Columbia-based novelist KeijaParssinen’s first book, The Ruins of Us, was a Columbia One Read selection in 2013. The novel centered is around a crumbling marriage between an American expat and her Saudi billionaire husband. Parssinen’s new novel, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, is set closer to home: it takes place in a small Texas refinery town that grows increasingly zealous in its attempts to control its population of teenage girls. The town’s paranoia builds toward an outbreak of mass hysteria and a modern-day witch trial. Parssinen spoke with KBIA about the research behind her new book; she began by comparing the Saudi Arabia of her first book with the Texas town she describes in her new novel.
Parssinen is scheduled to read at the “Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions” series at Orr Street Studios on April 21 at 7 p.m. On May 2, she’s a part of the Osher Book Talk at 10 a.m., located at 1907 Hillcrest Drive in Columbia. On May 7 at 7 p.m., she’s reading at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City.
Listen to Parssinen read an excerpt from her novel, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, below.
Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio