New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville will host a book reading and signing with novelist Alice Bingham Gorman on Saturday, Nov. 17, from 4:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Alice Bingham Gorman’s debut novel, Valeria Vose, takes readers deep inside the cultural and emotional life of a 1970’s Southern woman. This event is free to attend.
About the Book: In the 1970’s South, Valeria Vose’s life is not as she expected. Raised to be a wife and mother in a closed society with traditions that blinded her from her own potential and her desire to be an artist, she is unprepared for a life-altering crisis. On the brink of forty, her 18 year marriage is shattered by her husband’s infidelity and his lover’s attempted suicide. Turning to an Episcopal priest for direction and solace, she spins into a clandestine love affair that results in abuse and betrayal. In her disillusionment, she picks herself up and embarks on a course that leads to personal, creative independence.
This debut novel reads like a memoir, relentlessly honest in its internal observations, rich in detail of time and place. Challenging the core of a religious skeptic, it is a triumph of the spirit that wins in the end.
“Alice Gorman’s beautiful first novel tracks the eponymous Valeria’s journey as she finds her way from dutiful wife and mother to independent and enlightened single woman, aware of herself and sure of her place in the world. Gorman is exquisitely attuned to social nuance and psychological detail, and she renders this community—Memphis in the mid-twentieth century—with wonderful accuracy. This is a necessary story about a journey all women take in one form or another, and the book is enriched by Gorman’s wisdom and compassion.,” said Roxana Robinson, author of Cost and Sparta.
About the Author: Alice Bingham Gorman is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She earned an MFA in writing from Spalding University in 2005 and received an honorary PhD in fine arts from the Memphis College of Art. Her writing has been published in Vogue, O, the Oprah Magazine, O’s Little Book of Love and Friendship, The Louisville Review, and countless regional periodicals and art publications. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, she divides her time between Maine and Florida. Valeria Vose is her first novel.
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