Raleigh novelist Elaine Neil Orr will visit Page 158 Books in Wake Forest’s Renaissance Plaza on Brooks Street at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 26, for an evening of reading and conversation about her new novel, Swimming Between Worlds.
Orr, the critically acclaimed writer of A Different Sun brings readers a Southern coming-of-age novel that sets three very different young people against the tumultuous years of the American civil rights movement.
Tacker Hart left his home in North Carolina as a local high school football hero, but returns in disgrace after being fired from a prestigious architectural assignment in West Africa. Yet the culture and people he grew to admire have left their mark on him. Adrift, he manages his father’s grocery store and becomes reacquainted with a girl he barely knew growing up.
Kate Monroe’s parents have died, leaving her the family home and the right connections in her Southern town. But a trove of disturbing letters sends her searching for the truth behind the comfortable life she’s been bequeathed.
On the same morning but at different moments, Tacker and Kate encounter a young African-American, Gaines Townson, and their stories converge with his. As Winston-Salem is pulled into the tumultuous 1960s, these three Americans find themselves at the center of the civil rights struggle, coming to terms with the legacies of their pasts as they search for an ennobling future.
Elaine Neil Orr is professor of English at North Carolina State University, where she teaches literature. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Spalding University in Louisville. Author of A Different Sun, two scholarly books, and the memoir, Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, she has been a featured speaker and writer-in-residence at numerous universities and conferences and is a frequent fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She grew up in Nigeria. Learn more at www.elaineneilorr.com.
For more information, please visit https://www.page158books.com/.
