Venue

: The Great Hall
: 1119 Eighth Avenue (enter on Eighth Avenue)
Seattle, 98101 United States + Google Map

Event Format: In-Person

EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.

Headshots of Kate Quinn (with fair skin, long light brown hair) and Elise Hooper (with fair skin, long blonde hair)

Arts & Culture

Have you ever wished you could go inside of a book? You could travel to a new place, see new sights, potentially live a different life altogether — all from the page.

From New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn comes Astral Library, a fantastical novel where books are not merely objects, but doors to different worlds, different adventures, and different futures.

After growing up in the foster care system, protagonist Alix Watson came to believe one thing: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and letting her dreams of higher education fall to the wayside, Alix takes refuge in the reading room at the Boston Public Library, reading her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of faraway lands night after night. One day, she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless guardian of the Astral Library, where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives inside their favorite books. All seems well until a shadowy enemy emerges and threatens everyone inside.

As danger draws closer, Alix and the Librarian try to escape, fleeing places like the back alleys of the Sherlock Holmes series, the Regency-era drawing rooms of Jane Austen, and the decadent parties of The Great Gatsby, to name a few. In journeying through books, Quinn may offer insight into where readers truly belong.

Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction. A native of Southern California, she attended Boston University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in classical voice. A lifelong history buff, she has written four novels in the Empress of Rome Saga and two books set in the Italian Renaissance before turning to the 20th century with The Alice Network, The Huntress, The Rose Code, The Diamond Eye, and The Briar Club. The Astral Library is her first foray into magic realism. She and her husband now live in Maryland with their rescue dogs.

Elise Hooper spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting a MA and teaching high-school literature and history. Her debut novel The Other Alcott was a nominee for the 2017 Washington Book Award. Three more novels—Learning to See, Fast Girls, and Angels of the Pacific—followed, all centered on the lives of extraordinary but overlooked historical women. Her newest book, The Library of Lost Dollhouses, was inspired by a dollhouse that’s been in her family for five generations. Elise lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle.

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