In-Store: Carola Dibbell: The Only Ones w/ Anna North

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/vj0aTmJv3o4
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

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"A bracing, tough minded, farsighted novel about bravery and endurance, motherhood and the way life goes on even after the world ends. Every sentence pierces." —Kelly Link, author of Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters

Inez wanders a post-pandemic world, strangely immune to disease, making her living by volunteering as a test subject. She is hired to provide genetic material to a grief-stricken, affluent mother, who lost all four of her daughters within four short weeks. This experimental genetic work is policed by a hazy network of governmental Ethics committees, and threatened by the Knights of Life, religious zealots who raze the rural farms where much of this experimentation is done.

When the mother backs out at the last minute, Inez is left responsible for the product, which in this case is a baby girl, Ani. Inez must protect Ani, who is a scientific breakthrough, keeping her alive, dodging authorities and religious fanatics, and trying to provide Ani with the chilldhood tha Inez never had, which means a stable home and an education.

With a stylish voice, The Only Ones is a time-old story, tender and iconic, about how much we love our children, however they come, as well as a sly commentary on class, politics, and the complexities of reproductive technology.

Set in a pandemic future that has proved oddly prescient, Carola Dibbell’s debut novel The Only Ones was published in 2015 by Two Dollar Radio and reissued in 2024 as part of its New Classics series. It was selected for many top ten lists, from science fiction best-ofs to Oprah’s O Magazine. Rochester’s Writers & Books program named Dibbell a debut novelist of the year, and her book was later published in two French-language editions. Her short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, The New Yorker, Black Clock and Fence, and her journalism in the Village Voice, where she was an early female rock critic and one of the first to write about punk. Her work in progress, Young Adult (ish), is a memoir of the author’s early twenties in late-sixties London and New York when she was married to a film student from Pakistan and had never heard of rock criticism or read science fiction. An old adult now, she lives in New York’s East Village with her husband of fifty years, Robert Christgau. They have one daughter, Nina.

Anna North is the author of three novels: Outlawed, America Pacifica, and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark. Published in 2021, Outlawed was a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club and Belletrist pick. In addition to her fiction writing, she is also a senior correspondent at Vox, covering American work and family life. Previously, she was a writer and editor at the New York Times, Salon, BuzzFeed and Jezebel. She grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2009, and now lives in Brooklyn.