Fran Fabriczki in Conversation With Tova Mirvis

In partnership with Nu Reads, a new initiative from The Jewish Book Council, we invite you to the launch of Fran Fabriczki’s newest book Porcupine, moderated by author Tova Mirvis.

The event will feature an audience Q&A dessert reception, and book signing.

This event will benefit The Jewish Book Council and its new program, Nu Reads, a bi-monthly book subscription series, connecting readers with essential contemporary Jewish fiction by pairing new releases with curated conversations and exclusive author programming. In just a few short months since its launch, Nu Reads has built a vibrant community of over 1,600 readers nationwide, offering authors guaranteed reach and readers direct access to the writers shaping today’s literary landscape.

Thank you to our additional Boston community sponsors: Hebrew College, The Jewish Community Day School (JCDS), The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and The Vilna Shul.

A fresh and witty debut about a young immigrant mother and her increasingly inquisitive daughter, who wakes up one day and decides to find out who her father is.

Sonia is a Hungarian immigrant who is raising her daughter, Mila—her beloved Milosh—on her own in sunny Los Angeles. Her days are a blur of not-quite-illegal business activities, dodging PTA moms, and baking birthday cakes laced with rum—minor mistakes that nevertheless continually remind her of everything she doesn’t understand about America and parenthood. Mila, meanwhile, is juggling violin and swimming lessons and navigating the treacherous social politics of school with the help of a less-than-helpful guidebook on how to be cool in the sixth grade—all the while trying to get her secretive mother to share something, anything, about her past.

Sonia is sure that their bond, stitched from drive-through dinners, extracurricular activities, and a lot of exasperated affection for each other—will be enough to satisfy her daughter. But her guarded lifestyle has left Mila lonely, isolated, and ready to write herself into a bigger story. When she stumbles across emails between her mother and a man she’s never met, Mila decides to take matters into her own hands and forms a plan that will implode their carefully constructed lives.

Moving between Budapest before the fall of the Berlin Wall; Washington, DC, in the tense years of the Cold War; and the bright sunshine of early aughts Los Angeles, Porcupines is an irresistible novel about mothers and daughters, secrecy and loneliness, belonging and reinvention—and what happens when the truth can’t be held back any longer.

About Fran Fabricski:

Fran Fabriczki was born in Budapest and lived in Los Angeles for many years as a child. She moved to the United Kingdom to study English at the University of Cambridge. Porcupines is her first novel.

About Tova Mirvis:

Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation as well as four novels, We Would Never, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine and Real Simple, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, MA with her family.

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