History of Lovers is the union of NY state's Blue Was A Bear and friends including Bethany Johnson, Anwar Sawyer, and Ryan Higgins in a new project that mingles classic country, folk ballad, and the downright macabre, all presented with a razor-sharp contemporary edge. On one hand History of Lovers speaks easily and on the other, reveals something much deeper. Cataloging personal experience through narrative, History of Lovers has developed a reputation for attacking music patiently, methodically and with great interest in finding unexpected angles. The new album "Burn Brightly" is currently being recorded and will be released soon.

Cost - $10.00 cover - BYO

admission - $5.00

7:30 PM - At Arcadia Cafe, 20 Arcadia Road, Old Greenwich, Conn.

Armbrecht is an anthropologist and has written a book that is much more than travel writing rooted in Nepal. Thin Places is an eloquent meditation on what it means to move between cultures and how one might finally come home, a particular paradox in a culture that lacks deep ties to the natural world. During the 1990s, Ann Armbrecht, an American anthropologist, made several trips to northeastern Nepal to research how the Yamphu Rai acquired, farmed, and held onto their land; how they perceived their area's recent designation as a national park and conservation area; and whether-as she believed-they held a wisdom about living on the earth that the industrialized West had forgotten.

What Armbrecht found instead were men and women who shared her restlessness, people also driven by the feeling that there must be more to life than they could find in their village. "We each blamed our dissatisfaction on something in the world," she writes, "not something in ourselves or in the stories we told ourselves about that world. If only we lived elsewhere, then we would be at home."

Charting Armbrecht's travels in the mountains of Nepal and in the United States and her disintegrating marriage back home, Thin Places is ultimately an exploration not of the sacred far-off but of the sacredness of places that are between-between the internal and external landscape, the self and others, and the self and the land. She finds that home is not a place where we arrive but a way of being in place, wherever that place may be. Along the way, Armbrecht explores the disconnections in our most intimate relationships, how they stem from the same disconnections that create our destruction of the land, and how one cannot be healed without attending to the other.

Free and open to the public; 203-637-0707 or www.justbooks.org

The Lost Daughter powerfully illustrates how lives can irrevocably change in a moment. It examines a mother's pain for her lost daughter and explores the ability to heal through love. Women, steeped in the tragedy of an accidental shooting, experience emotional upheavals that lead to strength and redemption. Talk, Q&A and book signing

admission - $5.00

When you kill yourself, you kill every memory everyone has of you. You're saying "I'm gone and you can't even be sure who it is that's gone, because you never knew me."

Sixteen years ago, Joan Wickersham's father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Using an index - that most formal and orderly of structures - Wickersham explores this chaotic and incomprehensible reality. Every bit of family history - marriage, parents, business failures - and every encounter with friends, doctors, and other survivors exposes another facet of elusive truth. Dark, funny, sad, and gripping, at once a philosophical and deeply personal exploration, The Suicide Index is, finally, a daughter's anguished, loving elegy to her father.

In Linda Fairstein's outstanding new novel, the New York Public Library houses dazzling treasures - and deadly secrets.

When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen. As Alex pursues the murderer, she is drawn into the strange and privileged world of the Hunt family, major benefactors of the New York Public Library and passionate rare book collectors.

Hailed by Patricia Cornwell as "one of the most promising forces in crime fiction," former head of the Manhattan District Attorney's Sex Crimes Unit Linda Fairstein has hooked readers with her intense mystery series featuring assistant D.A. -- and Fairstein's alter ego -- Alex Cooper.