Author Event! Madeleine Dunnigan's "Jean"

Join us on January 21st at 6pm as we host Madeleine Dunnigan in conversation with Courtney Denelle to discuss her queer comin-of-age debut novel, Jean! Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase and patrons can meet the author.

About the book:

Set over one hot summer, a startlingly assured debut about the kinds of love that break us and make us whole.
Seventeen-year-old Jean, a troubled Jewish boy caught in the countercultural swirl of 1970s London, arrives at Compton Manor, a rural alternative boarding school for boys with “problems.” Dyslexic, antisocial, and prone to violent outbursts, Jean has never made friends easily and school has never been a place of safety or enjoyment.

Compton Manor is his last chance, but even here, despite the unconventional teaching methods, Jean is marked by difference. The other boys are fee-paying, while Jean is on a grant; they have good, English families, while Jean’s mother, Rosa, is a German-Jewish refugee and his father is an absent memory. Having broken the rules several times, Jean is on thin ice. But there is only one summer to get through and then Jean will pass his exams and get out.

All of a sudden, he is befriended by Tom—confident, charming, buoyed by years of good breeding and privilege—and it seems as if Jean’s world might change. When things turn romantic, Jean is tipped into a heady, overwhelming infatuation. Now Jean skips class to venture into the woods, or sneaks across moonlit fields to see Tom, wondering whether the relationship might offer a way out of a life marked by alienation. But what if the only true path to freedom is to disappear altogether

Spellbinding and evocative, Jean is a meditative narrative of loss and escape distilled into the heartrending story of an intense and dangerous adolescent love.

About the author:

Madeleine Dunnigan was a Jill Davis Fellow in the MFA program at New York University. While there she was awarded a Global Reporting Initiative Fellowship in Paris. She lives in London, where she was born and raised.

About the moderator:

Courtney Denelle is the author of IT’S NOT NOTHING (SFWP, 2022), a novel-in-fragments drawn from her experience of homelessness and recovery, and the forthcoming novel Real Piece of Work, an artworld satire that explores image-craft and the unbidden toll of a life lived in persona. Her stories have appeared in the Alembic, Tahoma Literary Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in America’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction and Night of the Geminids: Fireside Tales. She lives in Providence, where she received her greater education from the public library.

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