JMRL and Virginia Humanities are pleased to announce that Earl Swift’s Chesapeake Requiem (2018), named a Best Book of the Year by Washington Post, NPR, Outside, Smithsonian, Bloomberg, Science Friday, Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Review of Books, and Kirkus is the 2025 Same Page Community Read selection.
About Same Page Community Read:
Each year, JMRL invites all book lovers to participate in the Same Page Community Read throughout March, providing residents with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within their community by an author appearing at the Virginia Festival of the Book.
Same Page Community Read will be coming to a JMRL branch near you starting March 1. Copies of the book, as well as book discussion groups and Same Page programs and activities for all ages throughout the month. Stay tuned for more program information, times, and a full schedule.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
From the Publisher | Author Website
Tangier, Virginia: a community unique on the American landscape. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the Revolution, the tiny sliver of mud and marsh is home to 470 hardy people who live with one foot in the twenty-first century and another in times long passed.
But the very water that has long sustained Tangier now erases it day by day, wave by wave, as the island sinks and the bay rises. Experts reckon that islanders will soon be forced to abandon their homes. Conservative and deeply religious Tangiermen ponder the end times.
Chesapeake Requiem takes an intimate look at the island’s past, present, and tenuous future, and sounds a warning on the coming fate of countless coastal communities.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Earl Swift is the author of the New York Times bestseller Chesapeake Requiem, which was named to ten best-of-the-year lists. His other books include Across the Airless Wilds, Auto Biography, The Big Roads, and Where They Lay. A former reporter for the Virginian-Pilot and a contributor to Outside and other publications, he is a fellow of Virginia Humanities at the University of Virginia. He lives in the Blue Ridge mountains west of Charlottesville.
Same Page Community Read is generously funded by the Friends of JMRL, supported by the Art and Jane Hess Fund of the Library Endowment and the Virginia Festival of the Book, a program of Virginia Humanities.
[…] delighted to announce that Earl Swift (Chesapeake Requiem) is this year’s Same Page Community Read author, bringing his acclaimed work to readers across the region. Other headlining authors include Emma […]