Cynthia Newberry Martin in conversation with Rachel Swearingen "Tidal Flats"

Join us at the Book Cellar to celebrate the paperback release of Cynthia Newberry Martin's book Tidal Flats, where she will have a conversation with local author Rachel Swearingen to discuss both of their books.

About the Book:

In this elegant and honest novel, a young couple must navigate that fine line between the things they want for themselves and the things they want together, and it appears each will have to make a choice―the person they love or the life they want.

Mary Cassatt Miller, the director of an Atlanta home for older women, and famous photojournalist Ethan Graham want a life together. Despite Ethan's work taking him to the streets of Afghanistan, he agrees that after three years, he will stop traveling.

But, nine weeks before their third anniversary, Cass is unsure whether Ethan will ever give up the work he loves. As the clock counts down, it doesn't help that Singer, the artist-bartender, is always in Atlanta, and the enthralling Setara, the subject of Ethan's most famous photograph, is also his business partner.

A new danger in Afghanistan changes everything.

About the Author:

Cynthia Newberry Martin's first novel, Tidal Flats, won the Gold Medal in Literary Fiction at the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Fiction. Martin's second novel, Love Like This, will be published in April of 2023. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has served as the Review Editor for Contrary Magazine and the Writing Life Editor for Hunger Mountain. Her website features the How We Spend Our Days series, over a decade of essays by writers on their lives. She grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Columbus, Georgia, with her husband, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in a little house by the water.

About the Conversation Partner:

Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize, and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Selection.” Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, the Guild Literary Complex named her one of 30 Writers to Watch. She lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program.

"Rachel Swearingen's debut, How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, presents stories that bristle with menace and charm with intimate revelations. An investment banker falls for a self-made artist who turns the rooms of her apartment into eerie art installations. An au pair imagines her mundane life as film noir, endangering the infant in her care. A down-on-his-luck son moves in with his elderly mother and tries to piece together the brutal attack she survived when he was a baby. Through nimble prose and considerable powers of observation, Swearingen takes us from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Northern Michigan, to Seattle, Venice, and elsewhere. She explores not only what it means to survive in a world marked by violence and uncertainty, but also how to celebrate what is most alive."--Provided by publisher.