Dizzier Than Gillespie: Sibyl James in Conversation with Edward Harkness

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum is delighted to celebrate the release of Folio member and author Sibyl James's debut novel Dizzier Than Gillespie (Cune Press), now available for pre-orders. Sibyl will be in conversation with fellow author Edward Harkness.

On the eve of the first Gulf War, an American poet drifts into Tunis-and into a world that refuses to stay ordinary. Dizzier Than Gillespie follows Delilah, a restless traveler and visiting professor, as she navigates friendship, feminism, spirituality, and danger in North Africa, guided (and occasionally derailed) by a scandalous thirteenth-century saint with a taste for gin and tonic. Lyrical, witty, and fiercely intelligent, Dizzier Than Gillespie blends political insight with magical realism, tracing women who claim space in male cafés, challenge orthodoxy, and invent joy in the shadow of war. This is a novel about sisterhood and resistance, exile and belonging-where jazz syncopation, desert light, and saintly mischief collide, and where…