An Evening with Cynthia d’Aprix Sweeney

New York Times bestselling author of The Nest, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney will appear in conversation with award-winning writer Madhushree Ghosh to discuss her compelling new novel, Lake Effect. Hailed by Booklist as “a reverberating, intergenerational family saga… artful and fresh,” the novel explores love, longing, and the complicated bonds between mothers and daughters as one family reckons with the consequences of a long-buried scandal. A book signing will follow the discussion.  

Sweeney’s previous novels, The Nest and Good Company, have been widely celebrated, with The Nest named a best book of the year by People, The Washington Post, and NPR, and currently in development as a limited series with AMC Studios.

Ghosh is the author of the award-winning Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family and a widely published essayist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous literary outlets. 

This event is free and open to the public. Seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basis. Limited preferred seating is offered with the purchase of Lake Effect through Warwicks Bookstore. 

About Lake Effect 

It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible — but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood. 

Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down. Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight,  Lake Effect is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.