Adventures by the Book® is coming to Orange County, and we are excited to celebrate our inaugural event with beloved SoCal author, Susan Meissner, author of such perennial book club favorites as Secrets of a Charmed Life, Fall of Marigolds, The Shape of Mercy, and A Bridge Across the Ocean.
Over a delicious fajita luncheon at Claim Jumper Restaurant, Susan will discuss her new novel, As Bright As Heaven. Set in Philadelphia during the Great War, Susan relates another of history’s rarely remembered moments, this time, the deadliest pandemic in human history, exactly 100 years after it devastated the world.
Your Adventure includes lunch, beverage, tax, gratuity, author talk, book signing, and the chance to meet the author up-close and personal in an intimate setting.
Susan Meissner is a multi-published novelist, speaker and writing workshop leader with a background in community journalism. Her novels include A Fall of Marigolds, named to Booklist’s Top Ten Women’s Fiction titles for 2014, and The Shape of Mercy, named by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Novels of 2008. A California native, she attended Point Loma Nazarene University. Susan is a pastor’s wife and a mother of four young adults. When she’s not working on a novel, Susan writes small group curriculum for her San Diego church.
In As Bright As Heaven, her first book to be published in hardcover, Susan turns back the clock exactly 100 years to the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which infected about one-third of the world’s population. In a richly imagined and evocative novel, she explores the impact on one American family living in Philadelphia – from the first hints of the disease as World War I draws to a close to its far-reaching consequences. Epic in scope but intimately depicted, As Bright As Heaven is sure to become another of Susan’s perennial book club favorite books.