Boston Book Festival

War forces us to confront humanity’s strengths and profound shortcomings. Four authors powerfully and poignantly address the upheaval of war and its rattling aftershocks in their new novels. Deni Ellis Béchard jumps right into the modern-day war zone in Kabul in Into the Sun, exploring the lives of aid workers, journalists, and mercenaries who flock there. The artists and intellectuals in Kathleen Spivack’s Unspeakable Things have fled from war, finding refuge in New York City during World War II. In Jonathan Rabb’s Among the Living, a Holocaust survivor encounters both culture shock and unexpected kinship in the American South. And in Bottomland, Michelle Hoover takes readers to the time of the Great War, examining how xenophobic attitudes stoked by a far-away war affect the lives of German-Americans in Iowa. Leading the conversation is Catherine Parnell, senior associate editor for Consequence magazine, which focuses on the culture and consequences of war. Sponsored by Other Press.