An award-winning journalist’s extraordinary account of being kidnapped and tortured in Syria by al Qaeda for two years—a revelatory memoir about war, human nature, and endurance that’s “the best of the genre, profound, poetic, and sorrowful” (The Atlantic). In 2012, American journalist Theo Padnos, fluent in Arabic, Russian, German, and French, traveled to a Turkish […]

Join us in person at HVWC and on Zoom to hear two astonishing writers read from their memoirs. Journalist Theo Padnos and poet Diana Goetsch have each departed from their usual genre of choice to tell their unique and captivating stories. We cannot wait to hear them read from Blindfold (Scribner, 2021) and This Body […]

A mesmerizing breakthrough novel of family myths and inheritances by the award-winning author of Crescent.  We will be having a VIRTUAL VISIT WITH THE AUTHOR! The King of Jordan is turning 60! How better to celebrate the occasion than with his favorite pastime―fencing―and with his favorite sparring partner, Gabriel Hamdan, who must be enticed back […]

While "The Foundling" is a novel, it is based on a startling discovery Ann Leary made while researching her grandmother's employment as a stenographer at Pennsylvania's The Laurelton State Village for Feeble Minded Women of Childbearing Age in the 1930s. During this dark American era of eugenics, if a young woman who had a child […]