BookPeople Presents: Rowan Beaird - Tenderness

Please welcome Rowan Beaird and Jenny Tinghui Zhang to celebrate Tenderness! This event is free and open to the public. * Start time: 7:00 P.M. * Run time: 45-60 minutes, followed by a signing line. * Location: The second floor of BookPeople. The author will be signing and personalizing copies of the book after the speaking portion of the event. * To get a book signed, a copy of the event book or an item of equal value must be purchased from BookPeople. * For high volume events, post-talk signing lines can become very long. For such events, we recommend arriving and checking in to the event early as that will get you into an earlier signing group. Guidelines: * Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis and is not guaranteed. * If you have any accessibility concerns regarding seating, please contact online@bookpeople.com * If you have any other questions, please visit our Eventbrite FAQ. If your question isn't covered in the FAQ, feel free to email us at online@bookpeople.com. * All event guidelines are subject to change. * BookPeople reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary. * There will not be a live stream or recording available. About the book: From the beloved author of The Divorcées comes a novel set in the 1970s during an island wedding, where the bride has recently left a sinister cult that might still be trailing her On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp? Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another. Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, Tenderness is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are. About the author: Rowan Beaird's fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. The Divorcées is her first novel. About the moderator: Jenny Tinghui Zhang is the author of the novels Superfan and Four Treasures of the Sky, named an Idaho Book of the Year and short- and longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has appeared in The Cut, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Texas Highways, and elsewhere. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and has received support from Yaddo, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Tin House, and the University of Wyoming, where she completed her MFA. By purchasing a book from BookPeople, you are not only supporting a local, independent business – you’re showing publishers that they should continue sending authors to BookPeople. Thank you for supporting Rowan Beaird, Jenny Tinghui Zhang, and your local independent bookstore!