The Center for Fiction and BCLF Present Donna Hemans on The House of Plain Truth with Maisy Card

Thursday, 7:00 pm EDT February 1, 2024

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

THE HOUSE OF PLAIN TRUTH

Kicking off our 2024 literary event season is Lignum Vita Award-winning author Donna Hemans (Tea by the Sea), discussing her lyrical and layered new work, The House of Plain Truth. Inspired by Hemans’s family history, the novel follows Pearline, who returns to her childhood home in Jamaica after her father’s passing and learns her father’s puzzling deathbed wish: that she find her siblings—whom she hasn’t seen in 60 years—and discover the secret that tore her family apart. Maisy Card (author of These Ghosts Are Family, shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize) joins Hemans for a rich conversation on the novel, which Card describes as a “compelling family mystery and a moving story of generational healing and reconciliation, but also a profound portrait of the emotional aftermath of voluntary and forced migration.” After the conversation, Hemans will sign books.

Presented in partnership with the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival.

THE HOUSE OF PLAIN TRUTH

In Conversation

  • Photo credit- Shala W. Graham.

    Donna Hemans

    Donna Hemans

    Donna Hemans is the author of two previous novels, River Woman and Tea By the Sea, which won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. She is also the owner of DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers based in Washington, DC. Born in Jamaica, she lives in Maryland, and received her undergraduate degree in English and Media Studies from Fordham University and an MFA from American University.


    Photo Credit: Shala W. Graham

  • Headshot credit Tehsuan Glover

    Maisy Card

    Maisy Card

    Maisy Card is the author of the novel These Ghosts Are Family, which won an American Book Award, the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize in fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. She is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University and a fiction editor for The Brooklyn Rail.


    Photo Credit: Tehsuan Glover

Featured Book

  1. . 
    THE HOUSE OF PLAIN TRUTH

    The House of Plain Truth

    By Donna Hemans

    Published by Zibby Books

    PURCHASE

    With news of her father’s passing, Pearline abruptly leaves her daughter and grandchildren behind in Brooklyn to return to her childhood home in Jamaica. But Pearline isn’t prepared for her father’s puzzling deathbed wish that she find her siblings—whom she hasn’t seen in 60 years—and discover the secret that tore her family apart.

    Moving through time and place, from Cuba to Montego Bay and from Brooklyn to Havana, The House of Plain Truth traces Pearline’s reconciliation of what she thought she knew about her family and the truth of their origin.

    Inspired by the author’s own family story, this delicate, incisive novel explores the divided loyalties within a family, the true meaning of home, and what one woman must sacrifice to finally get what she wants.

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