Bonnie Nadzam Book Talk

Book Talk with Bonnie Nadzam

Tuesday, July 26th - 7 pm

Acclaimed author Bonnie Nadzam returns to Steamboat Springs to share her latest novel, Lions. 

About the book: Bonnie Nadzam, author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning debut, Lamb, returns with Lions, a scorching, haunting portrait of a rural community in a “living ghost town” on the brink of collapse and its inhabitants who are confronted with either chasing their dreams or—against all reason—staying where they are.

In this beautifully tragic story of young love sobered by adult decisions and consequences, Nadzam captures the grandeur, stark emptiness, and raw beauty of the romantic American infatuation with myth and stories that has been at the heart of the West. Set on the high plains of Colorado, a nearly deserted place steeped in local legends and sparse in population, the town of Lions was built to be a glorious western city upon a hill, never fit for farming, mining, trading, or any of the illusory sources of wealth its pioneers imagined. The Walker family have made a home on its barren terrain for generations – a simple family in a town otherwise still taken in by stories of bigger, better, brighter.

When a traveling stranger appears one day, his unsettling presence sets off a chain reaction that changes the fates of everyone he encounters, beginning with the patriarch, John Walker, who succumbs to a heart attack. His devastated son, Gordon, is forced to choose between leaving for college with his girlfriend, Leigh, and staying with his family to look after their flailing welding shop and, it is believed, to continue carrying out a mysterious task bequeathed to all Walker men. While Leigh is desperate to make a better life in the world beyond the desolation of Lions, Gordon is strangely hesitant to leave it behind. As more families abandon the town, he is faced with what seem to be their reasonable choices and the burden of betraying his own heart.

Reminiscent of the works of Bonnie Jo Campbell, Mark Spragg, Ron Rash, Kent Haruf, and Jeffrey Lent, Lions is an exquisite novel that tells a story of awakening, exploring ambition and an American obsession with self-improvement, the responsibilities we hold to ourselves and each other, as well as the everyday illusions that pass for a life worth living.

About the Author: Bonnie Nadzam has published fiction and essays in many journals and magazines, including Granta, Harper’s Magazine, Orion Magazine, The Iowa Review, Epoch, The Kenyon Review, and many others. Her first novel, Lamb, was the recipient of the Center for Fiction’s first novel award in 2011 and was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. It has been translated into several languages and made into a film that will be released in 2016. She is also co-author with Dale Jamieson of Love in the Anthropocene (OR Books, 2015).