H&H Books Presents: Ariel Delgado Dixon / SOURLAND

We're delighted to host novelist Ariel Delgado Dixon at H&H Books to celebrate Sourland on Wednesday, September 16 at 7 PM. Ariel will be in conversation with Philly-based author Joseph Earl Thomas.

In Sourland, a power struggle over a prosperous (and illegal) W**d farm ensues after the owner disappears. The main players? The owner’s ex-lovers.

The Seattle Times describes Sourland as "the kind of literary thriller that gets dirt under its nails—moody, combustible and charged with the sense that everyone is hiding something dangerous.” Harper’s Bazaar characterized it as “if you wish ‘Succession’ was a little more Gen Z.” (Read more about the book below!)

Copies of Sourland will be available for purchase at the event. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.

Registration is free and highly recommended!

Questions? Email [email protected], and follow @theheadandthehand on Instagram for events, book clubs, updates, and more.

Sapphire and her farm, Sourland, are fixtures of Northern California’s rugged wilderness, offering refuge to rejects, rebels, and outcasts—anyone willing to work and learn. But the haven Sapphire has built is fractured when she suddenly goes missing, her scorched truck abandoned on a mountain road.

Frankie, a disgraced ballerina and Sapphire’s former girlfriend and right-hand woman, returns to Sourland, claiming ownership of the farm. When she arrives, Frankie finds that Fizz—Sapphire’s most recent lover, an ex–baseball player with a preternatural green thumb—has already begun prepping Sourland for its biggest harvest yet.

As the two grapple for power, the farm’s fate hangs in the balance, and with it, the future Fizz and Frankie each covet for themselves. Past demons and scorned admirers remain hauntingly close, while the specter of Sapphire looms over the farm: in cryptic notes, in bud-tender gossip, in every blade of grass and whorl of smoke.

A brilliantly constructed novel of desire and betrayal, Sourland sparkles with the beauty and grime of the California woods. Dixon’s novel warns that our true nature catches up to us all—no matter how far we run.

Ariel Delgado Dixon was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey. She is the author of the novels Sourland and Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You. She lives in Western Massachusetts where she works in farming and teaches writing.

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink: A Memoir, the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. His prose and poetry has been published in The Paris Review, The Verge, VQR, Harper’s, N+1, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and The Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing and Fulbright, among others. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and literature at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.