WITH “SUCH KINDNESS”
In conversation with Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge.
Tom Lowe’s identity and his pride are invested in the work he does with his back and his hands. He designed and built his family’s dream home, working extra hours to pay off the adjustable rate mortgage he took on the property, convinced he is making every sacrifice for the happiness of his wife and son. Until, in a moment of fatigued inattention, shingling a roof in too-bright sunlight, he falls.
In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the cost of his relationships with his wife and son, Tom slowly comes to realize that he can never work again. If he is not a working man, who is he? He is not, he believes, the kind of person who lives in subsidized housing, though that is where he has ended up. He is not the kind of person who hatches a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud, together with neighbors he considers lowlifes, until he finds himself stealing his banker’s trash.
To one man’s painful moral journey, Dubus brings compassion with an edge of dark absurdity, forging a novel as absorbing as it is profound.
Andre Dubus III is the author of Such Kindness, Gone So Long, Dirty Love, Townie, The Garden of Last Days, and House of Sand and Fog (an Oprah’s Book Club pick and a finalist for the National Book Award). He lives with his family north of Boston.
Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, and other novels.
*Ticket Package includes a signed book (Such Kindness, $30, hardcover), beverage, reserved seat, author discussion, audience Q+A, and post-show meet-and-greet.