Guest Author Event: The World Against Her Skin

Virginia and Joe Thorndike have been married for twenty-two years, and now she wants a new life. She’s in love with Rich Villamano, a surgeon thirteen years her junior, but after flying to Miami to start living with him, he tells her he has changed his mind and they must go their own ways. In an instant their four-year affair is over. She takes off in his car, heading north with no luggage, no hope, no destination. She buys a bottle of gin and drinks it straight. Afraid that she’ll kill herself or someone else on the road, she abandons the car in Georgia, flies to New York and takes an airport hotel room. She has no home and nowhere to go.

The World Against Her Skin is a biographical novel in which much is remembered and much imagined. “I stay close to my mother’s story,” the author explains, “but to know the details I had to make them up.”

John Thorndike is a critically acclaimed author, with works scattered across a career of nearly forty years.  Copies of his new novel will be available for sale and autographing.

Sponsored by the Friends of the Athens Public Library.