Join us on Wednesday, January 9th, for a talk by local author Sara Holliday for her new book A Thousand Dances: A Novel of the British Blues Boom. The novel is set in 1963 London, amid the British blues boom, and many of the songs, musicians and venues of that era figure in the story.

Rhythm & blues is exploding all over the London area. It's a thousand dances in the teen clubs until someone turns up dead.

It’s 1963, and 17-year-old Nicky Spinnery is swept away by London’s rhythm-&-blues explosion. With his best friend, peacenik filmmaker Lucinda, he dances his way around the city, crossing paths with brink-of-famers such as Pete Townshend, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton. But when a strange madness starts felling his fellow clubgoers, Nicky turns amateur detective, looking for answers among musicians, Mods and miniskirts, armed only with his big mouth ... A Thousand Dances pulses with the energy and excitement of the year the Beatles hit the big time, following the music from the kitchen sink to the dives of Soho, from suburban teen clubs to the swinging streets of Piccadilly.

Born in Arlington, Texas, Sara Holliday grew up thirty years after Nicky Spinnery and 5,000 miles away, but she’s captured the tone and texture of early-‘60s England with amazing fidelity. Experts on the period are raving about her amazing mastery of the details of the era. Sara Holliday is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. She lives among too many books and records in New York City. This is her first book.