Please join us for a virtual conversation hosted by the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, October 3rd, including Andrea Bajani, author of If You Kept a Record of Sins.

In three astonishing new novels, the past hovers over the present like a ghost. In Italian writer Andrea Bajani’s If You Kept a Record of Sins, translated by Elizabeth Harris and published by Archipelago Books, a mother’s abandonment lingers on in the memory of her grown son. Meanwhile, the protagonist of Sri Lankan author Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, contends with the echoes of the country’s thirty-year civil war. And in Haitian writer Myriam J.A. Chancy’s What Storm, What Thunder, the island’s devastating 2010 earthquake is recalled with an eerie relevance.

You can learn more here.

Andrea Bajani (Rome, 1975) is one of the most respected and award-winning novelists and poets of contemporary Italian literature. He is the author of four novels and two collections of poems. His novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins, has brought him a great deal of attention. In just a few months, the book won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize and the Lo Straniero Prize. His works have been translated into many languages. He now lives in Houston and teaches at Rice University.

Anuk Arudpragasam was born and raised in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He spent most of his twenties studying in the United States, eventually receiving a doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University. His first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was translated into seven languages, won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. His latest novel is A Passage North. He currently lives between India and Sri Lanka.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian-American writer, the HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She is the author of the novel What Storm, What Thunder.

Link to register is forthcoming.