Susan Bernhard “Westerly” in Conversation with Tess Callahan "Dawnland"

East End Books Ptown Presents: Susan Bernhard “Westerly” in Conversation with Tess Callahan "Dawnland" - Ptown

Susan Donovan Bernhard is the author of Winter Loon, an Amazon bestseller and winner of the Boston Authors Club's Julia Ward Howe Prize for fiction. She is a Mass Cultural Council fellowship recipient, a GrubStreet Novel Incubator program graduate, and a Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, Susan was born and raised in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana and graduated from the University of Maryland. She now lives and writes in Massachusetts.

Tess Callahan is the author of April & Oliver. Her essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Writer's Digest, National Public Radio, AGNI, Narrative Magazine, AWP: The Writer's Notebook, Newsday, The Common, the Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere. Her TEDx talk on creativity is titled "The Love Affair Between Creativity and Constraint." Tess is a graduate of Boston College and Bennington College Writing Seminars and teaches creative writing and meditation. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives with her family and number one life coach: her dog. For more information, visit www.tesscallahan.com.

Westerly

In an unforgettable saga of survival, motherhood, sisterhood, and the secrets that haunt us, one desperate decision creates a fault line that spans decades and threatens to break a family wide open.

In 1946, two German sisters, child refugees in a program dubbed Operation Shamrock, arrive in Ireland to live in foster care while Europe recovers from war. Nearly fifty years later, on a fateful day in a bustling Maine farmhouse, an Irish newspaper clipping threatens to unravel Faye Sullivan's carefully constructed life with husband William and daughters Maeve and Molly, a life already on the brink of collapse.

When tragedy strikes and the Sullivans grapple with a cascade of buried secrets, Faye must confront the truth of a childhood summer in West Cork marked by adventure, heartbreak, and a life-altering decision that now jeopardizes everything she holds dear. And while their bonds may not be what they seemed, those bonds might be the one thing strong enough to help the broken Sullivan family navigate the truth and find their way forward together.

From Germany to Ireland to coastal Maine, this tender family saga explores identity, reconciliation, and the true meaning of home.

Dawnland

On a fated summer getaway in Cape Cod, two families on the verge of fracture contend with the secrets of the past in a powerful and moving novel by the author of April & Oliver.

April, her brother-in-law Oliver, and their families reunite in Cape Cod on an exquisite stretch of beach called Dawnland. After eleven summers of building traditions--kayaking, whale watching, bonfires, and ocean swims--this year comes with new threats both on and off the coastline.

Before their marriages, April and Oliver had an intense but disastrous fling that they kept hidden. Although they moved on with their lives, their more recent fiery encounter is getting harder to keep secret--especially as the week unravels, revealing fault lines not only between husbands and wives but between brothers, fathers and sons, and children growing up amid discord and lies. Ground zero for conflict is April's volatile teenage son, Lochlann.

The family structure begins to teeter. Secrets are surfacing. As everyone faces the consequences of their choices, the truth could finally forge them together or tear them apart forever.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher East End Books Ptown