Left Bank Books presents author Jeannette Walls, who will sign and discuss her novel, The Silver Star (Scribner Book Company, June 2014), on Thursday, June 12, 7pm, at the Ethical Society of St. Louis (9001 Clayton Rd.).

In The Silver Star, it is 1970 in a small town in California. “Bean” Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that’s been in Charlotte’s family for generations. From one of the bestselling memoirists of all time comes a stunning and heartbreaking novel about an intrepid girl who challenges the injustice of the adult world in a triumph of imagination and storytelling.

The Silver Star received starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. Kirkus claims, “Walls turns what could have been another sentimental girl-on-the-run-finds-home cliche into a fresh consideration of both adolescence and the South on the cusp of major social change.” Chelsea Cain of The New York Times Book Review calls The Silver Star “[g]reat writing…An absorbing, unsentimental tale of childhood,” and Holly Silva of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch says, “Walls has written yet another gripping story.”

Jeannette Walls was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in the southwest and Welch, West Virginia. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York City for twenty years. Her memoir, The Glass Castle, was a New York Times bestseller for more than three years. Walls lives in rural Virginia with her husband, the writer John Taylor.