Simon & Schuster Authorfest
NOT YOUR MOTHER’S LOVE STORIES
Join TJ Alexander, Kaliane Bradley, & Jackie Lau in conversation with Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings (aka Christina Lauren).
Ahead of their upcoming releases, Alexander, Bradley, and Lau will discuss what makes a great romance, and how the genre can go beyond a simple love story.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 24th
At 7PM ET/ 6 PM CT / 4 PM PT VIA ZOOM
You will receive a Zoom link closer to the event.
From fake relationships to star-crossed time travelers to queer throuples, these authors are not your mother’s romance writers.
Ahead of their upcoming releases, Alexander, Bradley, and Lau will discuss what makes a great romance, and how the genre can go beyond a simple love story.
Jackie Lau – Love, Lies and Cherry Piesj
Jackie Lau, author of the The Stand-Up Groomsman, returns with a charming rom-com about a young woman’s desperate attempts to fend off her meddling mother…only to find that maybe mother does know best.
Mark Chan this. Mark Chan that. Writer and barista Emily Hung is tired of hearing about the great Mark Chan, the son of her parents’ friends. You’d think he single-handedly stopped climate change and ended child poverty from the way her mother raves about him. But in reality, he’s just a boring, sweater-vest-wearing engineer, and when they’re forced together at Emily’s sister’s wedding, it’s obvious he thinks he’s too good for her.
TJ Alexander – Triple Sec
As a bartender at Terror & Virtue, a swanky New York City cocktail lounge known for its romantic atmosphere and Insta-worthy drinks, Mel has witnessed plenty of disastrous dates. That, coupled with her own romantic life being in shambles, has Mel convinced love doesn’t exist.
Everything changes when Bebe walks into the bar. She’s beautiful, funny, knows her whiskeys—and is happily married to her partner, Kade. Mel’s resigned to forget the whole thing, but Bebe makes her a unique offer: since she and Kade have an open marriage, she’s interested in taking Mel on a date.
Kaliane Bradley-The Ministry of Time
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.
Moderators Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings (Christina Lauren)-The Paradise Problem
Anna Green thought she was marrying Liam “West” Weston for access to subsidized family housing while at UCLA. She also thought she’d signed divorce papers when the graduation caps were tossed, and they both went on their merry ways.
Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the heartless corporation his family built from the ground up. He is interested, however, in his one-hundred-million-dollar inheritance. There’s just one catch.
