Morgan Jerkins presents ZEAL

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Morgan Jerkins joins us in Remington to celebrate her new novel Zeal! Morgan will be in conversation with Baltimore author Laura Lippman!

ABOUT ZEAL:

The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.

Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .

Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.

Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at a freedmen’s school, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.

Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.

When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?

Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.

Zeal releases on Tuesday, April 22 and is available for preorder at greedyreads.com!

Morgan Jerkins is the author of Caul Baby, Wandering in Strange Lands, and the New York Times bestseller This Will Be My Undoing. Jerkins has taught at Columbia and Princeton Universities, and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and the Guardian, among many others. She lives in Brooklyn.

Laura Lippman has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction since her debut in 1997 and was named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Her books have won more than 20 prizes, been nominated for 30 more, and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. In 2024, her novel Lady in the Lake was adapted for an Apple TV+ minseries starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram. This year, she was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, a lifetime achievement award whose recipients have included Agatha Christie, Michael Connelly, Graham Greene, P.D. James, Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her daughter.

Host or Publisher Greedy Reads