Calder reads at Cross & Crow Books
May 26th, 2025
Hannah Calder will be celebrating her new fiction, Hester in Sunlight (New Star $22) at Cross & Crow Books on Thursday, May 29.
The Hester in the title refers partly to the fallen woman character who is socially shunned while raising her daughter on her own in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th century classic, The Scarlet Letter.
But Calder’s novel is less a re-telling or transposition of Hawthorne’s classic than a re-purposing of the materials to tell a different version revolving around the relationships between the (unnamed) narrator; her husband Sonny and gender fluid child Luna; her sister Dani and her two kids; and their parents. The publisher writes that this book “is a heady and stimulating riff on contemporary motherhood and parenting.”
Hannah Calder is a UK-born novelist who lives on unceded Syilx Okanagan territory in Vernon, B.C. She earned her MA in English Literature in 2004 from Simon Fraser University and has published poetry and fiction in West Coast Line, The Capilano Review and dANDelion. Hester in Sunlight is her third novel with New Star. 9781554202102
EVENT DETAILS
Thursday May 29
7–9pm
Cross & Crows Books
2836 Commercial Drive, Vancouver
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