Ben Shattuck, author of The History of Sound, the 2025 Greenwich Reads Together book selection, will be joined in conversation by his editor Allison Lorentzen in the Berkley Theater at 7 p.m. Greenwich Reads Together is sponsored by the Friends of Greenwich Library.

The event will also be livestreamed on the Library’s YouTube channel. A recording will be available after the event.

In twelve luminous interconnected stories set in New England across three centuries, The History of Sound examines the unexpected ways the past returns to us and how love and loss are entwined and transformed over generations. In Ben Shattuck’s ingenious collection, each story has a companion story, which contains a revelation about the previous, paired story. Mysteries and murders are revealed, history is refracted, and deep emotional connections are woven through characters and families.

The haunting title story recalls the journey of two men who meet around a piano in a smoky, dim bar, only to spend a summer walking the Maine woods collecting folk songs in the shadow of the First World War, forever marked by the odyssey. Decades later, in another story, a woman discovers the wax cylinders recorded that fateful summer while cleaning out her new house in Maine. Shattuck’s inventive, exquisite stories transport readers from 1700s Nantucket to the contemporary woods of New Hampshire and beyond—into landscapes both enduring and unmistakably modern. Memories, artifacts, paintings, and journals resurface in surprising and poignant ways among evocative beaches, forests, and orchards, revealing the secrets, misunderstandings, and love that linger across centuries.

Books will be available for sales and signing through Diane's Books. The History of Sound is available at Greenwich Library in book, eBook, eAudiobook formats. For additional suggested titles for younger readers, please visit www.greenwichreadstogether.org. While there, find links to author interviews, book discussion guides, and reviews.