M.L. Rio + John Wray: Hot Wax

Join us for a launch event with bestselling author M.L. Rio, discussing her new book Hot Wax. Joining M.L. in conversation is critically acclaimed author John Wray. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is.

Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills’ wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning—one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.

The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil’s beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she’d lost forever: desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country—and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back—where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.

Photo credit: Cait Brady

M.L. Rio, the breakout bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift, has accomplished the rare feat of being embraced by literary critics while also receiving rave reviews from BookTok where she has become a sensation. Her books have earned words of praise for people like Emily St. John Mandel, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, and Chuck Wendig. An avid record collector, concert-goer, and music journalist herself, Hot Wax (Simon and Schuster; September 9) is her most personal work yet. It’s a book about road trips, rock and roll, and a concert tour that goes disastrously wrong. A mashup of the best kind, Hot Wax is Thelma & Louise meets Almost Famous. Music aside, this is a story about a woman refusing the role society has thrust upon her. It’s one woman’s journey to the depths of chaos and back—where losing yourself could be the only way to rediscover who you truly are.

Photo credit: Julio Arellano

John Wray is the author of Gone to the Wolves, Godsend, The Lost Time Accidents, Lowboy, Canaan's Tongue, and The Right Hand of Sleep. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, and a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007. A citizen of the United States and Austria, he lives in New York City.

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