You Know When the Men Are Gone
by Siobhan Fallon
 
Each year, the Winnetka/Northfield library staff members search for the perfect book to designate as the One Book Two Villages adult selection. It is always a struggle to find the perfect book until the book emerges. After reading an advanced copy of Siobhan Fallon's book You Know When the Men Are Gone, we knew it was the book.  Fallon's tales of life on a contemporary American military base were inspired by her own experiences as an army wife living at Fort Hood, Texas, while her husband was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty.  Fallon's book, an electrifying collection of interconnected short stories about domesticity and war, will be published on January 20, 2011. 
 
With fidelity, compassion, and stunning honesty, Fallon's eight loosely linked stories take readers inside the homes, marriages, and families of that small segment of our society that deals daily with the emotional consequences of our ongoing wars.  As in civilian life, there are extramarital affairs, health crises, teenage angst, financial stresses, and scrapes with the law, but all are heightened and distorted by the knowledge that the person you depend on most in the world is 5,000 miles from home and in harm's way. 

You Know When The Men Are Gonehas been showered with advance praise, included in Publisher Weekly's Spring 2011 First Fiction round-up of ten promising fiction debuts, and featured on NPR's "Talk of the Nation." The Winnetka-Northfield Public Library is excited to add a new honor to the book, as the 2011 One Book Two Villages title.
 
The Library District is pleased to welcome Ms. Fallon to The Book Stall at Chestnut Court at 7 p.m. on January 31. The event is free and open to the public. Don't miss your opportunity to meet Ms. Fallon before her family is deployed to the Middle East.