Join First Light Books to celebrate the release of Yume Kitasei's upcoming third novel, SALTCROP.

The event will begin with an author reception from 6–6:30 p.m., followed by a panel discussion with Yume and Nicky Drayden, moderated by Ehigbor Okosun. 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

The epic tale of two sisters who sail across oceans to find their missing third sister—and Earth’s environmental salvation.

In Earth's not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find—and save—her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister's work and the corporations that want what she discovered.

But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister—or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.

About the author

Yume Kitasei is the author of Saltcrop, The Stardust Grail, and The Deep Sky. She is Japanese and American and grew up in a space between two cultures—the same space where her stories reside. She lives in Brooklyn with two cats, Boondoggle and Filibuster.

She'll be joined in conversation by Nicky Drayden, a systems analyst based in Austin, Texas, who dabbles in prose when she’s not buried in code. Her award-winning novel, The Prey of Gods, is set in a futuristic South Africa brimming with demigods, robots, and hallucinogenic hijinks, and with her new novel, Escaping Exodus, she’ll be taking her weirdness off-world to a civilization living inside the gut of moon-sized space beast.

The conversation will be moderated by Ehigbor Okosun, the internationally bestselling author of Forged By Blood. Raised across four continents, she now resides in the U.S., where she writes speculative fiction, mystery thrillers, and contemporary novels. She writes to do justice to the myths and traditions she grew up steeped in, and to honour her large, multiracial, and multiethnic family. She is a graduate of UT Austin with degrees in Plan II Honors, neurolinguistics, and English, as well as chemistry and pre-medical studies.