The 2009/2010 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series presents an evening with Irish Booker Prize winner John Banville and South Asian author/physician Abraham Verghese. Banville and Verghese will give readings from their new novels The Infinities and Cutting for Stone.
The reading will be followed by an on-stage interview with Houston novelist and Inprint blogger Robert Cremins, author of A Sort of Homecoming and Send in the Devils, and a book sale and signingconducted by Brazos Bookstore.
Banville, hailed by The Economist as “Ireland’s finest contemporary novelist,” won the 2005 Man Booker Prize for his novel, The Sea. He is the author of more than 20 highly regarded books, including the novels The Book of Evidence, Eclipse, Shroud, and The Untouchable. Banville is also the author of Christine Falls, The Silver Swan, and many other mysteries under the pen name Benjamin Black. The Infinities, a comical multigenerational family saga interwoven with Greek gods, is his first novel since winning the Booker. Tom Payne in the Telegraph praises, “The Infinities is a Beethoven string quartet of a novel. It deals with huge ideas – plenty of them – and in doing so, breaks new ground in its own medium . . . a masterpiece of a book.”
Verghese, an Ethopian-born South Asian physician, is the author of two acclaimed memoirs, My Own Country and The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book, of which Kaye Gibbons writes, “It supersedes any memoir I’ve ever read. . . a wonderful examination of what it means to be alive.” His debut novel, Cutting for Stone, is a sprawling family story set mostly in Ethiopia. Ann Packer describes the book as “A marvel of a first novel. Verghese’s generosity of spirit is beautifully embodied in this gripping family saga that brings mid-century Ethiopia to vivid life. The practice of medicine is like a spiritual calling in this book, and the unforgettable people at its center bring passion and nobility — not to mention humor and humility — to the ancient art, while living an unforgettable story of love and betrayal and forgiveness. It’s wonderful.”
Now in its 29th year, the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series is presented by Inprint in collaboration with the University of Houston Creative Writing Program and Brazos Bookstore. The Series receives generous underwriting support from The Brown Foundation, Inc., Weatherford International, and the National Endowment for the Arts, “which believes that a great nation deserves great art.” Inprint receives in-kind support from the Alley Theatre, Continental Airlines, Hines, and KUHF 88.7 FM, as well as support from the Texas Commission on the Arts and The City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance.
