Elise Juska celebrates the release of REUNION with Asali Solomon

We are so excited to welcome author Elise Juska into the store for a signing and discussion of her latest novel, Reunion, on Tuesday May 7th at 6pm! Juska will be joined in conversation by Asali Solomon, author of the Days of Afrekete and Disgruntled: A Novel.

We encourage all interested parties to register for the event through our Eventbrite. 

Elise Juska’s previous novels include If We Had Known and The Blessings. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, the Hudson Review, Electric Literature, and other outlets. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize from Ploughshares, and her work has been cited by the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She lives with her family outside Philadelphia, where she is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of the Arts.

Reunion is a gripping story about three friends in their forties forced to reckon with their lives during a college reunion in coastal Maine. It’s June 2021, and three old college friends are heading to New England and the twenty-fifth reunion that was delayed the year before. Hope, a stay-at-home mom, is desperate for a return to her beloved campus, a reprieve from her tense marriage, and the stresses of pandemic parenting. Adam is hesitant to leave his bucolic but secluded life with his wife and their young sons. Single mother Polly hasn’t been back to campus in more than twenty years and has no interest in returning—but changes her mind when her struggling teenage son suggests a road trip.

But the reunion isn’t what any of them had envisioned. Hope, always upbeat, is no longer able to downplay the pressures of life at home or the cracks in her longstanding friendships. Adam finds himself energized by the memory of his carefree, reckless younger self—which only reminds him how much has changed since those halcyon days. Polly cannot ignore the ghosts of her college years, including a closely guarded secret. When the weekend takes a startling turn, all three find themselves reckoning with the past—and how it will bear on the future.