In Jonathan Fine’s thrilling new novella, A Refugee in Sudan, an American man, divorced from his wife, distraught with the stinging realization of a total estrangement from his son, follows an unusual impulse. He sets off to the heart of war-torn Southern Sudan with the singular idea that holed up in a bunker with a machine gun, he can save the innocent villagers of the region from the genocidal death riders, the Murahaleen. A story of fathers and sons, family ties broken, and a life in turmoil, this tale sweeps across the harsh climate of equatorial Africa to portray the plight of a country and one man’s search for redemption.

A local Vermont author, this is Jonathan Fine’s debut novella. To help spread awareness of the horrific violence in both Southern Sudan and the Darfur region, a portion of sales of A Refugee in Sudan will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, a non-profit organization “working to increase access to education in post-conflict Southern Sudan.”

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear a local Vermont, Shires Press author.

Alice Lichtenstein is the author of The Genius of the World and has published short stories is several literary journals. In her new novel Lost, Lichtenstein has crafted a fiercely eloquent and emotionally suspenseful novel about the lengths we will go to take care of someone and the unfathomable ways that even the simplest of choices can reverberate throughout a life. With her stark, beautiful prose and extraordinary insight into the human conscience and heart, Lost portrays the unexpected convergence of three lives, revealing an arresting portrait of the shifting terrain of marriage and the uneasy burden of love and regret.

In addition to her published writings, Alice Lichtenstein teaches creative writing at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York and has taught at Boston University, Wheaton College, Lesley College, and the Harvard University Summer School. She has received a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction and has twice been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony.

This month's free monthly Sustainable Living in Vermont series focuses on Sustainable Food; featuring talks and tastings of food from local farmers.

Oliver Levis of Earth Sky Time Farm in Manchester will be talking about Community Supported Agriculture. Learn how you can enjoy a wide variety of fresh organic vegetables, flowers, herbs, and even fresh organic eggs without having to start seeds, weed a garden, or raise chickens.

Members of our local farmer's market will also be on hand to discuss what other delicious sustainably grown and prepared food you can enjoy with a simple visit to their booth.

Don’t miss this opportunity to eat your way toward sustainability.

Sally Hemings has long captured international attention as the enslaved mistress of Thomas Jefferson. That Hemings was also a mother to Jefferson’s mixed-race children, the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, and, for a time, the most famous enslaved person in early nineteenth-century America, all seems to have escaped any serious consideration. In The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Annette Gordon-Reed delves more deeply into the historical record, employing many unpublished primary sources, to bring to light the Hemings family in all its complexity. Known only to the public as the slaves of Thomas Jefferson, Gordon-Reed has recovered the Hemings’ full story to cast them in a new and more accurate light: as a quintessentially American family.

Winner of the 2009 National Humanities Medal, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and the 2008 National Book Award, Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. Along with numerous articles and essays, she is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Gordon-Reed is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City with her husband and children.

Come support the 6th graders of Cambridge School as they launch their participation in Greg Mortenson's (Three Cups of Tea) 'Pennies a Page' effort to build schools in Central Asia. This day long event will conclude with a reading at 3pm by Vermont Childrens picture book author, Stephen Swinburne, presenting his first middle reader novel Wiff and Dirty George: The Z.E.B.R.A. Incident. For information on how you can become involved supporting a reader, please contact: Therese Zoufaly at Therese.Zoufaly@cambridgecsd.org.

Set in contemporary New England, Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel unfolds a story of the intricate consequences of domestic violence. Secrets of Eden opens as Alice Hayward’s life ends—but her story begins. Weaving together compelling narratives, Bohjalian examines the inner complexities that mark all of our lives. This haunting literary thriller is a riveting page-turner in which nothing is precisely what it seems.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of twelve novels, including the New York Times bestsellers, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars, and Midwives. Bohjalian won the New England Book Award in 2002, and his novel, Midwives, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, a Publishers Weekly "Best Book," and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. He has written for a wide variety of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and has been a Sunday columnist for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian graduated from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.