We're looking forward to celebrating The Almond in the Apricot by Sara Goudarzi, out now from Deep Vellum! Sara will be in conversation with the writer Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson.
“The Almond in the Apricot is brimful of mystery and longing, a page-turner that derives its suspense from vast and resonant questions about the layers of the self and of the world. Movingly, Sara Goudarzi’s debut novel plumbs the depths of grief, desire, and love.” —Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson
This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 3/3. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.
About The Almond in the Apricot…
“At its heart, this is a story about the deep ties of real and true friendships, one at its end and the other just beginning.” —Tessa Terry, Booklist
“A New Jersey woman tries to understand how she stumbled upon a parallel universe after losing her best friend in Goudarzi’s exquisite and magical debut.” —Publishers Weekly
Emma had the perfect trifecta: a long-term job as an engineer designing sewers; a steady relationship with her reliable boyfriend; and an adoring and creative best friend (about whom she wasn’t quite ready to admit her unrequited feelings). Then early one morning, a phone call changed her world forever.
Now she’s having nightmares that threaten to disrupt the space-time continuum –– nightmares of hiding from bombs in basements, of glass shattering from nearby explosions. But these disturbing dreams, in which she inhabits the body of a young girl named Lily, seem all too real, and Emma’s waking life begins to be affected by the events that transpire in this mysterious wartime landscape. Convinced she has been given a chance to save a life, Emma tries to rescue Lily from heartache, but ultimately it is through Lily that Emma finds her way back.
The Almond in the Apricot navigates connections formed across space and time and explores love, grief, and the possibility that the universe might be bigger than either Emma or Lily ever imagined.
Sara Goudarzi’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, National Geographic News, The Adirondack Review and Drunken Boat, among others. She is the author of Leila’s Day at the Pool and Amazing Animals from Scholastic Inc. Sara has taught writing at NYU and is a 2017 Writers in Paradise Les Standiford fellow and a Tin House alumna. Born in Tehran, she grew up in Iran, Kenya and the U.S. and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Clare Beams’s novel The Illness Lesson, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel prize and named a best book of 2020 by Esquire and Bustle. Her story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. A new novel, The Garden, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2023. Clare lives in Pittsburgh with her family and has taught at Carnegie Mellon University and the Randolph College MFA program.