Author Talk: Susan Conley, LANDSLIDE

After a fishing accident leaves her husband hospitalized across the border in Canada, Jill is left to look after her teenage boys–“the wolves”–alone. Nothing comes easy in their remote corner of Maine: money is tight; her son Sam is getting into more trouble by the day; her eldest, Charlie, is preoccupied with a new girlfriend; and Jill begins to suspect her marriage isn’t as stable as she once believed.
With remarkable poise and startling beauty, LANDSLIDE ushers us into a modern household where, for a family at odds, Instagram posts, sex-positivity talks, and old fishing tales mingle to become a kind of love language. It is a beautiful portrait of a family, as compelling as it is moving, and raises the question of how to remain devoted when the eye of the storm closes in.

Susan Conley is the author of three previous novels including Elsey Come Home, and a memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares. She’s received multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, as well as from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She lives in Portland, Maine, where she’s on the faculty of the Stonecoast Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine.

About the host
Karen Dukess is the author of The Last Book Party, “a spare, bittersweet page-turner (NYTimes),” which was an IndieNext and Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She has been a tour guide in the former Soviet Union, a newspaper reporter in Florida, a magazine publisher in Russia and a speechwriter on gender equality for the United Nations Development Programme. She has blogged on raising boys for The Huffington Post and written book reviews for USA Today. She has a degree in Russian Studies from Brown University and a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University. She lives with her family near New York City and spends as much time as possible in Truro.