Anne Korkeakivi, author of An Unexpected Guest, to speak at The American Library in Paris Oct 10

“Serious geopolitics mixes with parenthood and the finer points of entertaining... Like her protagonist, Korkeakivi’s writing is cool, calm and composed." - The New York Times

Wed 10 October 2012  19h30

Evenings with an Author: Anne Korkeakivi The American Library in Paris 10, rue du Général Camou 75007 Paris, France

On a lovely spring day in Paris – post-9/11 and several months after the London Underground bombings — Clare Moorhouse, the Irish-American wife of a high-ranking British diplomat, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband’s career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the abrupt arrival of her son from boarding school in England and a random encounter with a man on the street, who may be a suspected terrorist. More unnerving still is a recurring face in the crowd, one that belonged to another, darker era of her life. But it can’t be him…

Like Virginia Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway, Anne Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party.

About the author

Anne Korkeakivi is the author of An Unexpected Guest (Little, Brown; April 2012). Her short fiction has been published by the Atlantic, the YaleReview, the Bellevue Literary Review, the Brooklyn Review, and other magazines, and in 2011 she was made a Hawthornden Fellow. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times (U.K.), the Village Voice, Gourmet, Travel & Leisure, Ms., and many other periodicals in the U.S. and the U.K. She was raised in New York City and western Massachusetts, and currently lives in Switzerland with her husband, who is a human rights lawyer at the U.N. in Geneva, and two daughters. Other places she's lived include France and Finland.

Read the Kirkus review of An Unexpected Guest and see more on Anne's website.