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Mother County: a virtual Fireside Adventure featuring award-winning author Jacinda Townsend
May 17, 2022 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm PDT
Free – $20.49
About the Event
In her new novel, Mother Country, award-winning author Jacinda Townsend offers a bone-deep and unsparing portrayal of the ethical and emotional claims we make upon one another in the name of survival and in the name of love.
Join us live as we chat with Jacinda about her new transnational feminist novel, where you have the unique opportunity to converse and ask questions live with the author on our virtual stage.
To join our virtual event on the exciting new storytelling platform, Fireside, simply purchase a book or register below and we will send you a private VIP link to attend the virtual event. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can be part of the virtual audience to chat live with Jacinda. With other devices, you can still listen live here to the broadcast.
Your Adventure includes a hardcover copy of Mother Country, tax, shipping within the U.S., a live Fireside chat with Jacinda, and Q&A.
About the Author and Book
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey, set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Her new transnational feminist novel, Mother Country, explores human trafficking and motherhood.
Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own.
With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life.
In rendering Souria’s separation from her family across vast stretches of desert and Shannon’s alienation from her mother under the same roof, Jacinda Townsend brilliantly stages cycles of intergenerational trauma and healing. Linked by the girl who has been a daughter to them both, these unforgettable protagonists move toward their inevitable reckoning.
About Fireside
We are thrilled to announce that Adventures by the Book has been invited to host a literary series on Fireside which will include book discussions, author talks, book clubs, special presentations, and much more. During the course of WWII, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt instituted a series of “fireside chats” on the radio, as a way to regularly communicate self-assurance and calm during times of despair and uncertainty in our country.
While once a thing of the past, thanks to the brilliant collaboration of billionaire entrepreneur and Shark Tank TV star, Mark Cuban, and Falon Fatemi, former CEO and Founder of Node.ai, Fireside Chats are back, bigger and better than ever, and in a technological format that allows YOU to actively participate!
Fireside Chat is the exclusive, invite-only new podcast platform for the next generation – a socially responsible space for us to come together in real-time to collaborate and create meaningful conversations. Together, we will engage in discussion, debate, and discourse in a public forum and make it a thing of celebration and beauty. We are ready to share our microphone with you and hope you’ll join us as we collaborate in the world’s most dynamic auditorium.
