Long Beach
FESTIVAL of
AUTHORS

Lisa Alvarez

Some Final Beauty and Other Stories showcases characters whose resistance, reconciliation, and strength vigorously affirm community. The eleven stories, loosely linked, explore self-discovery, rebellion, and solidarity as complex personalities and values meet at the intersection of art, love, relationships, activism, and identity from post-WWII to today. Gustavo Arellano calls Lisa Alvarez’s Southern California one of “melancholy and beauty, cities and canyons, insurrections and mariachis and secrets kept and spoken.”​

Susan Choi

In Flashlight, award-winning novelist Susan Choi writes with rare precision about inheritance and identity passed between parents and children. At ten years old, Louisa is found alone on a beach in Japan, her father presumed drowned. Choi’s searching novel unfolds across six decades and three countries, moving fluidly between the perspectives of Louisa and her father, illuminating an astonishing hidden history and the struggle to reconcile memory and truth.​

Sadeqa Johnson

Keeper of Lost Children follows three interconnected lives shaped by love, sacrifice, and identity across post–World War II Germany and 1960s America. Ethel Gathers, wife of an American officer, is determined to help abandoned children born to German women and Black American soldiers find homes. Meanwhile, Black GI Ozzie Phillips falls in love with a German woman while stationed overseas. Years later, teenager Sophia Clark uncovers a shocking secret that sends her searching for the truth about who she is. Together, their stories reveal the lasting impact of Ethel Gathers' compassion across generations.

Paula McLain

The sweeping historical novel, Skylark, by Paula McLain delivers a powerful tale of courage, resistance, and freedom set across two turbulent eras of Paris. The novel intertwines the lives of Alouette Voland, an aspiring artist fighting against confinement in 1664, and Kristof Larson, a young doctor risking everything during the Nazi occupation in 1939. Through these parallel narratives, McLain explores how acts of bravery and defiance can transcend time and connect lives across centuries.​

Emma Pattee

In her debut novel Tilt, Emma Pattee draws on her expertise as a climate journalist to follow Annie through an electrifying single-day odyssey. When a catastrophic earthquake levels Portland, Oregon, Annie – nine months pregnant and completely stranded – must walk across the wreckage to find her husband. Written as an intimate conversation to Annie’s unborn baby, Tilt is a heart-pounding yet deeply touching exploration of community, motherhood, and what it truly takes to reset your life when the world fractures around you.​

Kate Quinn

A dazzling blend of historical fiction, fantasy, and adventure, The Astral Library invites readers into a hidden world where books become doorways to new lives. Kate Quinn has created a daring heroine who travels through beloved literary worlds in a thrilling quest to save a mysterious library that serves as a refuge for the desperate and lost. Enchanting and suspenseful, this is a celebration of the transformative power of books and the worlds within their pages.​

Katie Yee

Structured by the classic bar joke, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar tackles dark themes with levity. The story’s unnamed narrator learns her husband is having an affair. Shortly after receiving that news, she receives a breast cancer diagnosis. She then names her tumor “Maggie” after the other woman. A New York Times Notable Book of 2025, Maggie explores the things we inherit and invites us to take a scalpel to the stories we tell ourselves. A is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into defiant comedy.​