James Michelin Distinguished Visitors Program

Award-winning author Jessica Shattuck will discuss her New York Times bestselling novel, The Women in the Castle. The book tells the story of three German widows living together in a crumbling castle in Bavaria in the immediate aftermath of World War II. While their husbands were executed for their participation in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, the women's own beliefs and experiences span the gamut of the German political spectrum. It is as much about complicity as it is about resistance and offers a new and different look at WWII from the German point of view. Shattuck, who is herself of German descent, will share how she came to write the book and what she learned in her research about this time in history.

Shattuck's other novels include Perfect Life and The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a Boston Globe Book of the Year, and a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Winship Award. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Glamour, Open City, and The Tampa Review among other publications. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones, Wired, The Believer Magazine, and The Boston Globe.