The 100 Year Miracle
If you were given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to save yourself, would you take it? Even if it cost you everything? This question is the driving force behind Ashley Ream’s whip-smart, powerful and captivating The 100 Year Miracle.
Once a century, for only six days, the bay around a small Washington island glows like a water-bound aurora. Dr. Rachel Bell arrives on the island as part of a team researching this once-in-a-lifetime event, but she's also got a personal mission: to find out if the tiny sea creatures truly offer the powerful pain relieving effects of native myths and folklore, and to finally end the chronic pain she's been silently suffering most her life.
When Rachel connects with Harry and Tilda, a divorced couple cohabiting once again as Harry enters the last stages of a neurological disease, Harry is pulled into Rachel's obsession and hope. But if Rachel really wants to learn the truth about the 100-year miracle and harness its powers, she must contend with forces desperate to keep the island's secrets before the waters go dark for another 100 years.
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival. Ashley will appear in conversation with Steve Paulson of WPR's To The Best Of Our Knowledge.
Ashley Ream
Ashley Ream got her first job at a newspaper when she was 16. After working in newsrooms across Missouri, Florida and Texas, she gave up the deadlines to pursue fiction. Her debut novel, Losing Clementine, which sold at auction, was a Barnes & Noble debut pick, a Sutter Home Book Club pick and was short-listed for the Balcones Fiction Prize. She and her books have appeared in L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Magazine, Bust Magazine, the Kansas City Star and Marathon & Beyond Magazine, among many others. After a decade in Los Angeles, she recently moved to Madison where she runs ultramarathons and is finishing her next novel.
Her newest book, The 100 Year Miracle, was named an Amazon Best Book of the Month. The Seattle Times called it “an absorbing story with an arresting premise,” and The Charlotte Observer said, “Every page holds little treasures of observation.”