Authors Talk: Lily King, "Heart the Lover" and Kate Russo, "Until Alison"

Darien Library and Barrett Bookstore are thrilled to welcome authors Lily King and Kate Russo, who will talk about about their newly released books, Lily's Heart the Lover and Kate's Until Alison.  Lily and Kate will be in conversation with local editor, Demetra Ganias.

Come join the conversation as these two bestselling and acclaimed authors who both hail from the state of Maine, share their thoughts on their writing process and their new titles, perfect for book group discussions and cozy weekend reading!

About Lily King and Heart the Lover

Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, including Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, and the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. She lives in Portland, Maine.

Heart the Lover: You knew I’d write a book about you someday. Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.

In the fall of her senior year of college, "she" meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever. 

Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self. 

About Kate Russo and Until Alison

Kate Russo, author of Super Host, grew up in Maine but now divides her time between Maine and the UK. She has an MFA in painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, and while living in London, she worked with the theatre group, Love Bites, who presented two of her short plays (“The Blind” and “Bernie's Night Off”) at the Calder Bookshop Theatre. She exhibits widely in the United States and England. Learn more at KateRusso.com and connect on Instagram @RussoKate.

Until Alison is a brilliantly incisive and resonant literary thriller that explores class, gender, and the arbitrary nature of violence and silence while presenting a coming-of-age story with two fascinating female protagonists and a murder at its heart. 

When Rachel Nardelli finds out that her childhood friend turned rival Alison Petrucci is found dead in Pleasant Pond, (the same place the two girls first said goodbye to each other back in eighth grade), the town of Waterbury is outraged by the fear of losing one of their own—the heir to Maine’s largest construction company. But it’s a little more complicated for Rachel. She saw Alison the night she died. Callous, she said something she shouldn’t have. She stirred up the past. The next morning, Alison was gone.  Rachel and Alison’s diverging paths caused deep and irreparable rift in their relationship. Alison, by then the most bullied girl in school, left for private high school. 

Four years later, they both end up at Denman College, an elite liberal arts college in Maine, with plenty of scars and far more in common than either one of them would like to admit. Rachel, as News Editor of the school paper, is forced to examine not only what happened to Alison at the pond, but also what happened there eight years prior.  

Plagued by the complicated memories around their relationship, Rachel joins her journalism crew to investigate the murder. But as she revisits their fraught relationship, she falls into a web of cruelties that threaten to undo everything she understood about her past.

About Demetra Ganias

Demetra Ganias is an editor for The Local Moms Network — a media company that gives moms the gift of time. Local Moms offers resources, profiles of moms, and an engaging community to get moms through the ups and downs of motherhood. Demetra is also a host and public speaking coach.