Author Amanda Lindhout (photo credit: Steve Carty)
Friday, March 14, 2014
On Monday, March 24 at 6 and 8 pm, Northshire Bookstore Saratoga presents an all-star literary double feature, with events at 6 and 8 pm. Both events are free and open to the public.ogoj
At 6 pm, co-authors Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett will be at Northshire Bookstore for a reading, discussion and signing of “A House in the Sky,” a dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world's most remote places, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity. Northshire Bookstore is located at 424 Broadway.
At 8 pm, Ishmael Beah, author of the runaway bestseller – and instant classic - A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier will be at Filene Recital Hall at Skidmore College for a reading, discussion and signing of his debut novel Radiance of Tomorrow. This event is presented by Northshire Bookstore, and sponsored by the Skidmore College Committee on Intercultural and Global Understanding. Skidmore College is located at 815 North Broadway. Doors open at 7 pm.
A House in the Sky appeared on many “best of 2013” lists, and has been listed as a New York Times Notable Book. As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of "National Geographic" and imagining herself in its exotic locales. Later, as a television reporter, she traveled to Somalia--"the most dangerous place on earth." On her fourth day she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road, and was held hostage for 460 days. Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.
Radiance of Tomorrow is a haunting, beautiful first novel, a parable about postwar life in Sierra Leone. Two longtime friends return to their hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As villagers begin to come back, the friends try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they’re beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations of a foreign mining company intent on sullying the town’s water supply and blocking its paths with electric wires. As they search for a way to restore order, they’re forced to reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike. With the gentle lyricism of a dream and the moral clarity of a fable, Radiance of Tomorrow is a powerful novel about preserving what means the most to us, even in uncertain times.