Novel Nights: The Ninth Metal by Benjamin Percy
Join us for Novel Nights! At this event, award-winning author Benjamin Percy will speak about his novel, The Ninth Metal, with fellow writer Ruth Joffre. This event will be held virtually.
Tickets:
- $25 general admission
- $100 series pass
This event takes place in Pacific Time. Tickets can be purchased at the bottom of the page.
This event is sponsored by DeNoma Literary Services.
About The Ninth Metal
IT BEGAN WITH A COMET…
At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet’s debris field and the sky rained fire.
The town of Northfall, Minnesota will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source…and a weapon.
John Frontier—the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall—returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community.
In this gut-punch of a novel, the first in his Comet Cycle, Ben Percy lays bare how a modern-day goldrush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family—the Frontiers—hopes to control it all.
About the author
Benjamin Percy has won a Whiting Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast. He is the author of the novels The Ninth Metal, The Unfamiliar Garden, The Dark Net, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding; three story collections; and an essay collection, Thrill Me. He also writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics. He lives in Minnesota with his family.
About the moderator
Ruth Joffre was born and raised in Northern Virginia. Ruth earned her BA from Cornell University and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She now lives in Seattle, where she currently serves as the Hugo House Prose Writer-in-Residence and co-organizes the Fight for Our Lives performance series. Ruth is the author of the story collection Night Beast, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, The Masters Review, Lightspeed, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Nashville Review, Copper Nickel, PANK, and elsewhere.
About Novel Nights
Part book club, part celebration: a novel approach to the literary salon.
We write because we were readers first—and our love of reading great literature is what sustains us through long, lonely hours at the writing desk.
But books don’t exist only in the solitude of our minds; they come alive in the conversations we have about them.
At Novel Nights, you’ll delve into the depths of books in the company of fellow book-lovers and friends—all while supporting Hugo House. To see a full list of all the Novel Nights events or buy a series pass, click here.
