Téa Obreht + Marie-Helene Bertino: Sunrise
About this Event
Moderating this discussion is award-winning author Marie-Helene Bertino. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
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Three lives, 100 years, one ghost town: an explosive novel about a mysterious place called Sunrise where the secrets of the past refuse to stay buried, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife
In 2024, Nina's small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old energy bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story 100 years in the making.
In 2003, Sunrise’s golden boy Coll begins to direct town's annual historical reenactment when he is linked with a scandalous incident at a local bar. And when an upstart author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy's disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?
These three are strangers, separated by time. But Sunrise has secrets which lie in waiting like gunpowder: quiet, unassuming, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht's novel challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the places we lay claim to, and most of all, of our own lives.
Photo credit: Ilan Hare
Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Southwest Book Award, and have been finalists for the National Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, among other honors. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Beautyland, Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collections Exit Zero and Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review 30. She is the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University.
PRAISE FOR TÉA OBREHT’S SUNRISE
“The title refers to a town in Wyoming that has a magical ‘Brigadoon’ quality. The new novel by the author of bestselling The Tiger’s Wife is set in multiple time frames…2024, 2003 and 1902. In each, characters struggle to get at the truth about what’s going on in the western town. Eventually, the stories converge and Obreht reveals the ghosts that haunt Sunrise.” -Minnesota Star-Tribune
“The Great Plains serve as a site of mystery and revelation…all three of Obreht’s protagonists are compellingly crafted, and all three are driven by secrets, which the author reveals slowly…Obreht has created quite a challenge for herself here, and she delivers a virtuoso performance. In her hands, these three narratives aren’t just satisfying on their own. They illuminate each other in ways that are both elegant and emotionally deep. An adventurous, rewarding novel from a writer who just gets better and better.” -Kirkus, starred review
“Obreht is riveting in each time frame as she exults in emulating and subverting tales of the Old West while exposing the poisonous complexities of gender, taboo love, myth, history, and our desecration of the wild in a breathtaking, shocking, and reverberating survival story.” -Booklist, starred
"A Wyoming ghost town provides the stage for this spectacular novel from Obreht about the enduring myths of the Wild West...Obreht employs impressive restraint, providing just enough clues to create intrigue as the reader pieces together the connections between the three storylines...it careens to an explosive climax. Readers will have a blast." -Publishers Weekly, starred
“Obreht’s latest novel is an unputdownable, metafictional, and nimble page-turner…The book’s structure is part of its pleasure, as is Obreht’s uncanny ability to write convincingly, it seems, about everything and everywhere and everyone, her precise, generous prose like being dunked into a new reality; with every section I found myself both anxious to get to the next, to find out what happened, and equally reluctant to leave…The result of all this is an adventure novel about what we remember and why, a three-pronged fable about the myths we hold dear, both about ourselves and about men and women we’ve never met.” -Lit Hub
“24-year old Nina survives a plane crash in the Wyoming mountains. While searching for her boyfriend, who was flying the plane, she stumbles into a ghost town in the wilderness. There, she discovers a series of secrets that connect her to a gunslinger from a 1902 pulp novel and a historian trying to preserve the ghost town in 2003, in this triple-timeline story that asks: Who writes history, and what do they have to hide?” -Good Housekeeping
“Téa Obreht never disappoints, and I’m excited to see her return to the American West after Inland, my favorite of her novels. This time, Sunrise is set in Wyoming, where three different narratives in 1902, 2003, and 2024 explore the history of a ‘strangely well-maintained, but seemingly abandoned’ ghost town.” –Esquire
“I’ve loved every book Téa Obreht has written but I might love this one the most. It’s tense and beautifully constructed, and it features Obreht’s signature precision when it comes to both language and emotion. Please put this book into the hands of everyone you know.”—Liz Moore, New York Times bestselling author of The God of the Woods
“Sunrise is thrilling and ingenious. In her new novel, Obreht explores this country’s troubled past, its gaps and silences, and the rich history that only new storytellers can excavate.”—Laila Lalami, bestselling author of The Dream Hotel
“Sunrise is everything you could wish for from a storyteller of Obreht’s caliber: a witty, propulsive tale of survival, a spirited reckoning with the ambivalences of American life, a deep dive into the secret histories of the West. Spellbinding and ingeniously crafted, this novel deepens Obreht’s reputation as one of our moment’s most original bards and shows the power of story to orient, investigate, and illuminate.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Something New Under the Sun
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Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 13.61 to USD 35.66
