that bring us home. “Two Children for Sale.” The sign is a last resort. It sits on a farmhouse porch in 1931, but could be found anywhere in an era of breadlines, bank runs, and broken dreams. It could have been written by any mother facing impossible choices.

For struggling reporter Ellis Reed, the gut-wrenching scene evokes memories of his family’s dark past. He snaps a photograph of the children, not meant for publication. But when it leads to his big break, the consequences are more devastating than he ever imagined. At the paper, Lillian Palmer is haunted by her role in all that happened. She is far too familiar with the heartbreak of children deemed unwanted. As the bonds of motherhood are tested, she and Ellis must decide how much they are willing to risk to mend a fractured family.

To schedule a book club visit with Kristina or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

 

Ellen Meeropol is an award-winning author and frequent presenter at conferences and book festivals, including the AWP annual conference, The Muse and the Marketplace, Wordstock, Virginia, Salem, and Maine Festivals of the Book, the San Miguel International Writing Conference, and the WriteAngles Writers Conference. She has taught fiction workshops at Writers in Progress in Florence, MA, Grub Street in Boston, and World Fellowship Center in New Hampshire. She volunteers with WriteAngles, Inc. and is a Founding Member of the Straw Dog Writers Guild, coordinating its social justice committee. She is married to Robert Meeropol, the younger son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and they live in western Massachusetts. Ellen is a founding board member of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which was started by Robert in 1990 in honor of his parents’ refusal to “name names.” Ellen’s dramatic script telling the story of the foundation has been produced five times, most recently in Manhattan in June 2013, featuring Eve Ensler, Angela Davis, and Cotter Smith.

In her fourth novel, Her Sister’s Tattoo, it is 1968, and Rosa and Esther Cohen march through downtown Detroit protesting the war in Vietnam. The march is peaceful, but when a bloodied teenager describes a battle with mounted police a few blocks away, the sisters hurry to offer assistance. Trying to stop the violence, they instead intensify it, and Rosa and Esther are arrested and charged with conspiracy and attempted murder. The consequences of their actions lead one sister underground and to prison, the other to leave town to bury her past in a new life. Told from multiple points of view and through the sisters’ never-mailed letters, and bracketed by the Vietnam and Iraq wars, Her Sister’s Tattoo explores the thorny intersection of sibling loyalty and clashing political decisions.

To schedule a book club visit with Ellen or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

 

Isla Morley grew up in south Africa during apartheid, the child of a British father and a South African mother. During the country’s State of Emergency, she graduated from Nelson Mandela University with a degree in English Literature. By 1994, she was one of the youngest magazine editors in South Africa, but left her career, country, and kin when she married an American and moved to California, where she pursued a career in non-profit work, focusing on the needs of women and children. Her debut novel, Come Sunday, was a finalist for the Commonwealth Prize and has been translated into 7 languages, and her novel, Above, was an IndieNext Pick, a Best Buzz Book and a Publishers Weekly Best New book.

Her most recent novel, The Last Blue, is a luminous narrative inspired by the fascinating real case of “the Blue People of Kentucky,” in which Isla probes questions of identity, love, and family in 1937 Appalachia. When two government-sponsored documentarians from Cincinnati, Ohio—a writer and photographer—are dispatched to penetrate this wilderness and record what they find for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, they happen upon Jubilee Buford, a woman whose skin is a shocking and unmistakable shade of blue. From this happenstance meeting between a woman isolated from society and persecuted her whole life, comes a mesmerizing story in which the dark shades of betrayal, prejudice, fear, and guilt, are refracted along with the incandescent hues of passion and courage. Panning across the rich rural aesthetic of eastern Kentucky, The Last Blue is a captivating love story and an intimate portrait of what it is like to be truly one of a kind.

To schedule a book club visit with Isla or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

 

Marco Rafala is is a first-generation Sicilian American novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in Fiction from The New School and is a co-curator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and Literary Hub.

In his debut novel, How Fires End, a dark secret born out of World War II lies at the heart of a Sicilian American family in this emotional and sweeping saga of guilt, revenge, and, ultimately, redemption. Written with elegiac prose, How Fires End, which won the honorable mention in fiction for the 2020 Connecticut Book Awards, delves into the secret wars of men; the sins they cannot bury; and a life lived in fear of who will reveal them, who will survive them, and who will forgive them.

To schedule a book club visit with Marco or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

 

 

Deborah Goodrich Royce was a film and television actress for ten years, where her credits include the leading role of Silver Kane, sister of the legendary Erica Kane, on the long running ABC soap opera, All My Children, as well as starring roles in feature films such as Remote Control, April Fool’s Day, and Just One of the Guys, television movies such as Return to Peyton Place, The Deliberate Stranger with Mark Harmon, and Liberace, and television series such as St. Elsewhere, Beverly Hills 90210, and 21 Jump Street. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Lake Erie College in 1980 with a BA in modern foreign languages (French and Italian) and a minor in dance. In 2008, she received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the same institution.

Finding Mrs. Ford, her latest novel, was named one of the five must-read summer mysteries for 2019 by Forbes, one of the top ten summer reads of 2019 by Good Morning America, and one of the top fifty summer books of 2019 by Book Riot. On a sunny summer morning by the sea in New England, Susan Ford’s cocoon of privilege is threatened when an Iraqi man from her distant past boards a plane in Baghdad to come find her, when the past pays a call to collect. What happened in that summer of 1979 and why is she being sought out years later? And why is Mrs. Ford lying?

To schedule a book club visit with Deborah or any of our authors on NovelNetwork:

 

 

For Book Clubs or Author Live Chats

Are you in a book club, library reading group, or is your group of friends, colleagues, family members seeking fabulous authors who are excited and available to meet with you? Then you will be delighted to know that Claire Fullerton, Kristina McMorris, Ellen Meeropol, Isla Morley, Marco Rafala, and Deborah Goodrich Royce are all members of our wonderful community of over 125 NovelNetwork authors available to meet with small groups via video chat.

NovelNetwork is the nation’s first and only match(dot)com for authors and book clubs to find each other, so check it out today. Book clubs join for free and gain access to our database of dozens of authors, from NYT and international bestsellers, to debut authors, cookbook authors, mystery and non-fiction authors, and representing various regions of the United States, and even Alaska and Hawaii, all of whom want to meet with you!

To schedule a visit with Claire, Kristina, Ellen, Isla, Marco, Deborah, or any of our authors, join FOR FREE  here.

Event Registration

This event is free and open to the public (on a first-come, first-served basis); however, registration (below) is necessary in order to receive your Zoom invite and to receive your virtual bingo card (bingo cards will only be available to those who register before January 23, 2021), or to purchase one or more of the author’s books. You may attend the event without playing bingo, but will still need to register to receive your Zoom invite. While the event is free, your purchase of a book(s) below offers support to these authors whose book tours and events have been cancelled. Book prices below include shipping within the U.S. and will include signed bookplates.

SAN PEDRO REGIONAL LIBRARY