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Monica Byrne presents THE ACTUAL STAR, with Kim Stanley Robinson VIRTUALLY at Flyleaf Books
August 17, 2022 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Flyleaf Books is hosting Monica Byrne, in conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson, for a special online event to launch the paperback version of The Actual Star on Crowdcast.
To access this exclusive event, purchase a paperback copy of The Actual Star ($18.99 retail price plus tax) and mention in the order comments that you would like to sign up for the online event. We will add you to the registration list, and the link + access password will be sent to you two days before the event.
Monica Byrne is happy to sign & personalize copies of The Actual Star. Please use your order comments to specify whether you’d like your copy personalized (and to what name) or just plain signed!
Please contact Flyleaf Books at info@flyleafbooks.com with any questions.
David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas meets Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, as acclaimed author Monica Byrne (The Girl in the Road) crafts an unforgettable piece of speculative fiction about where humanity came from, where we are now, and where we’re going—and how, in every age, the same forces that drive us apart also bind us together.
“A stone-cold masterpiece.”—New Scientist
The Actual Star takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents—telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle.
Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion, racing toward a confrontation that will determine the fate of the few humans left on Earth after massive climate change.
In each era, a reincarnated trinity of souls navigates the entanglements of tradition and progress, sister and stranger, and love and hate—until all of their age-old questions about the nature of existence converge deep underground, where only in complete darkness can they truly see.
Monica Byrne is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. She earned degrees from Wellesley College and MIT in biochemistry, but then left academia to become a science fiction writer. She attended the Clarion Workshop in 2008, where she studied under Nalo Hopkinson, Kelly Link, and Neil Gaiman. She performed live monologues twice at TED in Vancouver, and her first novel, The Girl in the Road, won the Otherwise Award in 2014. The Actual Star is her second novel. She’s lived in Durham, North Carolina, for the last seventeen years, but is about to leave the country to go nomadic, indefinitely.
Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction novelist, essayist–and after his last book, The High Sierra: A Love Story–a memoirist. He earned degrees in English Literature from the University of California at San Diego and Boston University, and attended the Clarion Workshop in 1975, where he was taught by Ursula K. Le Guin. His work grew from the humanist science fiction movement of the seventies, and his many novels–including The Years of Rice and Salt, 2312, Aurora, and The Ministry for the Future–have won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and dozens of other awards. He currently resides in California, near the Sierra Mountains.
