In-Store: Madeleine Moss: Mistranslation w/ Naomi Xu Elegant

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/EhXK3-OXFMk
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact eventhelp@booksaremagic.net.

“Mistranslation is a complex quadrille in which characters dance imperfectly through their lives, continually thrown off step by missing partners. Two absences—a mystery father, a vanished brother—distort the lives of those left behind in this gritty coming-of-age novel with much to say about what it takes to be a parent, a sibling, a friend.”—Geraldine Brooks, author, Memorial Days

In upstate New York in 2001, nine-year-old twins Sabina and Camilla spend the summer weathering the moods of their erratic mother while finding themselves pulled toward diverging interests: Sabina into the mystery of their absent French father and Camilla into burgeoning popularity. But their lives are shaken up by the arrival of an Arab French family across the street. Thrilled by what she sees as a link to the country of her origins, Sabina attempts to befriend the family’s son, Khalil, and is rebuffed for reasons she doesn’t understand.

Yet as the twins and Khalil come of age, they are drawn into a tense and ever-shifting triangular dynamic. As Sabina strives to find her father and make sense of her mother, as Camilla confronts whether the power she held in youth translates to adulthood, and as Khalil reckons with the psychological fallout of a family tragedy, their paths converge in ways both surprising and inevitable. Bookended by events with global resonance, Mistranslation is a continent-spanning chronicle of family, inheritance, and the reverberations of the choices we do—or don’t—make.

Madeleine Moss grew up in Ithaca, New York, and holds a degree in French literature from Cornell University. She received her MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. Her debut novel, Mistranslation, has been named a "Most Anticipated Book of the Year" by Debutiful. She lives in Strasbourg, France, where she teaches middle and high school English.

Naomi Xu Elegant is the author of the novel Gingko Season, named a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025. She is also a journalist and is currently a staff writer for Totei magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.