Dinner with the Author: Wendy Webb

06/14/2013 6:30 pm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We continue our very popular Dinner with the Author Series this Friday with novelist Wendy Webb at 6:30pm. 

About the Author: Wendy Webb is the author of "The Tale of Halcyon Crane," the 2011 winner of the Minnesota Book Award for genre fiction, an Indie Next Pick from the Independent Booksellers Association, a Midwest Connections Pick from the Midwest Booksellers Association, and a Great Lakes, Great Reads Pick from the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota.
 
About the Book:Grace Alban has spent more than twenty years avoiding her childhood home, the stately Alban House on the shores of Lake Superior, for reasons she would rather forget. But when her mother's unexpected death brings Grace and her teenage daughter back, she finds more is haunting the halls and passageways of Alban House than her own personal demons. 

 
Long-buried family secrets, a packet of old love letters, and a lost manuscript plunge Grace into a decades-old mystery about a scandalous party at Alban House, when a world-famous author took his own life and Grace's aunt disappeared without a trace. The night has been shrouded in secrecy by the powerful Alban family for all of these years. Her mother intended to tell the truth about that night to a reporter on the very day she died--could it have been murder? Or was she a victim of the supposed Alban curse? Grace soon realizes her family secrets tangle and twist as darkly as the mansion's secret passages.
 
With the help of the disarmingly kind--and attractive--Reverend Matthew Parker, Grace must uncover the truth about her home and its curse before she and her daughter become the next victims. 
Location: 
Street:
162 W 2nd St
City:
Winona
,
Province:
Minnesota
Postal Code:
55987
Country:
United States

Author Reading Event: Sue Leaf

06/25/2013 7:00 pm

 Author Sue Leaf will be reading from her biography of Thomas Sadler Roberts, A Love Affair With Birds, on Tuesday, June 25 at 7pm. 

About the Book: Imagine a Minneapolis so small that, on calm days, the roar of St. Anthony Falls could be heard in town, a time when passenger pigeons roosted in neighborhood oak trees. Now picture a dapper professor conducting his ornithology class (the university's first) by streetcar to Lake Harriet for a morning of bird-watching. The students were mostly young women--in sunhats, sailor tops, and long skirts, with binoculars strung around their necks. The professor was Thomas Sadler Roberts (1858-1946), a doctor for three decades, a bird lover virtually from birth, the father of Minnesota ornithology, and the man who, perhaps more than any other, promoted the study of the state's natural history. A Love Affair with Birds is the first full biography of this key figure in Minnesota's past.

Roberts came to Minnesota as a boy and began keeping detailed accounts of Minneapolis's birds. These journals, which became the basis for his landmark work The Birds of Minnesota, also inform this book, affording a view of the state's rich avian life in its early days--and of a young man whose passion for birds and practice of medicine among Minneapolis's elite eventually dovetailed in his launching of the beloved Bell Museum of Natural History. 

About the Author: Leaf has taught biology and environmental science at Cambridge Community college in Minnesota. A resident of the Anoka Sand Plain for 20 years, she is currently president of the Wild River chapter of the Audubon Society. 

Location: 
Street:
162 W 2nd St
City:
Winona
,
Province:
Minnesota
Postal Code:
55987
Country:
United States
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