Author Diane Les Becquets in Conversation with Lisa Allen

For fans of Tell Me Everything and Heartwood, Where the Water Meets the Sky is the story of a brave young woman seeking wholeness and love in the untamed forests of Michigan’s upper peninsula—and answers about a fire that took away everything.

The Purple Couch is excited to welcome the bestselling author of Indie Next Pick Breaking Wild, Diane Les Becquets to celebrate the release of her new novel, Where the Water Meets the Sky. A conversation and Q&A with the author will be followed by a signing. Tax inclusive tickets are $30.81 and include your copy of the book.

On a night in January, on the Garden Peninsula of Michigan, a farmhouse burns to the ground. A young child makes it out and flees into the woods with a book of matches in her hand.
Ten years later, Abby, a lover of birds and the natural world, returns to Garden, to the woods and lakes and farms and fisheries of her childhood, to assist her uncle on an environmental study of trees. Her best friend, Brew, invites her to a party where she meets a troubled girl named Seda, on the run from her abusive ex. Abby sets out to protect Seda and introduces her to an abandoned cabin that becomes a sanctuary for them both. Here, Abby begins to process her unrequited feelings for Brew while also discovering the person she is becoming. She wants more for her life, a hunger both spiritual and physical, and seeks to understand the trauma of her childhood that took her mother from her. Abby cares deeply for the people and flora and fauna around her and identifies with the wounds of the environment. She is desperate to remember what happened the night of the fire and as the summer of 1996 unfolds, Abby will be forced to reckon with the truth.

Diane Les Becquets is the author of Breaking Wild and The Last Woman in the Forest. Breaking Wild, an Indie Next Pick and a national bestseller, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist, and was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition. It was the recipient of the Colorado Book Award in Fiction, the New Hampshire Outstanding Work of Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award in Fiction.

Diane will be joined in conversation by Lisa Allen. Lisa is a mental health counselor and longtime literary facilitator whose work centers on the power of story to shape identity and meaning. Her background in narrative inquiry and creative nonfiction informs both her clinical work and her approach to literary dialogue. She is especially interested in the ways landscape, longing, and personal transformation intersect in fiction and in life. Allen brings to her conversations with authors a deep respect for the emotional architecture of story and for the ways characters’ searches for belonging, wholeness, and love mirror our own.

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