Kelley Shinn presents THE WOUNDS THAT BIND US, with Bland Simpson
Thursday, August 31, 2023 - Signing Line at 5:30 pm, Talk begins at 6:00 pm
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Flyleaf will offer seating for up to 75 in-person guests, with priority access given to folks who purchase the book.
The improbable and powerful true story of a single mother with prosthetics for both legs who travels the globe with her young daughter in a Land Rover.
The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) takes readers on a wild journey—literal and emotional—filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption.
Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal—a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator’s keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.
Kelley Shinn lives on Ocracoke, North Carolina, a remote island twenty-six miles from the coast. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Fourth Genre, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and elsewhere.
Bland Simpson is the Kenan Distinguished Professor in English and Creative Writing at UNC Chapel Hill and longtime pianist and composer-lyricist in The Red Clay Ramblers, the acclaimed Tony Award-winning North Carolina string band, which celebrated its 50th anniversary Fall 2022. He has published ten books, all but one about North Carolina, focusing on the state’s eastern sound country and coastal provinces. His most recent work, North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky (UNC Press 2021, with photography by his wife Ann Cary Simpson [their 4th collaboration], along with Tom Earnhardt and Scott Taylor) won the North Caroliniana Society’s 2021 Book Award.
