This is a free in-person event, and seating is first come, first served. 

After her professor’s suspicious death, a PhD student uncovers dark machinations among her academic associates in this "richly atmospheric and irresistibly readable" (Joyce Carol Oates) Gothic mystery set between Scotland, Italy, and France. Combining epistolary elements, Gothic suspense, and an atmospheric “dark academia” setting, The Bequest is a gripping literary thriller that will appeal to fans of Alex Michaelides’ The Maidens and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

Joanna Margaret is an art historian whose previous writing and scholarly work has focused on Florentine aristocrats in sixteenth-century France. She holds a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and an MFA from NYU, where Joyce Carol Oates served as her thesis advisor. The Bequest is her first novel.

Margaret will be in conversation with Melissa Scholes Young. Young is the author of the novels The Hive and Flood and editor of the anthologies Grace in Darkness and Furious Gravity. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Washington Post, Poets & Writers, The Believer, Ploughshares, Lit Hub and elsewhere. Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, she is currently an associate professor in Literature at American University.