Chloe Benjamin in Conversation with Liz Hein

Boswell welcomes Chloe Benjamin, author of the bestselling novel The Immortalists, who appears with her new novel, Under Story, an epic love story and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Benjamin will be in conversation with Milwaukee bookstagrammer extraordinaire Liz Hein. Benjamin's new novel invites us to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love. At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known, working as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family. But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo, her former husband, Eli, won't be far behind. A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. Author Anthony Marra says: "Benjamin is an astonishing writer who conjures an entire parallel universe to illuminate one family’s loss. Under Story is the most ingenious novel I’ve read in a long time, and yet its scenes depicting the ordinary joys and sorrows of parenthood, marriage, and friendship are perhaps most magical of all. If this speculative masterpiece has a flaw, it’s that at 500 pages it feels too short." Chloe Benjamin is the author of The Immortalists and The Anatomy of Dreams. She received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Benjamin is a graduate of Vassar College and earned an MFA at UW-Madison.