Shannon Sanders presents THE GREAT WHEREVER

Registration for this event is not required; however, in the case of a full event, your registration will reserve your seat.

Join us on Tuesday, July 14, in Remington to celebrate the release of Shannon Sanders' debut novel, The Great Wherever! Shannon will be in conversation with Baltimore writer Khaliah Williams.

About The Great Wherever:

An impulsive and heartbroken woman inherits her father’s share of a Tennessee farm that is rich in family secrets and occupied with busybody ghosts in this sweeping family portrait.

At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling through adulthood. An underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, she’s grieving the end of a serious relationship and the recent loss of her father. When Aubrey learns she has inherited his stake in a sizable Tennessee farm she sees an opportunity to get out of the city—and to erase a mounting pile of debt.

Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts—Aubrey’s ancestors, who’ve staked their own claims to the farm and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the mistakes made by the living, whether romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey’s great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hopes to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it turns the Lambs against one another, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes through the decades.

Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they’ve made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future.

An expansive family saga told with a wry and distinctly modern voice, The Great Wherever is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our families, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us.

The Great Wherever releases on Tuesday, July 7. Preorder your copy here!

Shannon Sanders is the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was named one of the best books of 2023 by Publishers Weekly and Debutiful, and was shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including One Story, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature, and has received a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband and three sons.

Khaliah Williams is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has been published in the Hawaii Women’s Journal, Frontier Psychiatrist, Day One, and The Hopkins Review. You can read her non-fiction at Buzzfeed, American Short Fiction, and Salon. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and two very decorative cats.

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