Author Event: Simon Tolkien

Join the library and author Simon Tolkien as he discusses the books The Palace at the End of the Sea and The Room of Lost Steps. The books tell the sequential coming-of-age story of an American boy, Theo Sterling, who grows up in New York in the Great Depression, attends boarding school in England, and volunteers to fight for the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War after experiencing the street fighting and anarchist revolution in Barcelona in the summer of 1936.

Tolkien will do a live Zoom Q&A about the books and his writing career on which his relationship with his grandfather, J.R.R. Tolkien had such an effect. His other novel, No Man’s Land published by Nan Talese / Doubleday in 2016 is set before and during the First World War and was inspired by his experience at the Battle of the Somme which had a profound effect on his vision of evil in Middle-earth.