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“Kantika”: Author Talk with Mass Book Award-Winner Elizabeth Graver
Join the Hull Public Library for a special event with Elizabeth Graver! Graver will present on her gorgeous family saga, Kantika, which won the 2024 Mass Book Award and National Jewish Book Award.
Moving from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, Graver offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries. Kantika follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way―a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood. Moving from Spain to Cuba to New York for an arranged second marriage, she faces her greatest challenge―her disabled stepdaughter, Luna, whose feistiness equals her own and whose challenges pit new family against old. A haunting, inspiring meditation on the tenacity of women, this lush, lyrical novel celebrates the insistence on seizing beauty and grabbing hold of one’s one and only life.
This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother Rebecca, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and New York. Kantika was awarded the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and a National Jewish Book Award. It was named a Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023 and Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Lilith, and Libby, and translated into German and Turkish. Elizabeth’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and Best American Essays. She teaches at Boston College.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3016558-0
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/3016558-2
