But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life. With the help of her boyfriend and a bribed official, Shannon makes the fateful decision to adopt and raise the girl in Louisville, Kentucky.

There, in the cobblestoned medina of Marrakech, she finds a toddler in a pink jacket whose face mirrors her own. Saddled with student loans, medical debt, and the sudden news of her infertility after a major car accident, Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco in search of relief. Can't make it to the event? Preorder the book on the registration page to have it signed, and choose to have it held or shipped from the store! You can pick your book up after 6:30PM on the day of the event. Reserve a book! Books will be available for purchase at the event, but you can ensure that you get a copy by preordering on the registration page. You will also be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates. Register for the event! RSVP to let us know you're coming! Depending on the volume of responses, an RSVP may be required for entrance to the event. Jacinda teaches in the Creative Writing program at University of California, Davis, and is mom to two beautiful children who amaze her daily.In person at Brookline Booksmith! Celebrate the release of Mother Country with author Jacinda Townsend, in conversation with Jennifer Haigh.

She recently finished a novel called Kif. and went on to spend a year as a Fulbright fellow in Côte d’Ivoire. While at Duke Law School she cross-registered in the English department, where she took her next few formative writing workshops, and in 1999, after four years of being first a broadcast journalist and then a lawyer in New York City, went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received her M.F.A. Jacinda grew up in Southcentral Kentucky and took her fist creative writing class at Harvard, where she earned her B.A. Saint Monkey was also the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Jacinda Townsend is the author of Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014), which is set in 1950’s Eastern Kentucky and won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction.

Saint Monkey by Jacinda Townsend