Please join First Light Books in welcoming Laura Venita Green to the shop in celebration of her debut novel, SISTER CREATURES, forthcoming from Unnamed Press.

The event will begin with an author reception from 6:30–7 p.m., followed by a conversation and signing.

Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

About the book

In the muggy, insect-ridden town of Pinecreek, Louisiana, college dropout Tess Lavigne is watching two bickering siblings while their parents are away. Her listless day drinking is interrupted when someone emerges from the woods behind the house. Filthy and feral, the daughter of religious fundamentalists, the girl known in town as Sister Gail convinces Tess to take her in for the night. The strange events of that evening will set the course for Tess’s future, and Sister Gail’s ultimate fate.

Meanwhile, other residents of Pinecreek try to cobble together a future from what little they have, their lives intersecting in small and not-so-small ways. Sisters fight to define independence for themselves (and from each other), while two young women on a bicycling trip wonder what their relationship promises, or threatens. Throughout, a deeply unsettling presence connects the characters to the buried secrets of Pinecreek: the ominous Thea, a malevolent shape-shifting entity whose rage and despair stems from a tragic history of misogyny, maternal loss, and stolen ambitions.

As time marches forward, so does Tess, creating a new path for herself while accepting what can never be entirely left behind. At times atmospheric and eerie, and at others all too real, SISTER CREATURES is about manufacturing resilience from nothing but the bonds that tie us together.

About the authors

Laura Venita Green is a writer and translator with an MFA from Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions, and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, Fatal Flaw, and translated to Italian in Spazinclusi. Her translations appear in Asymptote, World Literature Today, and The Apple Valley Review. Originally from Louisiana, she lives with her husband in New York City.

Laura will be joined by her friend Kirk Lynn, a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter living in Austin, Texas with his wife, the poet Carrie Fountain, and their children. Lynn is one of five artistic directors of the Rude Mechs theatre collective and head of the playwriting area in the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin.