Quan Barry, THE UNVEILING

Quan Barry, author of We Ride Upon Sticks and When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East, visits the store to discuss her new literary horror book, The Unveiling, a genre-bending novel set in Antarctica that explores abandonment, guilt, and survival in the shadow of America’s racial legacy. Gripping, lucid, and imaginative, The Unveiling is an astonishing ghost story about the masks we wear and the truths we hide even from ourselves.

Striker isn’t entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton’s doomed expedition. Along the way, she finds private if cautious amusement in the behavior of both the native wildlife and the group of wealthy, mostly white tourists who have chosen to spend Christmas on the Weddell Sea.

But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, a desolate setting complete with boiling geothermal vents and vicious birds. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group’s secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker’s past that could irrevocably shatter her world.

With her signature lyricism and humor, Quan Barry offers neither comfort nor closure as she questions the limits of the human bonds that connect us to one another, affirming there are no such things as haunted places, only haunted people.

Quan Barry is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry including When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East; We Ride Upon Sticks, winner of the 2020 ALA Alex Award; and She Weeps Each Time You’re Born. Her most recent poetry collection, Auction, was named one of the five best collections of 2023 by the New York Times. Her first play, The Mytilenean Debate, premiered in 2022. She is the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

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