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Speaker Series: Lydia Fitzpatrick

MON. APR 29 | 6:00PM - SPEAKER SERIES: LYDIA FITZPATRICK

The dazzling debut author, Fitzpatrick, will discuss her upcoming book Lights All Night Long, a gripping and deftly plotted narrative of family and belonging. Tickets are $5 for members and $10 for nonmembers. Every ticket purchased will receive a $5 off coupon for the title book Lights All Night Long useable specifically at this event.

Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student. The abundance of his new worldthe Super Walmarts and heated pools and enormous televisionsis as hard to fathom as the relentless cheerfulness of his host parents. And Sadie, their beautiful and enigmatic daughter, has miraculously taken an interest in him.

But all is not right in Ilyas world: hes consumed by the fate of his older brother Vladimir, the magnetic rebel to Ilyas dutiful wunderkind, back in their tiny Russian hometown. The two have always been close, spending their days dreaming of escaping to America. But when Ilya was tapped for the exchange, Vladimir disappeared into their towns seedy, drug-plagued underworld. Just before Ilya left, the murders of three young women rocked the towns usual calm, and Vladimir found himself in prison.

With the help of Sadie, who has secrets of her own, Ilya embarks on a mission to prove Vladimirs innocence. Piecing together the timeline of the murders and Vladimirs descent into addiction, Ilya discovers the radical lengths to which Vladimir has gone to protect hima truth he could only have learned by leaving him behind.

A rich tale of belonging and the pull of homes both native and adopted, Lights All Night Long is a spellbinding story of the fierce bond between brothers determined to find a way back to each other.

Lydia Fitzpatricks work has appeared in the The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, One Story, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. She graduated from Princeton University and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters.