“Evelyn in Transit” author David Guterson in conversation with novelist Emily Ruskovich at Shakespeare & Company

Shakespeare & Co. hosts a reading and discussion with award-winning author David Guterson on Tuesday, February 3 at 7:00 pm. Guterson will read from his new novel Evelyn in Transit (W. W. Norton & Co., January 2026) and be in conversation with celebrated novelist Emily Ruskovich. This event is free and open to the public.

About Evelyn in Transit:

A crystalline short novel about defying expectations, hitting the road, and seeking the right way to live.

Radically open-minded, formidably strong, and unusually clear-eyed about herself and others, Evelyn Bednarz has always been a misfit. She’s easily bored, unsuited to life at school, asks odd questions about faith and time, and sees through conventions others take for granted. Seeking to be true to herself, she hitchhikes across the American West taking odd jobs.

In distant Tibet, another life unfolds as remote from Evelyn’s as can be: the life of a boy named Tsering, raised as a Buddhist monk in the mountains of Tibet, who eventually becomes a high lama.

And yet, their lives are strangely linked—as Evelyn discovers when a trio of Buddhist lamas show up at her door to announce that her five-year-old son Cliff is the seventh reincarnation of the illustrious Norbu Rinpoche, recently deceased. The lamas’ visit sets off a family crisis and a media firestorm over Cliff’s future.

Written in a spare, precise style of extraordinary beauty, full of surprising humor and luminosity, Evelyn in Transit delivers much-needed insight and compassion about humanity’s strivings for transcendence, and what it might mean to “live the right way.”

Author Biographies:

David Guterson is the author of thirteen books, including the PEN/Faulkner Award winner Snow Falling on Cedars, which was made into a major motion picture, translated into twenty-five languages, and has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide. He lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

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Emily Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle on Hoodoo Mountain. She is the fourth American ever to win the Dublin International Literary Award for her debut novel, Idaho, which has been translated into a dozen languages. Emily has also won an O. Henry Award, The Pacific Northwest Book Award, and the Idaho Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Guardian, The New York Times, Zoetrope, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Montana, where she teaches in the MFA program. She lives in the mountains of western Montana with her husband and their three small children. Her second book, Nightjar, is a collection of stories forthcoming from Random House in 2026.

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