From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Reading Like a Writer and Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932 comes an utterly original novel inspired by the strange friendship between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Andersen and set during the summer when Dickens’s family life exploded.

In the summer of 1857, when British newspapers warned of an approaching comet about to destroy the earth, an unusual-looking stranger arrived at Charles Dickens’s home, Gad’s Hill, in the countryside outside London. Dickens had met Hans Christian Andersen at a dinner party, a decade before, and, in a moment of desperation, had invited him to visit.

The visit did not go well. The eccentric Danish author of classic fairy tales, who barely spoke English, outstayed his welcome and alienated the Dickens household, which included nine children. Even the oblivious, obsessively self-conscious Andersen sensed the increasing tension between Dickens and his unhappy wife, Catherine, but was slow to understand—or to believe—that Dickens had fallen in love with a young actress appearing in his new play. For Andersen, those five weeks were a series of social mistakes and embarrassments but ultimately a lesson in how life’s most humbling experiences can be transformed into art.

Five Weeks in the Country, a work of imaginative fiction inspired by actual events, is Francine Prose at her dazzling best.

Roxana Robinson will serve as interlocutor. She is the author of eleven books—seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, three as New York Times Editors’ Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Review, Epiphany and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR.

Books will be available for sale and signing. Registration is required at cornwalllibrary.org.