Local Author Book Launch: Gabrielle Fuentes, THE SLEEPING WORLD

Avid Bookshop is proud to present local author Gabrielle Fuentes in celebration of her debut novel, THE SLEEPING WORLD. The event will be held Friday, September 23rd, from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. There will be no admission charge.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Spain, 1977. Dictator Francisco Franco is dead, and in the wreckage of his regime, four friends throw themselves into the country’s celebration of freedom and fight for political control, embracing the bootleg punk music scene and the student riots with equal fervor.

After a violent incident at one of the riots, Mosca, Grito, La Canaria, and Marco blow off their university graduation exams and leave their hometown of Casarojas. Though they never speak of their motives, they’re each in search of something—a piece of the political action, a sense of self, young love.

Mosca is looking for something more concrete: her brother. Alexis is one of the country’s many “disappeared,” people taken by the government for alleged subversive actions and presumed dead. But Mosca is convinced that he’s still alive. The search takes her on a journey across Europe, and along the way Mosca shows that she is willing to sacrifice anything, even her friends, to find him.

In THE SLEEPING WORLD, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes captures an era of political and personal possibility, and the universal restlessness of coming of age.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes holds a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and is currently a Ph.D candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ONE STORY, SLICE, PANK, THE COLLAGIST, TWEED’S, NANO FICTION, WESTERN HUMANITIES REVIEW, and elsewhere. A Madison, Wisconsin native, she has lived in Spain and France, and currently lives in Athens, Georgia, with her husband, the poet Thibault Raoult, and their dog, Habana.