Rowan Beaird + Jason Diamond: Tenderness

Moderating this discussion is notable writer Jason Diamond. This event will be hosted at the Strand at Columbus (SCA) at 420 Columbus Ave.

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“INTOXICATING...You’ll find yourself turning page after page, utterly swept up in the heady spell it casts.” —Megan Abbott, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author

From the beloved author of The Divorcées comes a novel set in the 1970s during an island wedding, where the bride has recently left a sinister cult that might still be trailing her

On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp?

Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another.

Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, Tenderness is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are.

Photo credit: Faith Kelsey

Rowan Beaird is the author of the novels Tenderness and The Divorcées. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.

Photo credit: Jeremy Cohen

Jason Diamond is the author of Searching for John Hughes, The Sprawl and co-author of New York Nico's Guide to NYC (with Nicolas Heller). His work has been published by the New York Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, GQ, The Paris Review, and many other outlets. He publishes the newsletter The Melt, was born in Skokie, Illinois, and currently lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. Kaplan’s Plot is his first novel.