Pasadena Convention Center

Amity Gaige

2021, 2026

National Bestseller & April 2025 Read with Jenna Pick

Amity Gaige’s novel, Heartwood, tells the story of Valerie Gillis, a nurse who goes missing while hiking through the remote woods of Maine on the Appalachian Trail.  As a search and rescue team, led by Maine’s only female State Game Warden, Beverly Miller, races against time and possibly a clandestine paramilitary group to find her, a separate investigation is launched by seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher Lena who lives in a Connecticut retirement community.  Through the lenses of Beverly and Lena and Valerie’s own journal entries, readers explore the many ways in which we may be lost and found. Heartwood is Amity Gaige’s fifth novel. A national bestseller, it was selected as a Read with Jenna Pick for April 2025. In 2018, Gaige was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.  She lives in Connecticut with her family and teaches creative writing at Yale.

“A terrifically moving and tense thriller…genius.”  — The Washington Post.

“As gratifying as a daffodil at the end of a long winter.” — The New York Times. 

Leila Mottley

2026

Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, one of Amazon Best Books of 2025 & New Yorker “Briefly Noted” 

The Girls Who Grew Big opens with the unforgettably raw scene of Simone, sixteen years old and thirty-six weeks pregnant, giving birth to twins in the back of an old, dirty pickup truck. Through Simone and her friends, Adela and Emory, readers come to know and cheer for a group of teenage mothers navigating life in tiny Padua Beach on the Florida Panhandle. Exiled from their homes or facing difficult circumstances, these young women find strength and a sense of belonging in the community they forge together. Mottley’s first novel, Nightcrawling, was an Oprah’s Book Club Pick and a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of a poetry collection, woke up no light, and was named the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate in 2018. Mottley was born and raised in Oakland where she continues to live with her wife.

“Blistering, wise, empathetic. . . Mottley has brought the physicality and pain and beauty of birth and new motherhood into the light. That she has done so by way of teenage girls who have too often been shamed and shunned and told to hide themselves away makes her novel all the more vital to behold.” —  The New York Times Book Review.

Karen Russell

2026

Finalist for the National Book Award

The Antidote, longlisted for the National Book Award, is a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters — including a “Prairie Witch” who serves as a bank vault for memories, a Polish wheat farmer with a mysteriously spared crop, and a New Deal photographer whose magical camera reveals the town’s past and potential future.  Their fates become entangled after a dust storm ravages their small Nebraska town. Ultimately, the novel serves as a reckoning with national forgetting, particularly America’s history of “settler amnesia” and its impact on the land and the lives of those within it. Karen Russell is the author of six books of fiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. She has received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Born and raised in Miami, Florida, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, son, and daughter. 

“To embark on the adventure of reading The Antidote is to place yourself under the enchanting and challenging care of a writer who is guilty of actual witchcraft.” —The Washington Post. 

“Russell’s lyrical writing dazzles on every page.” —The New York Times.

Kathy Wang

2026

National Bestseller & Today Best Book of the Summer

The Satisfaction Café, by Kathy Wang, follows the life of Joan Liang, a Taiwanese woman who emigrates to California and navigates multiple marriages, motherhood, unexpected wealth, and assimilation in the white, upper class society that appears to accept her. Throughout her life, Joan grapples with the desire for genuine connection in an increasingly lonely world. A trip to Taiwan reveals a way for Joan to connect people to one another and to find connection for herself. The Satisfaction Cafe is Wang’s third novel.  She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Business School and lives in the Bay Area.

“An antidote to our global dissatisfaction… winsome… ironic but rarely biting, Wang’s narration moves nimbly just above Joan’s perplexed perspective while catching the notes of absurdity and hypocrisy around her.” — The Washington Post.