Please join us at McNally Jackson Seaport this October 31st for a celebration of The Halt During the Chase by Rosemary Tonks with writer and artist Audrey Wollen and Joanna Biggs, senior editor at Harper’s and author, most recently, of A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Start Again. Save your spot!

Sophie—a clever and charming young woman—is trying to get out from under her mother’s thumb. She’s in love with her childhood friend Philip (pragmatic, attractive, a bit of a bore), but she often worries that she loves him too much for her own good, and that he might only be another thumb to crawl under.

Both a sincere bildungsroman of Sophie’s attempt to seize a life for herself and a comic masterpiece with cutting observations and asides, The Halt During the Chase is flutteringly alive as it discusses different forms of love, adulthood (“Isn’t buying new lampshades a form of slow death?”), marriage, insecurity, and stifling British snobbery and classism. Sophie’s voice, fueled by Tonks’s acidic narration, evolves from thrashing about in various traps into a triumphant, croaky-throated liberation song.

Audrey Wollen is a book critic whose writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, The Nation and elsewhere.

Joanna Biggs is a senior editor at Harper's Magazine, and her book, A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, came out in the spring.