Join author Kate Stout for a discussion of her novel Ambient Light on Saturday, December 16 at 2PM at the Main Library.

Friendships have a funny way of getting under your skin. In Ambient Light seven friends navigate the tricky teenaged years by clinging to each other. But when Sebastian, the center of their universe, splits off from their pack of friends to live an openly gay life in San Francisco, he leaves his friends perplexed and floundering. The youthful magnetism he possessed infects his friends—Adie, Breck, Mary Clay, Tony, Jude and Grady—with his love of music, poetry, social engagement but, most of all, his passion for wild and crazy living. But just as their love for him continues to glow through the years, so does the undercurrent of resentment engendered by his abandonment of them. The six survivors carry Sebastian in their hearts like a talisman but with the caveat that inevitably they each must deal with the shackles of his influence, too.

Kate Stout is a jane-of-all-genres. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, she started, edited, and published a newspaper on Nantucket Island, The Nantucket Map & Legend. She has written for the Washington Post and The New York Times as well as magazines as varied as MS. Magazine and Bride, People and Saturday Review. By her own account she has written every composition there is to write except a PhD thesis. This includes: a children’s book, Adventures of a Nantucket Dog; two compilations from The Map & Legend, The Best of Blanche Lyon on Nantucket and The Best for Kids; and Nantucket’s Historic District’s design guideline manual, Building With Nantucket in Mind. Her plays have been produced in New York City, Chicago, and Nantucket. Ambient Light, her first novel, will not be her last. One great gift of the pandemic was the erasure of her type A+ calendar, giving her time to spend in a room of her own where she produced Ambient Light and the forthcoming Something Deeply Hidden. For more information, please visit her website: kate-stout.com. Also, see Reviews on ambientlightnovel.com.