PETALUMA --

Copperfield’s Books welcomes award winning local author Margaret Wilkerson Sexton to Petaluma in celebration of her book - On the Rooftop: A Reese's Book Club Pick.

Moderated by local author and columnist Eirinie Carson, the conversation will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

This event is free and open to the public.

“An utterly original and brilliant story.” –Reese Witherspoon

A stunning novel about a mother whose dream of musical stardom for her three daughters collides with the daughters’ ambitions for their own lives—set against the backdrop of gentrifying 1950s San Francisco

At home they are just sisters, but on stage, they are The Salvations. Ruth, Esther, and Chloe have been singing and dancing in harmony since they could speak. Thanks to the rigorous direction of their mother, Vivian, they’ve become a bona fide girl group whose shows are the talk of the Jazz-era Fillmore.

Now Vivian has scored a once-in-a-lifetime offer from a talent manager, who promises to catapult The Salvations into the national spotlight. Vivian knows this is the big break she’s been praying for. But sometime between the hours of rehearsal on their rooftop and the weekly gigs at the Champagne Supper Club, the girls have become women, women with dreams that their mother cannot imagine.

The neighborhood is changing, too: all around the Fillmore, white men in suits are approaching Black property owners with offers. One sister finds herself called to fight back, one falls into the comfort of an old relationship, another yearns to make her own voice heard. And Vivian, who has always maintained control, will have to confront the parts of her life that threaten to splinter: the community, The Salvations, and even her family.

Warm, gripping, and wise, with echoes of Fiddler on the Roof, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s latest novel is a moving family portrait from “a writer of uncommon nerve and talent” (New York Times Book Review).

Author: Margaret Wilkerson Sexton studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her most recent novel, On the Rooftop was a Reese’s Book Club Pick. Her novel The Revisioners, won a 2020 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and was a national bestseller as well as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award. She lives in Oakland with her family.

Eirinie Carson is a Black British writer, born to a Jamaican father and Scottish mother and raised in South East London. Her work is published in the Sonora Review, LitHub and Poets & Writers magazine, and she is a frequent contributor to Mother magazine. A member of the Writers Grotto, Eirinie writes about motherhood, grief, and relationships. Her first book, The Dead are Gods, was chosen as Oprah's Spring Read and received critical acclaim from The Washington Post, Nylon Magazine and People, to name a few. Eirinie lives in Northern California with her musician husband and their one dog and two daughters.