• The Innocents

    by Francesca Segal
    Price $25.99
    Hardcover
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    The Innocents

Francesca Segal

reads from

The Innocents

This event includes a book signing

Date

Jun
11
Monday
June 11, 2012
7:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome debut novelist FRANCESCA SEGAL for a reading of The Innocents, her contemporary recasting of Edith Wharton’s classic novel The Age of Innocence.

A smart and slyly funny tale of love, temptation, confusion, and commitment, The Innocents is a generous and deeply satisfying look at a close-knit society in which one young man's pre-wedding panic illuminates the universal conflict between responsibility and passion.  Newly engaged and unthinkingly self-satisfied, twenty-eight-year-old Adam Newman is the prize catch of Temple Fortune, a small, tight-knit Jewish suburb of London.

He has been dating Rachel Gilbert since they were both sixteen and now, to the relief and happiness of the entire Gilbert family, they are finally to marry. To Adam, Rachel embodies the highest values of Temple Fortune; she is innocent, conventional, and entirely secure in her community—a place in which everyone still knows the whereabouts of their nursery school classmates. Marrying Rachel will cement Adam’s role in a warm, inclusive family he loves. But as the vast machinery of the wedding gathers momentum, Adam feels the first faint touches of claustrophobia, and when Rachel’s younger cousin Ellie Schneider moves home from New York, she unsettles Adam more than he’d care to admit. Ellie—beautiful, vulnerable, and fiercely independent—offers a liberation that he hadn’t known existed: a freedom from the loving interference and frustrating parochialism of North West London. Adam finds himself questioning everything, suddenly torn between security and exhilaration, tradition and independence. What might he be missing by staying close to home?

Francesca Segal
Francesca Segal

Francesca Segal

Francesca Segal was born in London in 1980. Brought up between the UK and America, she studied at Oxford and Harvard universities before becoming a writer. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, and The Jewish Chronicle, amongst others. She has been a features writer at Tatler, and for three years wrote the Debut Fiction column in The Observer.

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

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While we can't guarantee fulfillment of a signed book pre-order, our authors are almost always able to sign extra books to fulfill such orders.

Ordering a signed book on harvard.com:

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FAQ:

Can I request a personalized inscription?
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General Info
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info@harvard.com

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