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Samira Ahmed and Libba Bray

  • Kepler's Books 1010 El Camino Real Menlo Park, CA, 94025 United States (map)

We are so sorry - this event has been cancelled.

CDC health officials are recommending that all gatherings be cancelled due to COVID-19 through May 9th. The wellbeing of our community is our top priority so we are following that recommendation.

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We are delighted to welcome Samira Ahmed with her latest novel, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know, that traces the lives of two young women fighting to write their own stories and escape the pressure of cultural expectations in worlds too long defined by men.

“I’m sick of the old behind-every-successful-man-is-a-great-woman BS. Time for this woman’s story to be front and center—in the light of day and not in some man’s shadow” – Khayyam #WRITEHERSTORY

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With the publication of Love, Hate, and Other Filters, Samira Ahmed became an instant New York Times bestselling author. More significantly, she broke ground advocating for the representation of teen Muslim characters, voices, and experiences in children's literature. This carried over to the smash hit Internment, which depicted a near-future where Muslim internment camps have become a terrifying new normal. Samira has cultivated a body of fiction that stars Muslim teens who challenge the status quo—sexism, racism,amophobia—and takes seriously the everyday insecurities and joys of being a teen—dating, friendship, college, self-discovery, first love. Yet her books also double as a call to action. Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know is no exception.

It’s August in Paris and 17-year-old Khayyam Maquet—American, French, Indian, Muslim—is at a crossroads. This holiday with her parents should be a dream trip but her maybe-ex-boyfriend is probably ghosting her, she might have just blown her chance at getting into her dream college, and now all she really wants is to be home in Chicago figuring out her messy life..Two hundred years earlier, Leila is struggling to survive and keep her true love hidden from the Pasha who has “gifted” her with favored status in his harem. In the present day—and with the company of a descendant of Alexandre Dumas—Khayyam begins to connect allusions to an enigmatic 19th-century Muslim woman whose path may have intersected with Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Delacroix, and Lord Byron. Echoing across centuries, Leila and Khayyam’s lives intertwine, and as one woman’s long-forgotten life is uncovered, another’s is transformed.

Samira will be chatting with Libba Bray, the New York Times bestselling author of The Gemma Doyle trilogy (A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing); the Michael L. Printz Award-winning Going Bovine; Beauty Queens, an L.A. Times Book Prize finalist; and The Diviners series.

We could not be more excited.

Earlier Event: April 9
Yasser El-Sayed with Abraham Verghese
Later Event: April 11
Big Ideas Reading Group