Author Jeannette Walls to read from new historical fiction novel at CODE

New Dominion Bookshop will host a reading, conversation, and signing with New York Times bestselling author Jeannette Walls on Saturday, July 8, at 7 p.m. at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building at 225 W. Water St. in Charlottesville.

Walls, the author of The Glass Castle, will be sharing her new historical fiction novel, Hang the Moon, which was released from Scribner this spring.

Walls will be in conversation with author Liza Nash Taylor for the event.

This in-person event is cosponsored by WriterHouse and is free to attend.

Attendees should use the theater entrance on Water Street.

Pre-signed copies of Walls’s books will be available for sale before and after the event.

The bookshop said there will be a personalization line available after the event. However, to have your book(s) personalized, you must purchase at least one copy of Hang the Moon at the event.

The book is set in a Prohibition-era small town in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains where Sallie Kincaid is the 8-year-old, adoring daughter of Duke Kincaid, the charismatic patriarch who runs the local lumber mill, the hauling company, and most profitably, the thriving bootlegging business, all under Kincaid Holdings.

Sallie thinks the Duke is so grand that he “hung the moon and scattered the stars.” After the tragic death of Sallie’s mother, the Duke remarried, adding a soft-spoken, bookish son, Eddie, to their brood. Sallie, who possesses the same fearless, sharp-witted streak as her father, is tasked with “making a Kincaid” out of her younger stepbrother. But, her attempt results in a devastating accident, casting Sallie to live with her aunt Faye miles away.

Sallie returns nine years later to reclaim her place in the family and take the reins of Kincaid Holdings. But, the world to which Sallie returns as a young woman – one filled with gun-wielding moonshiners, violent racism, exploitation of all kinds, and temperance activists – is much different than the one she remembers. Hang the Moon offers an enthralling read about an intrepid young woman who must survive in a tempestuous world not of her making.

Walls graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, has been a New York Times bestseller for more than eight years.

She is also the author of the instant New York Times bestsellers The Silver Star and Half Broke Horses, which was named one of the 10 best books of 2009 by the editors of The New York Times Book Review. Walls lives in rural Virginia.

Nash Taylor, the moderator of the event, is the author of two recent historical novels, Etiquette for Runaways (2020) and In All Good Faith (2021), both from Blackstone Publishing.

She was a 2018 Hawthornden International Fellow and received an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts the same year. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Deep South, and others.

A native Virginian, she lives in an old farmhouse in Keswick, which serves as a setting for her novels.

For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.