Books will be available for purchase.

About the event

Maine Read ME author Meghan Gilliss will visit BPL to read from her debut novel Lungfish, speak about the writing process, and answer audience questions.

About the book

Tuck is a woman whose husband's addiction has drained their finances and driven them to move illegally to an abandoned island off the coast of Maine. There, she must care for their young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives—or before they are found out—while her husband struggles to detox.

Tuck finds herself at the mercy of what the island has to offer for sustenance and answers (little green crabs, bladderwrack, rosehip tea; notes scrawled out by her grandmother, smells held by the damp walls of the house, a failed invention left behind by her missing father)—living moment-by-moment through the absurdity, beauty, paranoia, and hunger that shoots through her life.

With exquisite prose that is displacing and even transformative, Lungfish explores the wild, unknown spaces of what makes a family, and the darkness that must be grappled through to find a way out. Meghan Gilliss’ debut is a brilliant and heartbreaking novel about addiction, doubt, marriage, motherhood, and the ground that is ever-shifting beneath our feet.

About Meghan

Meghan Gilliss has worked as a journalist, a bookseller, a librarian, and a hospital worker. Her short stories have been anthologized in North by Northeast: New short fiction by writers from Maine and New England, and have appeared in journals such as Salamander, The Rattling Wall, and Nat. Brut, and are forthcoming in summer issues of Guernica and Water~Stone Review. A fellow of the Hewnoaks Artist Residency, she holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Portland, Maine. Lungfish, which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, is her first novel.

Visit Meghan's website for more information.