Join Dani Shapiro to talk about “Signal Fires.”
AUTHOR TALK DETAILS
1/25/2024 at 7:00 PM
OLIVER WALCOTT LIBRARY
160 South St
Litchfield, CT 06759
About the Author:
Dani Shapiro is the best-selling author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of The New York Times, and many other publications. Dani has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University. She is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut with her family. Dani’s latest book, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love will be published by Knopf in January, 2019.
About the Book:
NATIONAL BEST SELLER • A “gripping” new novel (People) from the best-selling author of Inheritance • “A haunting, moving, and propulsive exploration of family secrets.” —Meg Wolitzer, best-selling author of The Interestings • On a summer night in 1985, three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything changes.
A TIME Must-Read Book of the Year • A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year
Signal Fires opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes. Each of their lives, and that of Ben Wilf, a young doctor who arrives on the scene, is shattered. For the Wilf family, the circumstances of that fatal accident will become the deepest kind of secret, one so dangerous it can never be spoken.
On Division Street, time has moved on. When the Shenkmans arrive—a young couple expecting a baby boy—it is as if the accident never happened. But when Waldo, the Shenkmans’ brilliant, lonely son who marvels at the beauty of the world and has a native ability to find connections in everything, befriends Dr. Wilf, now retired and struggling with his wife’s decline, past events come hurtling back in ways no one could ever have foreseen.
In Dani Shapiro’s first work of fiction in fifteen years, she returns to the form that launched her career, with a riveting, deeply felt novel that examines the ties that bind families together—and the secrets that can break them apart. Signal Fires is a work of haunting beauty by a masterly storyteller.
