Poets & Writers Theater

In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, which was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific Ocean in 1820, novelist Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles) shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them.

Karen Thompson Walker's debut novel, one of the books generating a lot of prepublication buzz this summer, sets the coming-of-age story of an eleven-year-old girl against the backdrop of a natural calamity unlike anything anyone has ever seen. Foreign rights to The Age of Miracles have already been sold in more than two dozen countries; Random House will publish it in the U.S. later this month.