Mustian has written an extraordinary novel dealing with some of the most difficult issues of the twentieth century, issues that profoundly threaten this new century as well. This is a harrowing and truly important novel by a splendid American writer.”

—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

Please join us for a special evening with novelist Mark Mustian as he reads from and signs his new novel, THE GENDARME. To those around him, Emmet Conn is a 92 year old man on the verge of senility. A World War I veteran, he’s been affected by memory loss since being injured in the war. Now, at the end of his life, he’s beset by visions—frightening and realistic, he’s convinced they are memories of events he and others have denied or purposely forgotten. 

In Emmett’s dreams he’s a gendarme, escorting Armenian women and children from Turkey. A young woman among them, Araxie, captivates and enthralls him. She becomes the love of his life. But then the trek ends, the war separates them. He is injured. Seven decades later, as his grasp on the boundaries between past and present begin to break down, he sets out on a final journey, to find Araxie, and beg her forgiveness.

Alternating between Turkey at the dawn of the 20^th century and America in the 1990s, The Gendarme shows how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, how love can transcend nationalities and politics, and how the human spirit fights to survive in the face of hopelessness. It is a transcendent novel.

Please join us for a special evening with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey when she comes to Octavia Books to read from and sign BEYOND KATRINA.

Beyond Katrina is Trethewey’s very personal profile of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and of the people there whose lives were forever changed by hurricane Katrina.

Trethewey spent her childhood in Gulfport, where much of her mother’s extended family, including her younger brother, still lives. As she worked to understand the devastation that followed the hurricane, Trethewey found inspiration in Robert Penn Warren’s book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South, in which he spoke with southerners about race in the wake of the Brown decision, capturing an event of wide impact from multiple points of view. Weaving her own memories with the experiences of family, friends, and neighbors, Trethewey traces the erosion of local culture and the rising economic dependence on tourism and casinos. She chronicles decades of wetland development that exacerbated the destruction and portrays a Gulf Coast whose citizens—particularly African Americans—were on the margins of American life well before the storm hit. Most poignantly, Trethewey illustrates the destruction of the hurricane through the story of her brother’s efforts to recover what he lost and his subsequent incarceration.

Renowned for writing about the idea of home, Trethewey’s attempt to understand and document the damage to Gulfport started as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia that were subsequently published as essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review. For Beyond Katrina, Trethewey has expanded this work into a narrative that incorporates personal letters, poems, and photographs, offering a moving meditation on the love she holds for her childhood home.

Listen to NPR's Fresh Air interview with Natash Trethewey by Terry Gross