“Only connect,” E. M. Forster famously wrote as the epigraph to his novel Howards End. The imperative to connect and the challenges of doing so meaningfully are perhaps even more crucial today. In this session, we’ll hear from three astute novelists who write with urgency about the interconnectedness of human lives. Celeste Ng, whose second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, is a New York Times bestseller, examines the uneasy tensions between an affluent community and the disruptive newcomers in their midst, in a novel Kirkus calls “mesmerizing.” In Three Floors Up, bestselling Israeli novelist Eshkol Nevo employs a Tel Aviv apartment building as a microcosm of wider society, by profiling its inhabitants and their struggles to form genuine relationships. And in National Book Award winner Lily Tuck’s slight but intense novel Sisters, she portrays a narrator who feels an oppressive connection to her husband’s first wife, despite her desires for a fresh start. Connecting these three insightful authors is moderator and novelist Dawn Tripp, author most recently of the national bestseller Georgia.
