2007 SANTA MONICA CITYWIDE READS FEATURES THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date:       November 15, 2006
Contact:  Robert Graves, Public Services Librarian, (310) 458-2201, ext. 5956

The City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Public Library are pleased to announce the featured book for the 2007 Santa Monica Citywide Reads program: The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.

Santa Monica Citywide Reads is a community reading program that invites everyone to read and discuss the same novel in book clubs and other events held around the city.  2007 marks the fifth anniversary of Santa Monica Citywide Reads, and this year’s selection offers an exciting thematic change from the books featured thus far.

The Time Traveler’s Wife is the fantastic, romantic adventure story of beautiful artist Clare Abshire and dashing librarian Henry De Tamble.  Destined to be together as a couple, Clare and Henry must fight against one seemingly insurmountable obstacle: Henry suffers from chrono-displacement disorder, a condition that causes him to unexpectedly jump backwards and forwards in time, while Clare, the love of his life, ages in the normal chronological fashion, completely unaware as to where and when she and her beau will be able to resume their lives together again.  "Audrey Niffenegger makes this premise work with delightful wryness and delicate poignance,” says Susan Sterr-Ryan, chair of the English department at Santa Monica College and a member of the Citywide Reads Advisory Committee. "As we come to love her richly drawn characters, we appreciate our own challenges to live in the moment."  The Time Traveler’s Wife was published in hardback by MacAdam/Cage Publishing, and in trade paperback by Harcourt Trade Publishing.

Audrey Niffenegger is a professor in the M.F.A. program at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts.  The Time Traveler’s Wife was her first novel and, upon publication, became a New York Times best seller and won several awards, including a British Book Award for Popular Fiction and the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Alex Award for books with appeal to teens.  Ms. Niffenegger has subsequently published two lavishly illustrated "visual novels," The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress, and is currently at work on a new novel about a mysterious pair of mirror-image twins.

Santa Monica Citywide Reads will take place from mid-April to mid-May, 2007 and will feature free public book discussion groups led by volunteer facilitators and held in libraries, bookstores, coffeehouses, and other venues.  Related events, such as presentations on the mainstreaming of genre fiction, artist’s books and a possible visit from the author, are being planned.

For more information about Citywide Reads, visit www.smpl.org/cwr, or call the Santa Monica Public Library at (310) 458-8600.

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This page was last updated on 11/15/06.