Event Description
Porter Square Books and GrubStreet are excited to welcome Katherine A. Sherbrooke for the release of her book, This Much Is True. Susan Bernhard will join Sherbrooke in conversation.
ABOUT THIS MUCH IS TRUE
A mother faces an impossible dilemma as her daughter’s future hangs in the balance.
On her fifty-eighth birthday, Veronica Harmon feels blessed—with a fulfilling veterinary career, a wonderful marriage and three grown children, her youngest newly engaged and celebrating her first solo art show that very night. But when Veronica meets her daughter’s future in-laws, Ted and Belinda, who’ve flown across the country for the show, she is shocked to recognize Ted from an incident during high school that changed the trajectory of her life. Having never told a soul about that night, Veronica’s past reemerges like a live grenade.
Over the course of a pre-arranged weekend at the Harmon’s home intended to better acquaint the two families, Veronica unearths troubling memories, questions her own recollections and grapples with the impossible. If she quietly welcomes this man as a permanent part of her family she will be forced to live with a devastating lie, but if she reveals their shared history, she will expose her private shame and destroy her daughter’s future. Just when she thinks there is no viable solution, she has an epiphany that flips the script on what it means to be a survivor and the choices that are hers to make.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Katherine A. Sherbrooke is the award-winning author of three novels: the New York Times notable Leaving Coy’s Hill, which was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award; Fill the Sky, finalist for the Foreward INDIES Book of the Year and winner of an Independent Press Award; and The Hidden Life of Aster Kelly. Her work has also appeared in Cognoscenti and Zibby Magazine. She served as Chair of the Board of GrubStreet, the nation’s premier creative writing center, from 2013-2023 and lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts.
Susan Bernhard is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship recipient, a graduate of the GrubStreet Novel Incubator, and a 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her fiction has appeared in Little Bird Stories and Solstice Lit Mag and she is a contributor to Cognoscenti and the blog Dead Darlings. Her debut novel Winter Loon won the Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Prize for Fiction. A dual citizen of the United States and Ireland, Susan lives and writes in Massachusetts. Westerly is her second novel.