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Judy Blume, author of In the Unlikely Event

In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was 15, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Judy Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.

Week of May 2, 2016

Paperback releases for the week of May 2nd include Harper Lee's second novel, GO SET A WATCHMAN, which is set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD; IN THE UNLIKELY EVENT, Judy Blume's first novel for adults since the 1998 release of SUMMER SISTERS; BEACH TOWN by Mary Kay Andrews, which revolves around the attraction between a movie location scout and the mayor of a sleepy Florida panhandle town, a born-again environmentalist who is determined to keep his town from being commercialized; THE WRIGHT BROTHERS by David McCullough, the dramatic story-behind-the-story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly; and Laura Dave's EIGHT HUNDRED GRAPES, a story about the messy realities of family, the strength (and weaknesses) of romantic love, and the importance of finding a place to call home.