Rachel Beanland: The Half Life – in Conversation with Bruce Holsinger

Name: Rachel Beanland: The Half Life – in Conversation with Bruce Holsinger
Start: 2026-08-28T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-08-28T20:00:00-04:00
Location: New Dominion Bookshop

Schedule

Fri Aug 28 2026 at 07:00 pm to 08:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

New Dominion Bookshop | Charlottesville, VA

Join us for an evening with Rachel Beanland, who will read from her new novel, The Half Life. A conversation with Bruce Holsinger will follow. This in-person event will be cosponsored by WriterHouse and will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: From the author of Florence Adler Swims Forever and The House Is on Fire comes a novel set on a remote Italian island about a navy wife’s reckoning with power, love, and the price of staying silent in the Atomic Age.
When twenty-three-year-old Eileen O’Malley meets charismatic naval officer Paul Archer in a Charleston department store, she doesn’t expect to fall so hard, so fast. But Paul is funny and ambitious, and soon, Eileen’s got a ring on her finger and is following him to the tiny, sun-drenched Mediterranean island of La Maddalena, where Paul will be heading up Radiological Controls aboard a submarine tender.
In La Maddalena, Eileen joins a makeshift community of navy wives who are hell-bent on making the island feel a little more like home. But for Eileen, whose brother died in Vietnam, home is a loaded word, and as she settles into life on the island—taking Italian lessons and learning to make culurgiones—she begins to love the place for all the ways it is not like where she comes from.
Still, it doesn’t take long for Eileen to be confronted with the complexities of being an American abroad. The decision to send nuclear-powered subs into the La Maddalena Archipelago was a contentious one, and the US government is doing whatever it can to ensure that the island—not to mention all of Italy—doesn’t go communist in the next election.
When Italian activists and scientists begin to sound the alarm about possible nuclear contamination in the water, the island erupts in a series of protests, made worse by the ongoing mishaps of the US Navy. Soon, Eileen’s marriage falters and her loyalties begin to shift as she is drawn into a web of secrets—and to a local journalist who forces her to imagine a life beyond the one she’s been handed.
Atmospheric, sexy, and quietly defiant, The Half Life is a story of love, complicity, and awakening—of one woman forced to choose between loyalty to her husband and country and to the Italian locals who show her the high cost of American exceptionalism.
About the Author: Rachel Beanland is the author of The House Is on Fire and Florence Adler Swims Forever, which won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction. She is a graduate of the University of South Carolina and earned her MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives with her family in Richmond, Virginia.
About the Moderator: Bruce Holsinger is the author of Culpability, the 116th selection of Oprah’s Book Club and hailed by Oprah Winfrey as a “must read for all generations.” His previous books have been recognized with the Colorado Book Award, the John Hurt Fisher Prize, the Philip Brett Award, and the John Nicholas Brown Prize, among others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and he has been profiled on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.