The Natural World, Solitude, and the Human Spirit
Booker Prize winner Samantha Harvey, Eowyn Ivey, and Julia Phillips will explore the profound connections between wilderness and isolation, revealing how the natural world shapes identity, relationships, and the boundaries of survival.
| Where: | Modern Languages Room 350 (Seats 318, Wheelchair accessible)  |
| When: | Sun, Mar 16, 4:00 pm - 4:55 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing Area - Central Mall (following presentation)
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| Genre: | Fiction / Literature |
| Moderator: | Emily Walsh |
| Sponsors: | Session made possible courtesy of The William & Mary Ross Foundation, University of Arizona - Facilities Management, Carolyn W. Pope |
Panelists
Samantha HarveySamantha Harvey is the author of five novels, the latest of which -- "Orbital" -- won the 2024 Booker Prize as the year's best novel published in Great Britain. Others have shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize, and the James Tait Black Prize....
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Eowyn IveyEowyn Ivey was raised in Alaska and continues to live there with her husband and two daughters. She worked for nearly a decade as a bookseller at independent Fireside Books in Palmer, Alaska, and prior to that as a reporter for the local newspaper, The Frontiersman....
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Julia PhillipsJulia Phillips is the bestselling author of the novels "Bear" and "Disappearing Earth," which was a finalist for the National Book Award and one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year....
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Books:
Black Woods, Blue Sky
A Novel
Eowyn Ivey
Fiction / Literature
Random House
February 2025
ISBN 9780593231029
Hardcover, 320 pages
Buy nowBirdie’s keeping it together, of course she is. So she's a little hungover sometimes on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter Emaleen to work while she waits tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but it's a tough town to be a single mother and Emaleen never goes hungry.
Still, she remembers happier times—trout fishing with her grandfather and hiking in the tundra—being free in the world of nature.
Arthur Neilsen is a soft-spoken recluse, with scars across his face, who brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods one day. He speaks with a strange cadence, appears in town only at the change of seasons, and most people avoid him. But for Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for. He lives in a cabin in the mountains on the far side of the Wolverine River and tells Birdie about the caribou, marmots and wild sheep that share his untamed world. She falls in love with him and the land he knows so well.
Against the warnings of those who care about her, Birdie moves to his isolated cabin.
She and her daughter are alone with Arthur in a vast wilderness, miles from roads, telephones, electricity or outside contact, but Birdie believes she has come prepared. She can start a fire and cook on a woodstove. She has her rifle and fishing rod. In the beginning, it is an idyllic life—the three of them catch salmon, pick berries and swim in sunlit waters. But soon Birdie realizes that she is not at all prepared for what lies ahead: Arthur harbors a dark secret unlike anything she’d ever imagined; and she learns that the Alaska wilderness is as mysterious and dangerous as it is beautiful.
Black Woods, Blue Sky is a suspenseful novel with life-and-death stakes about the love between a mother and daughter, and about the lure of a wild life—about what we gain and what it might cost us. More/less
Bear
A Novel
Julia Phillips
Fiction / Literature
Random House Publishing Group
June 2024
ISBN 9780525520436
304 pages
Buy now
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
Fiction / Literature
Grove Atlantic
October 2024
ISBN 9780802163622
224 pages
Buy now
