Join us for a book talk and signing with Ellen Malphrus, Untying the Moon | Story River Books, USC Press.  A road trip in a ’67 Skylark convertible through blood and bone places in search of the redemptive possibilities of love and home.

Bailey Martin is in perpetual motion—a child of the South Carolina lowcountry tides, being pulled to and from a reckoning with destiny. A marine biologist by training and an artist by dedication and talent, Bailey is a woman of contradictions, at once a free-spirited adventurer giving deeply of herself to environmental causes and familial loyalties but also consumed by primal, isolating appetites and dangerous attractions. Restless and troubled, Bailey chafes at her existence, becoming uneasy in her success, her life, and her own skin. Untying the Moon, the debut novel from Southern storyteller Ellen Malphrus, is a vibrant tale of self-discovery, approaching the realms of myth and lore as readers ride shotgun with Bailey in Blue Ruby, her ’67 Skylark convertible, from Manhattan down the eastern seaboard, from coastal Carolina to the Alaskan wilderness and back again, all in search of the embrace of love and—finally—of home.

New York Times best-selling writer and Story River Books editor at large Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the novel.

Ellen Malphrus lives and writes in her native Carolina lowcountry and southwest Montana. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Southern Literary Journal, Review of Contemporary Fiction, William and Mary Review, Georgia Poetry Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and the anthology Essence of Beaufort and the Lowcountry. She was a student of James Dickey’s and teaches at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

Books will be available for purchase and signing. All programs will take place from noon to 1:00 p.m. at the South Carolina State Library located at 1500 Senate St., Columbia. Speaker @ the Center is FREE and open to the public. Feel free to bring your lunch. No registration required.

The South Carolina Center for the Book is the South Carolina Affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book and is a cooperative project of the South Carolina State Library, the University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science, and The Humanities CouncilSC.