Tommy Hays in Conversation with Michel Stone

Join us for an evening with Tommy Hays in conversation with Michel Stone where they will be discussing Tommy's new novel The Marriage Bed, with a book signing to follow.

A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation—laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath.

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.

Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn't know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive, and more important, rededicate himself to being a father.

Tommy Hays is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he’s lived and known—Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to The Marriage Bed, he is the author of The Pleasure Was Mine, In the Family Way, Sam’s Crossing, and What I Came to Tell You. He has been inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors as well as the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the governor of North Carolina. He’s retired Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC Asheville.

Michel Stone is the author of the novels Border Child (Doubleday),The Iguana Tree (Hub City Press), and the forthcoming Fig Days (April 2027, Regal House). She is the winner of the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters, the Patricia Winn Award for Southern Literature, and the South Carolina Fiction Award. Michel has published numerous stories and essays and her novels have been favorably reviewed from The San Francisco Chronicle to The New Yorker and many places in between. She is at work on her fourth novel.

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