It's 2001 and zombies have taken over Tom's town. Meth zombies. It starts small, with petty thefts of cleaning supplies and Sudafed from the supermarket where Tom works. But by year's end there will be ruined, hollow people on every street corner. Meth will unmake the lives of friends and teachers and parents. It will fill the prisons, and the morgues. Tom's always been focused on getting out of his depressing coal mining town, on planning his escape to a college somewhere sunny and far away. But as bits of his childhood erode around him, he finds it's not so easy to let go. Tom begins to see some reasons to stay, to see that even lost causes can be worth fighting for. In A Plague Year (Knopf, $15.99) Edward Bloor – author of perennial favorite Tangerine -- has created a searing portrait of a place and a family and a boy who survive a harrowing plague year, and become stronger than before.

The ambivalent relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States is the common theme in two recent novels by author Robert Friedman, who will be introduced this evening by Maurice Ferre. Friedman, a veteran journalist who worked for the San Juan Star in Puerto Rico for more than 20 years and as Washington correspondent for the paper until it folded in 2008, will sign and discuss his novels, Under a Dark Sun ($15) and Shadow of the Fathers ($15). The novels explore, among other things, crime, corruption and colonialism on the island. Shadow of the Fathers is based on a true incident that occurred in Puerto Rico—the supposed confession of a stateside doctor that he had killed several of his Puerto Rican patients because he found them members of an “inferior race.” El Nuevo Dia said the novel “meticulously and faithfully recreates the Puerto Rican setting...[and] recognizes Puerto Rico’s complex reality, both the internal struggles and those that come with colonial relations...” The late Puerto Rican novelist Edgardo Vega Yunqué called the work “a masterful literary novel.” Under a Dark Sun explores crime, corruption, drugs and politics in Colón, a Caribbean island stand-in for Puerto Rico. A young woman, returning from New York to the island of her birth, witnesses a murder and is caught in the underside of life on the island. A review of the novel in the Puerto Rico Daily Sun noted: “Friedman sure knows Puerto Rico’s political fauna...and portrays it majestically.”

Join us for Live Music in the Courtyard