Leni Zumas

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator and the novel The Listeners. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Granta, The Times Literary Supplement, BOMB, Tin House and elsewhere. Her bestselling novel, Red Clocks, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Entropy, and the New York Public Library. It also won the 2019 Oregon Book Award (Ken Kesey Award for Fiction). Zumas directs the creative writing program at Portland State University.

Website: lenizumas.com
Twitter: @lenizumas
Instagram: @lenizumas

With Red Clocks, Zumas has written a novel that’s political without being doctrinaire, that expands the dimensions of our most pressing social debate.” — The Washington Post

FESTIVAL BOOK

Red Clocks

Five women. One question. What is a woman for?

In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers. Ro, a single teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro’s best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling herbalist, or “mender,” who brings all their fates together when she’s arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.

Red Clocks is at once a riveting drama, whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. Zumas fearlessly explores the contours of female experience, evoking The Handmaid’s Tale for a new millennium. This is a story of resilience, transformation, and hope in tumultuous – even frightening – times.