Join us to celebrate the launch of new books by Anne Echols (A Tale of Two Maidens) and Terry A. Repak (Circling Home: What I Learned by Living Elsewhere). Registration requested.

About A Tale of Two Maidens:

Fifteen-year-old Felise, an apprentice scribe in medieval France, is in a desperate situation. She yearns to find a way to become a writer and a book shop owner, but in order to achieve her dreams she must first escape from her cruel guardian, who is plotting an arranged marriage for her.

As the Hundred Years’ War rages all around Felise, Joan of Arc blazes into history, claiming God-given powers to set France free from English control. Her courage inspires Felise to run away, but every day of the journey that follows draws the young scribe further into the underbelly of a world she has never known—a world of burning villages and terrified peasants left behind in the path of war. She soon encounters a young man from home who begins to pursue her, and she is drawn to him despite her quest for freedom and distrust of men. But following after the army, she meets Joan face to face, and finds herself torn between her heroine’s single-minded sense of purpose and her own desire for love and personal fulfillment.

A Tale of Two Maidens brings to life the story of an ordinary medieval girl on an extraordinary adventure—one that will require her to dig within herself to claim her own true, independent, and heroic destiny.

About the Author:

Anne Echols is the coauthor (with Marty Williams) of two nonfiction books, Between Pit and Pedestal: Women in the Middle Ages and An Annotated Index of Medieval Women. Her research for those projects inspired her to go beyond historical facts and imagine the fictional stories of ordinary women from the Middle Ages. After earning a BA and master’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta, Anne enjoyed a long career of teaching English to high school students with language learning disabilities. Her husband, Russ, and she have two adult children. Recently retired, she is grateful for the opportunity to divide her time between Silver Spring, Maryland, where her grandchildren live, and Atlanta. The sequel to A Tale of Two Maidens, Labyrinth of the Spirit, will be published in 2024.

About Circling Home: What I Learned by Living Elsewhere:

When Terry Repak and her husband moved to West Africa with two small children at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, she seized the opportunity to connect with people of other cultures and bear witness to the ravages of the disease. Circling Home chronicles the adventures and challenges of raising children to be global citizens and trying to find home in countries as diverse as Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Switzerland. Her memoir spotlights the complexity, struggles, and profound lessons at the heart of the expat journey.

Candid, thoughtful, and instructive, Circling Home explores the notion of “home” and how the bonds we form with people from other countries and cultures can profoundly change us.

About the Author:

Terry Repak worked as a reporter for several years before going to graduate school at the London School of Economics and Political Science and earning a PhD at Emory University. She and her partner lived in East and West Africa and in Europe, where he directed AIDS projects and she wrote and raised their children. She has published two other non-fiction books, numerous travel articles for newspapers and magazines, and her research in academic journals. She lives in Seattle where she continues to write and to teach English to foreign language learners (ELL) and to garden, hike, and swim.