It’s always a pleasure to welcome back one of our favorite local authors, Marlene Lee, who will be reading from her new novel, Anna and Sebastian, on Thursday, September 19.

Anna and Sebastian opens as a much older Anna grapples with aging and a disorienting change in the relationship with her long-time lover, Sebastian. Years earlier he hired a woman who, unlike Anna, was still of child-bearing age. Now, eighteen years later, the daughter, attempting to live alone as an adult, is sexually assaulted and trafficked. At this point, the novel explores the effects of assault and trafficking not only on Sebastian’s daughter, but on Anna, who adapted to the unusual paternity, and on Sebastian, who did not bargain for the suffering he experiences as a father. 

Marlene Lee graduated from the Brooklyn College MFA program. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Calyx; The Christian Science Monitor; Descant; Indiana Review; Other Voices; Maverick Press/Armadillo; roger: an art and literary magazine; and Southern Humanities Review. She is the author of five novels (The Absent Woman, Rebecca’s Road, Scoville, Limestone Wall, and No Certain Home) and a collection of short stories, Inner Passage.