Author Event: The Light Through the Branches by Anne Matlack Evans

Join us for a special event with Anne Matlack Evans, author of The Light Through the Trees. This event is free, but we appreciate your RSVP below so we can plan for your attendance.

“Elegantly written and compulsively readable...bravely plumbs a difficult mother-daughter
relationship with honesty, insight, and grace.” — Michelle Huneven, author of Search

“The Light Through the Branches takes uncomfortable turns, but it never surrenders its humanity.
In fact, that is its distinctive strength.” — Greg Fields, author of Through the Waters and the Wild; 2022 Winner, Independent Press Award for literary fiction

“With lucid, precise language...she suggests a daughter’s hard-won insight—into the frustrations
that made her mother such a complicated influence, and the unexpected resources of love.” — Angela Pneumann, Author of Lay it on My Heart

In late middle age, Kate Laidlaw begins to examine her troubled relationship with her mother, now ninety-three and confined to memory care. Her tribunal ranges widely, from the Omaha of her mother’s childhood to the small coastal town of Santa Maria, California, where Kate grew up in a household dominated by her stepfather. It leads through the triumphs and heartbreaks of Kate’s school life and to the bedroom where her stepfather undressed her.

It forces her to look at her mother’s early trauma and at the darkest hours of Kate’s own long marriage. As Kate cares and advocates for her mother and her anger and bitterness subside, other feelings emerge: the tenderness that comes with caring for a loved one and the undeniable bonds of kinship. With this brilliant debut novel, written in exquisite and evocative prose, Anne Matlack Evans offers a fresh perspective on childhood trauma, on the lessons taught by family, and on the universal longing for grace and wisdom.

“I want a tribunal. A three-judge truth and reconciliation thing. I want her to answer for everything."

Anne Matlack Evans has published fiction in The Bennington Review, Eclipse, and Memoir and nonfiction in The Ruminator Review and the San Francisco Chronicle. She received an MA in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley, an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. A professor of English and creative writing at Napa Valley College, she also directed the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She lives in Napa, California, where she teaches comparative literature and writing and enjoys playing the piano and walking her unruly Portuguese water dog.

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