The New York Times award-winning author Susan Straight returns to read from her latest and much lauded novel, Mecca. Set in Southern California’s inland and high desert area, this is a story of freeways, wildfires, secrets, and struggles that is, at its heart, a love song for a place and its people. Told from different points of view in interwoven narratives, Mecca speaks of loneliness and grief, family, and home, and the ways in which language, with its power and peculiarities carries a culture’s hopes and fears. With courage and grace, Straight, noted as “an essential voice in American writing and in writing of the West,” looks closely at the California few see, pushes deep into the difficult territories of the past few years, and shifts how we see the land and each other.

Book signing to follow.